Class Distinction Quotes

• Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

  Frederick Douglass

  Peace, Patriotic, Ignorance

  Speech on the twenty-fourth anniversary of emancipation in the District of Columbia,Washington, D.C., Apr. 1886

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• The distinctions separating the social classes are false; in the last analysis they rest on force.

  Albert Einstein

  Class, Justice, Diversity

  Albert Einstein (2013). “Einstein on Politics: His Private Thoughts and Public Stands on Nationalism, Zionism, War, Peace, and the Bomb”, p.228, Princeton University Press

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• Of all the hokum with which this country [America] is riddled, the most odd is the common notion that it is free of class distinctions.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Country, Class, America

  W. Somerset Maugham (2011). “A Writer's Notebook”, p.232, Random House

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• We must pick out what is good for us where we can find it.

  Pablo Picasso

  Picks

  Elizabeth Cowling, Pablo Picasso (2002). “Picasso: style and meaning”, Phaidon Press

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• Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, . . . neither persons nor property will be safe.

  Frederick Douglass

  Ignorance, Justice, Black History

  Speech on the twenty-fourth anniversary of emancipation in the District of Columbia,Washington, D.C., Apr. 1886

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• The class distinctions simply result from the different degrees of success with which men have availed themselves of the chances which were presented to them. Instead of endeavoring to redistribute the acquisitions which have been made between the existing classes, our aim should be to increase, multiply, and extend the chances.

  William Graham Sumner

  Men, Class, Degrees

  William Graham Sumner (1903). “What Social Classes Owe to Each Other”, p.144, Ludwig von Mises Institute

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• Genocide begins, however improbably, in the conviction that classes of biological distinction indisputably sanction social and political discrimination.

  Andrea Dworkin

  Class, Political, Discrimination

  "Trouble and Strife", Issues 13-17 (p. 45), 1988.

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• No power on earth, however, can abolish the merciless class distinction between those who are physically desirable and the lonely, pallid, spotted, silent, unfancied majority.

  John Mortimer

  Beauty, Lonely, Class

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• We must not discriminate between things. Where things are concerned there are no class distinctions. We must pick out what is good for us where we can find it.

  Pablo Picasso

  Artist, Class, Distinction

  Elizabeth Cowling, Pablo Picasso (2002). “Picasso: style and meaning”, Phaidon Press

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• Just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself, so the end goal of feminist revolution must be, ... not just the elimination of the male privilege, but of the sex distinction itself; genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally.

  Shulamith Firestone

  Sex, Class, Differences

  SHULAMITH FIRESTONE (1970). “THE DIALECTIC OF SEX: THE CASE FOR FEMINIST REVOLUTION”

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• Bravely you jog along with the rope of class distinction drawing closer, close, tighter, tighter around you... I see it and know it, but I cannot help you... I am only an unnecessary, little, bush commoner, I am only a - woman.

  Miles Franklin

  Art, Women, Class

  Miles Franklin (2009). “My Brilliant Career”, p.463, The Floating Press

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• There are things in American culture that want to wipe the class distinction. Blue jeans. Ready-made clothes. Coca-Cola.

  Leslie Fiedler

  Clothes, America, Blue

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• There's a particular hierarchy in the prison - class distinctions, high-school cliques. You have to learn how to navigate.

  Laura Prepon

  School, Class, Hierarchy

  Source: www.esquire.com

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• Art is a spiritual function of man, which aims at freeing him from life's chaos. Art is free in the use of its means in any way it likes, but is bound to its laws and to its laws alone. The minute it becomes art, it becomes much more sublime than a class distinction between proletariat and bourgeoisie.

  Kurt Schwitters

  Spiritual, Art, Mean

  "Manifesto Proletkult" by Theo van Doesburg, 1923.

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• I think my movie addresses the struggles of communities facing class distinctions, which are timeless. The questions of how we live together and what we do for money are really the stuff of drama.

  Ira Sachs

  Drama, Struggle, Thinking

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• James Baldwin is one of the greatest, North American writers of the second half of the Twentieth Century. A prolific writer and a brilliant social critic, he foreshadowed the destructive trends happening now in the whole Western world and beyond, while always maintaining a sense of humanistic hope and dignity. He explored palpable, yet unspoken, intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies and the inevitable, if unnameable, tensions with personal identity, assumptions, uncertainties, yearning, and questing.

  Raoul Peck

  Class, Identity, World

  Source: www.theskanner.com

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• In Blue Crush , we meet three Hawaiian surfers who work as hotel maids, live in a grotty rental, and are raising the kid sister of one of them. Despite this near-poverty, they look great; there is nothing like a tan and a bikini to overcome class distinctions.

  Roger Ebert

  Crush, Kids, Blue

  Roger Ebert (2004). “Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2005”, p.76, Andrews McMeel Publishing

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• The '80s to me, more than anything else, represents a time of real criminal activity in the office of the president: an incredibly disparate economy in terms of the class distinctions and whatnot, and a tremendous shallowness - a lot of sort of bank robbery by executives.

  Martha Plimpton

  Real, Class, Office

  Interview with Keith Phipps, www.avclub.com. March 3, 1999.

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• As the only class distinction available in a democracy, the college degree has created a caste society as rigid as ancient India's. Condemning elitism and simultaneously quaking in fear that our children won't become members of the elite, we send them to college, not to learn, but to "be" college graduates, rationalizing our snobbery with the cliché that high technology has eliminated the need for the manual labor that we secretly hold in contempt.

  Florence King

  Education, Children, Technology

  Florence King (1991). “Lump It Or Leave It”, p.77, Macmillan

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• I want to get totally rid of class distinction. As someone put it one of the papers this morning: Marks and Spencer have triumphed over Karl Marx and Engels.

  Margaret Thatcher

  Morning, Class, Paper

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• Transcending class distinctions, the speaker [Stalin] portrays the relation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as a mere division of labor. The workers and soldiers achieve the revolution, Guchkov and Miliukov "fortify" it.[...] This superintendent's approach to the historical process is exactly characteristic of the leaders of Menshevism, this handing out of instructions to various classes and then patronizingly criticizing their fulfillment.

  Leon Trotsky

  Class, Division Of Labor, Leader

  Leon Trotsky (2017). “History of the Russian Revolution”, p.306, Penguin UK

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• Criminals are never very amusing. It's because they're failures. Those who make real money aren't counted as criminals. This is a class distinction, not an ethical problem.

  Orson Welles

  Money, Real, Class

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• The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.

  W. H. Auden

  Birthday, Time, Money

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