Middle Class Quotes - Page 10

• A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world.

  Mary McCarthy

  Pain, Reading, Class

  Mary McCarthy (2002). “A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays”, New York Review of Books

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• If it wasn't for hustlers, gangsters & gamblers there'd be no Jazz. Wasn't middle~class who said Let's go hear Bird tonight.

  Betty Carter

  Music, Bird, Tonight

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• When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed.

  Jonathan Lethem

  Hippie, Artist, Rights

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• "Hit it with the back of your left hand" was the first swing thought I ever heard, brusquely bu not unlovingly put to me by the aunt-in-law who had moments before placed a golf club in my virgin grip. I was twenty-five, and had spent my youth in a cloisterd precinct of teh middle class where golf was a rumoured something, like champagne breakfasts and divorce, that the rich did.

  John Updike

  Divorce, Golf, Aunt

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• Public education is the key civil rights issue of the 21st century. Our nation's knowledge-based economy demands that we provide young people from all backgrounds and circumstances with the education and skills necessary to become knowledge workers. If we don't, we run the risk of creating an even larger gap between the middle class and the poor. This gap threatens our democracy, our society and the economic future of America.

  Eli Broad

  Running, Work, Issues

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• Poverty is everyone's problem. It cuts across any line you can name: age, race, social, geographic or religious. Whether you are black or white; rich, middle-class or poor, we are ALL touched by poverty

  Kathleen Blanco

  Religious, Cutting, Rich Or Poor

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• I was born into no true class and it was my decision early in life to insinuate myself into the middle class like a spy so that I would have an advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission, and to have taken my disguises too seriously.

  John Cheever

  Taken, Class, Decision

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• Now, because he knows that his economic theories don't work, he's been spending these last few days calling me every name in the book. Lately he's called me a socialist for wanting to roll-back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans so we can finally give tax relief to the middle class. I don't know what's next. By the end of the week he'll be accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten. I shared my peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

  Barack Obama

  Funny, Sarcastic, Book

  "Obama Mocks Socialist Attacks: 'I Shared My Toys'" by Sam Stein, www.huffingtonpost.com. November 29, 2008.

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• Simply, with a Republican Congress sitting shotgun, Mitt Romney will put the middle class on the roof and take us for a long, painful ride.

  Patty Murray

  Badass, Class, Long

  "Patty Murray Speech Text: Read The DNC Remarks", www.huffingtonpost.com. September 5, 2012.

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• The notion of saving the planet has nothing to do with intellectual honesty or science. The fact is that the planet was here long before us and will be here long after us. The planet is running fine. What people are talking about is saving themselves and saving their middle-class lifestyles and saving their cash flow.

  Lynn Margulis

  Running, Honesty, Cash Flow

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• Poor people and most of the middle class are not willing to be uncomfortable. Remember, being comfortable is their biggest priority in life... The only time you can actually grow is when you are outside your comfort zone.

  T. Harv Eker

  Inspirational, Encouraging, Priorities In Life

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• Poor and most middle-class people believe "If I have a lot of money, I could do what I want and I'd be a success." Rich people understand, "If I become a successful person, I will be able to do what I need to do to have what I want, including a lot of money."

  T. Harv Eker

  Inspirational, Believe, Successful

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• Rich people believe "You can have your cake and eat it too." Middle-class people believe "Cake is too rich, so I'll only have a little piece." Poor people don't believe they deserve cake, so they order a doughnut, focus on the hole, and wonder why they have "nothing."

  T. Harv Eker

  Inspirational, Trust, Believe

  FaceBook post by T. Harv Eker from Feb 19, 2013

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• If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected - those, precisely, who need the law's protection most! - and listens to their testimony.

  James A. Baldwin

  Country, Law, Class

  "No Name in the Street". Book by James A. Baldwin, 1972.

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• She is a reflection of comfortable middle-class values that do not take seriously the continuing unemployment. What I particularly regret is that she does not take seriously the intellectual decline. Having given up the Empire and the mass production of industrial goods, Britain's future lay in its scientific and artistic pre-eminence. Mrs Thatcher will be long remembered for the damage she has done.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Regret, Science, Reflection

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• Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great.

  Edmund White

  Class, People, Avenging

  Self-interview, Dalkey Archive Press, 1994.

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• I'm a middle-class former housewife who goes to my daughter's softball games.

  Charlaine Harris

  Inspirational, Softball, Daughter

  "Charlaine Harris's Vampire Empire". Interview with Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, www.wsj.com. May 5, 2009.

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• In traditional Hindu families like ours, men provided and women were provided for. My father was a patriarch and I a pliant daughter. The neighborhood I'd grown up in was homogeneously Hindu, Bengali-speaking, and middle-class. I didn't expect myself to ever disobey or disappoint my father by setting my own goals and taking charge of my future.

  Bharati Mukherjee

  Mother, Daughter, Father

  "American Dreamer" by Bharati Mukherjee, www.motherjones.com. January/February 1997.

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• Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest. If we want the Arms Act to be repealed, if we want to learn the use of arms, here is a golden opportunity. If the middle classes render voluntary help to Government in the hour of its trial, distrust will disappear, and the ban on possessing arms will be withdrawn.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Opportunity, Gun, Class

  Mahatma Gandhi (2008). “My Experiments With Truth: An Autobiography”, p.465, Jaico Publishing House

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• When you go to work, if your name is on the building, you're rich. If your name is on your desk, you're middle class. And if your name is on your shirt, you're poor.

  Rich Hall

  Funny, Witty, Work

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• He laid it on George, me and our wives without telling us at a dinner party at his house. He was a friend of George's, and our dentist at the time. He just put it in our coffee or something. He didn't know what it was, it was just, 'It's all the thing,' with the middle-class London swingers. They had all heard about it and didn't know it was different from pot or pills. And they gave it to us, and he was saying, 'I advise you not to leave,' and we thought he was trying to keep us for an orgy in his house and we didn't want to know.

  John Lennon

  Party, Coffee, Class

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• For globalization to work for America, it must work for working people. We should measure the success of our economy by the breadth of our middle class, and the scope of opportunity offered to the poorest child to climb into that middle class.

  John J. Sweeney

  Children, Opportunity, Class

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• The rich buy assets. The poor only have expenses. The middle class buys liabilities they think are assets. The poor and the middle class work for money. The rich have money work for them.

  Robert Kiyosaki

  Thinking, Class, Rich

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• It's important to save your money. We need it for the long haul but too many Americans don't save and don't invest. It used to be that people would be proud of the fact that they were middle class. You'd have your church and buy a house and you had a car and everything else. Now, it's really, really tough. Everybody has financial issues except for the one percent.

  Michael Douglas

  Success, Class, Issues

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• Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class…involving high meat intake, consumption of large amounts of frozen and convenience foods, ownership of motor vehicles, golf courses, small electric appliances, home and work place air-conditioning, and suburban housing are not sustainable...

  Maurice Strong

  Eugenics, Air, Class

  "Agenda 21: The U.N.'s Earth Summit Has Its Head In The Clouds" by Larry Bell, www.forbes.com. June 14, 2011.

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