Class Quotes

“The end had left them stiff and fragile, unable to accept that the suburbs were gone, that there was no more escaping the mob, no more pretending floors and toilets scrubbed themselves and reading about black people in monthly book clubs the way you’d read about the construction of London’s sewers or the history of the fur trade, as a kind of boutique curiosity, instead of actually talking to them.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“In our political system everybody is comforted. Our guides and governors who have to be elected by the influence of the Barbarians, and who depend on their favour, sing the praises of the Barbarians, and say all the smooth things that can be said of them. With Mr. Tennyson, they celebrate 'the great broad−shouldered genial Englishman,' with his 'sense of duty,' his 'reverence for the laws,' and his 'patient force,' who saves us from the 'revolts, republics, revolutions, most no graver than a schoolboy's barring out,' which upset other and less
broad−shouldered nations.

Our guides who are chosen by the Philistines and who have to look to their favour, tell the Philistines how 'all the world knows that the great middle class of this country supplies the mind, the will, and the power requisite for all the great and good things that have to be done,' and congratulate them on their 'earnest good sense, which penetrates through sophisms, ignores commonplaces, and gives to conventional illusions their true value.'

Our guides who look to the favour of the Populace, tell them that 'theirs are the brightest powers of sympathy, and the readiest powers of action.”
― Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy

“Because, you know, a colored woman with class is still an exceptional creature; and a colored woman with class, style, poetry, taste, elegance, repartee, and haute cuisine is an almost nonexistent species.”
― Kathleen Collins, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

“You always could have done something, he thought as the van bounced over the speed bump at the motor pool’s threshold and passed through a loose clump of gate guards in full riot gear, faces smudged with soot, blood drying on their plastic shields. You were just afraid to be uncomfortable.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“I have an English degree, which has as much value as The Papiermark in The Weimar Republic in 1923. It's worthless, and why I'm now a duck farmer. Plus, what could I do with English but be a classroom colonialist? If I wanted to teach something racist, I'd be a math professor.”
― Jarod Kintz, Ducks are the stars of the karaoke bird world

“How much money would I have to take from you so I don’t lose your respect?”
Crocker Fenway chuckled without mirth. “A bit late for that, Mr. Sportello. People like you lose all claim to respect the first time they pay anybody rent.”
“And when the first landlord decided to stiff the first renter for his security deposit, your whole fucking class lost everybody’s respect.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice

“Admission was on the basis of merit. Students were of all races, all classes and all religions.”
― Kuan Yew Lee

“One has often wondered whether upon the whole earth there is anything so unintelligent, so unapt to perceive how the world is really going, as an ordinary young Englishman of our upper class”
― Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy

“Now, the use of culture is that it helps us, by means of its spiritual standard of perfection, to regard wealth as but machinery, and not only to say as a matter of words that we regard wealth as but machinery, but really to perceive and feel that it is so.

If it were not for this purging effect wrought upon our minds by culture, the whole world, the future as well as the present, would inevitably belong to the Philistines. The people who believe most that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being very rich, and who most give their lives and thoughts to becoming rich, are just the very people whom we call Philistines.

Culture says: 'Consider these people, then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their voice; look at them attentively; observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which make the furniture of their minds; would any amount of wealth be worth having with the condition that one was to become just like these people by having it?”
― Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy

“In some ways it made it easier, focusing solely on the technical problem at hand. She didn’t have to think about the snotty little child empress she was doing it for, or the people starving in the camp outside the blast gate. There are people starving everywhere, she told herself sometimes, when guilt crept close as she lay on her memory-foam mattress, cool filtered air blowing over her, the taste of butter lingering on her tongue.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“Sometimes we also find a tendency to view everything that's indigenous as good and anything "European"-such as Spain-as evil. That view overlooks such historical realities as the Aztec empire's oppressive domination of other indigenous societies and its class system, which privileged priests and the military. That view also forgets Spain was not a typically European nation after 600 years of rule by the Moors, an Arab/Berber people from Africa.”
― Elizabeth Martínez, De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views for a Multi-Colored Century

“in a classless society, I am not sure that we would still use this notion of justice”
― Michel Foucault, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature

“We are almost all, my good General, of a nature so pitifully plastic, that we act from circumstance, and are fashioned by situation.”
― Frances Burney, Camilla

“These people come from poor and middle-class homes. They come from different language schools. Singapore is a meritocracy. And these men have risen to the top by their own merit, hard work and high performance.”
― Fook Kwang Han, Lee Kuan Yew: Hard Truths To Keep Singapore Going

“Harsh things are said too, no doubt, against all the great classes of the community; but these things so evidently come from a hostile class, and are so manifestly dictated by the passions and prepossessions of a hostile class, and not by right reason, that they make no serious impression on those at whom they are launched, but slide easily off
their minds.

For instance, when the Reform League orators inveigh against our cruel and bloated aristocracy, these invectives so evidently show the passions and point of view of the Populace, that they do not sink into the minds of those at whom they are addressed, or awaken any thought or self−examination in them.

Again, when our aristocratical baronet describes the Philistines and the Populace as influenced with a kind of hideous mania for emasculating the aristocracy, that reproach so clearly comes from the wrath and excited imagination of the Barbarians, that it does not much set the Philistines and the Populace thinking.

Or when Mr. Lowe calls the Populace drunken and venal, he so evidently calls them this in an agony of apprehension for his Philistine or middle−class Parliament, which has done so many great and heroic works, and is now threatened with mixture and debasement, that the Populace do not lay his words seriously to heart.”
― Matthew Arnold

“The echoes, the unfamiliar people, and the sense he’d carried all his life that wherever there was money—and money had outlasted the end of the world, as a state of mind if not in fact—he would always be uncomfortable.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“How many times had he driven through this place? How many times had he turned away from the unease he felt at seeing these wan, starving people in their shabby tents, telling himself there was nothing he could do, that he was just one person in a larger system, the same way he’d watched Ferguson and Standing Rock and thought, Well, what can I do?”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“But I think mostly I just wanted her to … make me real, the way you’re real when the beautiful people look at you, and talk to you, and let you fuck them.”
― Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt

“Almost everyone, as almost always at such concerts, was white. It is something I can't help noticing; I notice it each time, and try to see past it. Part of that is a quick, complex series of negotiations: chiding myself for even seeing it, lamenting the reminders of how divided our life still remains, being annoyed that these thoughts can be counted on to pass through my mind at some point in the evening. Most of the people around me yesterday were middle-aged or old. I am used to it, but it never ceases to surprise me how easy it is to leave the hybridity of the city, and enter into all-white spaces, the homogeneity of which, as far as I can tell, causes no discomfort to the whites in them. The only thing odd, to some of them, is seeing me, young and black, in my seat or at the concession stand. At times, standing in line for the bathroom during intermission, I get looks that make me feel like Ota Benga, the Mbuti man who was put on display in the Monkey House at the Bronx Zoo in 1906. I weary of such thoughts, but I am habituated to them. But Mahler's music is not white, or black, not old or young, and whether it is even specifically human, rather than in accord with more universal vibrations, is open to question.”
― Teju Cole, Open City

“While bilingual is understood as a valuable asset or goal for middle-class and upper-class students, for working-class and poor students it is framed as a disability that must be overcome”
― Jonathan Rosa, Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad

“I get angry with those in the women's movement and out of it who deal with class & color as if they defined politics and people.”
― Rosario Morales, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“Conversations about class are resisted in part because there is a tendency to imagine that one's class reflects upon one's character. What is key to America's understanding of class is the persistent belief - despite all evidence to the contrary - that anyone, with the proper discipline and drive, can move from a lower class to a higher class. We recognize that mobility may be difficult, but the key to our collective self-image is the assumption that mobility is always possible, so failure to move up reflects on one's character.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“The fact that acute differences exist between social and cultural classes seems to be acknowledged in most of the world, but in the United States, where democracy is often confounded with egalitarianism, even the idea that social classes exist has long been taboo. It is, however, a writer’s specialty to deal with taboos, to speak the unspoken, to reveal, to uncover, to show in the interaction of people the difference between what we profess and how we act. Moreover, because touchy subjects arouse emotion, they are especially useful for the writer who knows that arousing the emotions of his audience is the test of his skill.”
― Sol Stein, Stein on Writing

“Ava is drawn to wealthy partners as a means of quieting her class anxieties. In practice, having sex with rich people only heightens her awareness that she herself is not rich, and yet she keeps on doing it.”
― Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times

“We judge the street corner hustler or working-class criminal - from East Glasgow to East London - but we see a job as an investment banker, even in firms that launder the profits of drug cartels, fund terrorism, aid the global flow of arms, fuel war, oil spills, land grabs and generally fuck up the planet, as a perfectly legitimate, even aspirational occupation.”
― Akala, Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

“From the philosopher-kings of Plato to the enlightened oligarchies of Aristotle, some of the world's greatest thinkers have strived to categorise society.”
― Greg Hadfield, Class: where do you stand?

“Traveling is a classroom where the world teaches what one didn't learn at school.”
― Dr. Lucas D. Shallua

“But the underlying capability of the computer era is actually programming—which almost none of us knows how to do. We simply use the programs that have been made for us, and enter our text in the appropriate box on the screen. We teach kids how to use software to write, but not how to write software. This means they have access to the capabilities given to them by others, but not the power to determine the value-creating capabilities of these technologies for themselves.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age

“Exactly! Ever heard of King Arthur’s circular table? A circular table was selected to symbolize that all the people sitting on it were equal and their opinions mattered equally. We are sitting on a circular table, but is there equal freedom of speech and expression right now? There is no ‘head’ to this table, and yet we INSURGENTS---- why do we have to be called INSURGENTS for our voices----yeah, we INSURGENTS are put under you ALLIES just for mentioning our concerns! Isn’t that unconstitutional?”
― Lucy Carter, The Reformation

“He could put up with his meaningless office-life, because he never for an instant thought of it as permanent. God knew how or when, he was going to break free of it. After all, there was always his “writing.” Some day, perhaps, he might be able to make a living of sorts by “writing;” and you’d feel you were free of the money-stink if you were a “writer,” would you not? The types he saw all around him, especially the older men, made him squirm. That is what it meant to worship the money-god! To settle down, to Make Good, to sell your soul for a villa and an aspidistra! To turn into the typical bowler-hatted sneak – Strube’s “little man” – the little docile cit who slips home by the six-fifteen to a supper of cottage pie and stewed tinned pears, half an hour’s listening-in to the BBC Symphony Concert, and then perhaps a spot of licit sexual intercourse if his wife “feels in the mood!” What a fate! No, it isn’t like that that one was meant to live. One’s got to get right out of it, out of the money stink.”
― George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying