Best 4384 quotes in «class quotes» category

Rich people don’t have to have a life-and-death relationship with the truth and its questions; they can ignore the truth and still thrive materially. I am not surprised many of them understand literature only as an ornament. Life is an ornament to them, relationships are ornaments, their 'work' is but a flimsy, pretty ornament meant to momentarily thrill and capture attention.

Rose looked like a long-lost Obama daughter.

Robin Hood was also a terrorist ― but he had some style and a little class.

Sanity begins with knowing your place.

Setting a goal is like to set your destination point in your life GPS which could take you to your desire position as you dreamed about...

She came from the most worthless of classes - the rich, with a smattering of culture.

She lacked the sheen of money, muscular good health, good skin, good clothes.

She observed the dumb-show by which her neighbour was expressing her passion for music, but she refrained from copying it. This was not to say that, for once that she had consented to spend a few minutes in Mme. de Saint-Euverte's house, the Princesse des Laumes would not have wished (so that the act of politeness to her hostess which she had performed by coming might, so to speak, 'count double') to shew herself as friendly and obliging as possible. But she had a natural horror of what she called 'exaggerating,' and always made a point of letting people see that she 'simply must not' indulge in any display of emotion that was not in keeping with the tone of the circle in which she moved, although such displays never failed to make an impression upon her, by virtue of that spirit of imitation, akin to timidity, which is developed in the most self-confident persons, by contact with an unfamiliar environment, even though it be inferior to their own. She began to ask herself whether these gesticulations might not, perhaps, be a necessary concomitant of the piece of music that was being played, a piece which, it might be, was in a different category from all the music that she had ever heard before; and whether to abstain from them was not a sign of her own inability to understand the music, and of discourtesy towards the lady of the house; with the result that, in order to express by a compromise both of her contradictory inclinations in turn, at one moment she would merely straighten her shoulder-straps or feel in her golden hair for the little balls of coral or of pink enamel, frosted with tiny diamonds, which formed its simple but effective ornament, studying, with a cold interest, her impassioned neighbour, while at another she would beat time for a few bars with her fan, but, so as not to forfeit her independence, she would beat a different time from the pianist's.

She's on the stairs, ma'am, getting her breath,' said the young servant, who had not been long up from the country, where my mother had the excellent habit of getting all her servants. Often she had seen them born. That's the only way to get really good ones. And they're the rarest of luxuries.

She was shocked when she followed her aunt and cousin down into the city proper. The streets were crawling with people, all hurrying to and fro, mindless of one another. They brushed by with barely even a glance, stepping down into the busy roads between horse drawn buses and draymen’s carts with such confidence, seemingly oblivious that they could be run down at any moment. Children dodged in and out amongst them, ragamuffins all, some barefoot.

She transcends her sport, which is what any sport needs...And she does it while smiling the whole time. It's kind of a joke, but then again it's not, especially if you're a male pro trailing in her wake. To have this woman in the middle of such a suffer fest out there crushing people and smiling all the way...

She understood that it had never just been about talent: it had also always been about money. Ethan was brilliant at what he did, and he might well have made it even if Ash’s father hadn’t encouraged him, but it really helped that Ethan had grown up in a sophisticated city, and that he had married into a wealthy family. Ash was talented, but not all that talented. This was the thing that no one said, not once. But of course it was fortunate that Ash didn’t have to worry about money while trying to think about art. Her wealthy childhood had given her a head start, and now Ethan had picked up where her childhood had left off.

She was simple, not being able to adorn herself, but she was unhappy, as one out of her class; for women belong to no caste, no race, their grace, their beauty and their charm serving them in place of birth and family. Their inborn finesse, their instinctive elegance, their suppleness of wit, are their only aristocracy, making some daughters of the people the equal of great ladies.

So be yourself, just don't give yourself unless you're certain he deserves that gift.

Since 1960s pop art the art world has been happy for artists to use the lowbrow to add zest and authenticity to their works. But middlebrow has resonances of the suburban bourgeousie who might see art as aspirational by association.

Social rank has always been one of the pricier commodities sold in the great American department store, and the ceaseless revision of what constitutes society gives rise to the great American comedy that has been playing continuous performances since the beginning of the Republic. As one generation of parvenu rich acquires the means to buy the patents of nobility, it looks down upon the next generation of arrivistes as clubfooted upstarts.

Since the same human mire remains beneath, does not all civilisation reduce itself to the superiority of smelling nice and living well?

Skillfully, and with calculation, the economic problems of Reconstruction were being changed by planters and capitalists to look like problems of politics and social recognition.

Someone in the women's cell was crying and cursing the fleas. Some whore probably, the kind that would take on anybody. She was no good either. Fabiano wanted to yell to the whole town, to the judge, the chief of police, the priest, and the tax collector, that nobody in there was worth a damn. He, the men squatting around the fire, the drunk, the woman with the fleas —they were all completely worthless, fit only to be hanged.

So there is nothing inherently subversive about pleasure. On the contrary, as Karl Marx recognized, it is a thoroughly aristocratic creed. The traditional English gentleman was so averse to unpleasurable labour that he could not even be bothered to articulate properly. Hence the patrician slur and drawl, Aristotle believed that being human was something you had to get good at through constant practice, like learning Catalan or playing the bagpipes; whereas if the English gentleman was virtuous, as he occasionally deigned to be, his goodness was purely spontaneous. Moral effort was for merchants and clerks

Sometimes it's important to dare to dream - small or big - like Mandela, Gandhi, Winfrey, Obama, Malala and Dr King. From Einstein to Hawking - the skies no limit. From Ali to the Williams sisters - through trials and talent find the champions within. Like my mother did to raise great kids. Like the one or many who run with this. Like the unsung heroes in every city and village. Like the kind of heart and selfless healers. Like every act of kindness you ever did and received. Like the human spirit beyond class, colour and creed. Like every soul who has raised our consciousness. From one to all - love IS all we have and need.

SQUATS, Clementine! And don't stop until class is over. You legs look like they'd snap under the weight of a sack of flour. How do you walk around on those things?" "I don't know, Professor. One foot in front of the other, I guess.

Teens’ use of social media is significantly shaped by race and class, geography and cultural background [boyd, danah , "An Old Fogey’s Analysis of a Teenager’s View on Social Media," Medium, January 12, 2015].

Take a little thought experiment. Imagine all the rampage school shooters in Littleton, Colorado; Pearl, Mississippi; Paducah, Kentucky; Springfield, Oregon; and Jonesboro, Arkansas; now imagine they were black girls from poor families who lived instead in Chicago, New Haven, Newark, Philadelphia, or Providence. Can you picture the national debate, the headlines, the hand-wringing? There is no doubt we’d be having a national debate about inner-city poor black girls. The entire focus would be on race, class, and gender. The media would doubtless invent a new term for their behavior, as with wilding two decades ago. We’d hear about the culture of poverty, about how living in the city breeds crime and violence. We’d hear some pundits proclaim some putative natural tendency among blacks toward violence. Someone would likely even blame feminism for causing girls to become violent in a vain imitation of boys. Yet the obvious fact that virtually all the rampage school shooters were middle-class white boys barely broke a ripple in the torrent of public discussion. This uniformity cut across all other differences among the shooters: some came from intact families, others from single-parent homes; some boys had acted violently in the past, and others were quiet and unassuming; some boys also expressed rage at their parents (two killed their parents the same morning), and others seemed to live in happy families.

Teaching and learning _religious plurality often ends up privileging religious _texts_ over _practice_ and largely ignoring the social and historical contexts and the lived experience of people who shape, situate, and structure these religious texts. Furthermore, adopting the politics of recognition as a pedagogical principle in teaching can lead to an _uncritical silence_ about the various forms of oppression and domination of certain religious groups. Here people often use _religious difference_ as a _religious alibi_ for the oppression or violation of human rights of certain groups of people, such as women or LGBT people.

Stop thinking about class, she'd say. Like a rich man telling a poor man to stop thinking about money.

Thank God in heaven! What a relief! They could let their breaths out now. Miss Efficiency was a bigot. These days the thing about bigotry was, it was undignified. It was a sign of Low Rent origins, of inferior social status, of poor taste. So they were the superiors of their English baby nurse, after all. What a fucking relief.

The ability to try to understand existence, the ability to try to recognize the wonder and responsibility of one's own existence, the ability to know even fractionally the almost annihilating beauty, ambiguity, darkness, and horror which swarm every instant of every consciousness, the ability to try to accept it, or the ability to try to defend one's self, or the ability to dare to try to assist others; all such as these, of which most human beings are cheated of their potentials, are, in most of those who even begin to discern or wish for them, the gifts or thefts of economic privilege, and are available to members of these leanest classes only by the rare and irrelevant miracle of born and surviving 'talent.

That’s the difference between them and us. ‘Them’ view foxes as vermin, and ‘us’ identify with the fox.

The achievement gap between children from high income and low income families is roughly 30-40% larger among children born in 2001 than among those born 25 years ago. The class gap among students entering kindergarten was two to three times higher than the racial gap.

The aristocrats had to force them to do their jobs. After all, human beings are not badgers. We aren't molded to stoop.

The definition of money as the sublime good--because it can be turned into all other goods--results in the depreciation of all values that do not pay. What is moral is what returns a profit and satisfies the judgment of the bottom line. Freedom comes to be defined, in practice if not in commencement speeches, as the freedom to exploit. This commercial reading of the text of human natures gives rise to a system that puts a premium on crime, encourages the placid acquiescence in the dishonest thought or deal, sustains the routine hypocrisy of politics and proclaims as inviolate the economic savagery otherwise known as the free market or freedom under capitalism. It is no accident that in a society that presumes a norm of violence, whether on the football field or in the conduct of its business, people speak of deals as "killings.

Theban who acquires his wealth by inheritance builds his mansion with the weak poor's money. The clergyman erects his temple upon the graves and bones of the devoted worshippers. The prince grasps the fellah's arms while the priest empties his pocket; the ruler looks upon the sobs of the fields with frowning face, and the bishop consoles them with his smile, and between the frown of the tiger and the smile of the wolf the flock is perished; the ruler claims himself as king if the law, and the priest as the representative if god, and between these two, the bodies are destroyed and the souls wither into nothing.

The Church, like the monarchy, was a valuable bastion of defense against the dangerous alliance of atheistical philosophy with political radicalism. The Bible taught the poorer orders that their lowly path had been allotted to them by the hand of God, and the Church was there to make quite certain they understood that.

The car housed a hysterical bumper sticker: Save the Planet, and I permitted a moment of contemplation to truly bask in this thought. Save the planet? What a joke. Save the planet from what? From ourselves? And save it for what? For ourselves? It was a kind of perpetual stupidity in a tug-of-war battle over trivial matters. Only imbeciles see things in black and white: liberal or conservative, yes or no, this or that. Those in power laugh at those people in their morally inverted shades of grey, basking in the labels they've created so the people are easier to control.

Then there was Mani, the Mighty Good-For-Nothing. He towered above all the other boys of the class. He seldom brought any books to the class, and never bothered about homework. He came to the class, monopolized the last bench, ans slept bravely. No teacher ever tried to prod him.

The existence of a privileged class is absolutely necessary for the preservation of the state.

..The fate of the poor both locally and globally will to a grave extent determine the quality of life for those who are lucky enough to have class privilege. Repudiating exploitation by word and deed is a gesture of solidarity with the poor.

The guerilla fighter will be a sort of guiding angel who has fallen into the zone, helping the poor always and bothering the rich as little as possible in the first phases of the war. But this war will continue on its course; contradictions will continuously become sharper; the moment will arrive when many of those who regarded the revolution with a certain sympathy at the outset will place themselves in a position diametrically opposed; and they will take the first step into battle against the popular forces. At that moment the guerilla fighter should act to make himself into the standard bearer of the cause of the people, punishing every betrayal with justice.

The hardest part of being a Canadian kid is having to color in Nunavut with a crayon in school, hell on earth.

The history of the transformation of myth into religion (ideology) is not separable from the history of the constitution of a corps of specialized producers of religious rites and discourses, i.e. the progress of the division of religious labour, which is itself a dimension of the progress of the division of social labour, and hence the division into classes.

Their only chance to mix with royalty was while they played Bezique. They never played any other game but this one that had grown out of the French court: it was the game of the cavaliers, a game of waiting between battles.

The moral of that story, I think, is that being poor will kill you.

the most lovable of exceptional American qualities (is) our tradition of insisting that we are part of the middle class, even if we aren’t, and of interacting with our fellow citizens as if we were all middle class.

The estate stayed with me long after I moved elsewhere, partly in the form of a strange kind of vertigo when presented with opportunities and experiences I’d grown up assuming were far beyond my reach. I also felt its presence as early as my first term at university, when I got it into my head that everyone in the student union bar wanted to hear a version of my life story which crossed the “books on prescription” section of the library with Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch.

The fact that has got to be faced is that to abolish class-distinctions means abolishing a part of yourself. Here am I, a typical member of the middle class. It is easy for me to say that I want to get rid of class-distinctions, but nearly everything I think and do is a result of class-distinctions. All my notions — notions of good and evil, of pleasant and unpleasant, of funny and serious, of ugly and beautiful — are essentially middle-class notions; my taste in books and food and clothes, my sense of honour, my table manners, my turns of speech, my accent, even the characteristic movements of my body, are the products of a special kind of upbringing and a special niche about half-way up the social hierarchy.

Their faces were clay-coloured and featureless, yet not stupid; they might have been shrewd turnips.

The last time everyone loved or at least liked everyone was when the world had a population of about 4.

The more I read the more I fought against the assumption that literature is for the minority - of a particular education or class. Books were my birthright too.

The position they occupy in life, the status they have, the class, the political status is not the main difference between people