Social Class Quotes

“ In the privacy of my dreams, I'm a warrior.”
― Kimberly Derting, The Essence

“HIGGINS. Have you no morals, man?
DOOLITTLE [unabashed] Cant afford them, Governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“For the ruling class, in general, politics is a question of aesthetics: a way of seeing themselves, of seeing the world, of constructing a personality. For us it was life or death.”
― Édouard Louis, Qui a tué mon père

“The train bore me away, through the monstrous scenery of slag-heaps, chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud criss-crossed by the prints of clogs. This was March, but the weather had been horribly cold and everywhere there were mounds of blackened snow. As we moved slowly through the outskirts of the town we passed row after row of little grey slum houses running at right angles to the embankment. At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked. I had time to see everything about her—her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever-seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that ‘It isn’t the same for them as it would be for us,’ and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her—understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe.”
― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

“The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply have to work harder, in conditions that grow ever more insecure, to enrich the few. Democratic politics, which purports to enrich the many, is actually in the pocket of those bankers, media barons and other moguls who run and own everything.”
― Charles Moore

“This was the way he had to go; he had no choice. He had never had any choice. He was only a dreamer.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“Religions and states and classes and tribes and nations do not have to work or argue for their adherents and subjects. They more or less inherit them. Against this unearned patrimony there have always been speakers and writers who embody Einstein's injunction to 'remember your humanity and forget the rest.' It would be immodest to claim membership in this fraternity/sorority, but I hope not to have done anything to outrage it. Despite the idiotic sneer that such principles are 'fashionable,' it is always the ideas of secularism, libertarianism, internationalism, and solidarity that stand in need of reaffirmation.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports

“Now, I have always wanted to agree with Lady Bracknell that there is no earthly use for the upper and lower classes unless they set each other a good example. But I shouldn't pretend that the consensus itself was any of my concern. It was absurd and slightly despicable, in the first decade of Thatcher and Reagan, to hear former and actual radicals intone piously against 'the politics of confrontation.' I suppose that, if this collection has a point, it is the desire of one individual to see the idea of confrontation kept alive.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports

“The poor, I am told, are kind to each other but that is because they have nothing to lose,' he said. 'The rich cannot afford to be.”
― M.R.C. Kasasian, The Mangle Street Murders

“They had far more in common than either realised. One was born Catholic, the other Protestant. One was born Irish, the other British. But neither was the greatest difference between them. One was born rich and the other poor.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea

“In effect, nobody who is not from the losing classes has ever been thrust into a death cell in these United States.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“Maybe what she meant was that obviously she wasn't a lady because there was no way she could be. To be ordinary, as if pride were not the first manifestations of shame.”
― Édouard Louis, The End of Eddy

“There is a will that exists, a desperate, continual, constantly renewed effort to place some people on a level below you, not to be on the lowest rung of the social ladder.”
― Édouard Louis, The End of Eddy

“All rich things look the same, but poor things always look different.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, Can I Tell You Something?

“Parce que c'est ma mère, elle qui a sacrifié chacun de ses jours et plusieurs de ses nuits pour me voir libérée des servilités et soumissions qui étaient les siennes, qui a souahaité le plus ma réussite. Parce qu'elle a prié la vierge Marie à genoux dans toutes les chapelles pour que j'échappe aux fatalités du destin social. Parce que même si je me contruisais contre elle en embrassant les codes qui l'excluent, j'ai produit sa fierté. Parce que la trahison que l'ascension suppose était non seulement attendue mais espérée.”
― Caroline Dawson, Là où je me terre

“How much of us is what we do?”
― Colin Channer, Waiting in Vain

“Attendants and domestics have been part of Daniel's life since birth. They fade into his background, like Franco's security guards. They are silent witnesses, seemingly blind and deaf to all conversations and indiscretions. But they are not blind and deaf. Everything is noted.”
― Ruta Sepetys, The Fountains of Silence

“There are some females in the world who slip away from the public eye. You might see them walking past you in the lobby or behind the tinted windows of a limousine. They travel so much, you might only meet them in hotels. Last night, you wondered if you’d ever see those intelligent women again. How can any man be good enough for them?”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“There it is, forming behind us: The Fat Blue Phalanx. All the smug self-satisfied maleness you can drink, and free refills at the station house. It's all I can see in cops, that patriarchal bullshit that will never yield to a contract of mutual respect. That grunting fuck-obsessed inability to deobjectify you and treat you as a person, it’s a subclass of male that will never, ever change, no matter what. There they are with their uniforms and their discipline, an abstract and codified representation of all the construction workers who ever whistled at you and there you were, too polite to pee in their toolboxes in retaliation, too polite to challenge them, walking away red-faced because the worst part of it is that you were wondering whether they were really whistling like they’d whistle at Caprice or if they were just being sarcastic and were even now laughing at you with your short skinny legs and flat ass. Besides you’re not supposed to let it get to you. You’re supposed to have a sense of humour: they do. See them waving their cocks at each other and farting? You aren’t allowed to break the rules of their society which say that you are a cold uptight lesbian bitch if you don’t like their hohoho aggressive male ways so just hold your head high from your position of moral superiority and go home and tell your boyfriend (if you have one, which I don’t) who if you’re lucky will offer to go beat them up knowing you won’t take him up on it because you know perfectly well he’d probably get his ass kicked, most of the boys you know are highly ass-kickable because they’ve been brought up nicely. They were brought up in the luxury of knowing the money power of the military-industrial complex would protect them from the dirt and the grime of uneducated testosterone. its thanx to our weak boyfriends that we have cops at all, surrogate cock and balls to maintain ‘order’, whatever that is. Or was. And where does it really leave you as a prisoner of the suburbs? Fuming over some tiny incident that the aggressors have already forgotten about, but you have the sinking feeling you've just sniffed the true underbelly and the aroma was not what you get in Calvin Klein ads. Scratch 'n' sniff, scratch 'n' sniff, peel the onion... will you ever get down to the reality of what this place is about? And I know I shouldn't brand individual cops with the big blue brush but in my mind these guys are a symbol of the whole iron-cage Boy system that makes me always a victim, no matter what I do, it's a cage I can't escape. I'm the little princess. They dominate, they aggress, they protect.”
― Tricia Sullivan, Maul

“Americans need no strong sense of personal identity premised upon personal values or shared experiences. Many of us gladly traded in a moral and ethical characterization of self for an identity provided by our jobs and brand name consumer goods. We describe ourselves to new acquaintances by stating our vocations. We all know the class ranking system associated with our respective occupations. Whatever trendy neighborhood development we reside in establishes our social class. We are what we drive to work, what we do for a living, what exclusive clubs we belong as members, what teams we root for, and what artists we follow. Instead of working to develop a mature inward state of consciousness and expand their knowledge of the world, many Americans including me suffer from a juvenile tendency to define ourselves based upon our embodied social status. Americans promote their status by touting their jobs, the housing developments that we live in, and the designer clothes and sportswear that we clad ourselves.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“He was stupid, yes; he had never had any schooling; he didn't know how to explain himself. Was he in jail because he doesn't know how to explain things right? What was wrong with his being stupid? He worked like a slave, day in and day out. [...] Was it his fault he was stupid? Who was to blame?”
― Graciliano Ramos, Vidas Secas

“monomachy? Impossible. I'm not of the contending class”
― Gene Wolfe

“The boundaries that divide these worlds help define within each of them radically different ways of perceiving what it is possible to be or to become, of perceiving what it is possible to aspire to or not.”
― Didier Eribon, Returning to Reims

“The social function of court life is to enlist the support and adherence of the public for the ruling house. The Renaissance princes want to delude not only the people, they also want to make an impression o the nobility and bind it to the court. But they are not dependent on either its services or its company; they can use anyone, of whatever descent, provided he is useful. Consequently, the Italian courts of Renaissance differ from the medieval courts in their very constitution; they accept into their circle upstart adventurers and merchants who have made money, plebeian humanists and ill-bred artists - entirely as if they had all the traditional social qualifications. In contrast to the exclusive moral community of court chivalry, a comparatively free, fundamentally intellectual type of salon life develops at these courts which is, on the one hand the continuation of the aesthetic social culture of middle-class circles, such as described in the Decamerone and in the Paradiso degli Alberti, and represents, on the other, the preparatory stage in the development of those literary salons which play such an important part in the intellectual life of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 2: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque

“The degradation of love here serves merely as a social defence mechanism. The stability of medieval feudal society and even that of the courtly society of the seventeenth century was not threatened by the dangers of love; they needed no such defence against the excesses of prodigal sons. But now, when the frontiers between the social castes are crossed more and more frequently and not only the nobility but also the bourgeoisie has to defend a privileged position in society, the excommunication of the wild, incalculable love-passion, which threatens the prevailing social order, begins, and a literature arises which finally leads to the Dame aux camélias and to our Garbo films.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art Volume 3: Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism

“When Christophe at last made up his mind to go to bed, chilled in body and soul, he heard the window below him shut. And, as he lay, he thought sadly that it is cruel for the poor to dwell on the past, for they have no right to have a past, like the rich: they have no home, no corner of the earth wherein to house their memories: their joys, their sorrows, all their days, are scattered in the wind.”
― Romain Rolland, JEAN - CHRISTOPHE

“An older woman encountering his glance — it was like being stared at by a violet — might have summed him up: "Untrustworthy to a degree. But worth it.”
― Rosemary Tonks, Opium Fogs

“Some people would be ashamed of driving the cars, or living in the houses, some people are showing off.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Other struggling people aren't the enemy.”
― Nathan Monk

“While these racial differentials in mortality have provoked a certain amount of discussion, public health expert Vicente Navarro recently pointed to the "deafening silence" on the topic of class differentials in mortality in the United States, where "race is used as a substitute for class." But in 1986, on "one of the few occasions that the U.S. government collected information on mortality rates (for heart and cerebrovascular disease) by class, the results showed that, by whatever indicators of class one might choose (level of education, income, or occupation), morality rates are related to social class.”
― Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights and the New War on the Poor