Middle Class Quotes - Page 16

• We are committing ourselves to basic protections of our people... We will not permit banks to repossess the homes of working class and middle class people. That's the end of that, it is not negotiable.

  Alexis Tsipras

  Home, Class, People

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• Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes.

  Howard Zinn

  Class, Failing, Middle

  "A People's History of the United States". Book by Howard Zinn (Chapter 24), 1980.

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• As a person, I am still very middle class. People don’t realise these things. Most of the black suits that I wear are the same. All the designer clothes I have are actually from my films. I don’t dream of Rolls Royce and things like that… People are kind enough to me to give me the nicest things in life, but it doesn’t mean that I’m used to them.

  Shahrukh Khan

  Dream, Mean, Class

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• The place where you got to get revenues has to come from the middle class. That's where the huge number of people that are there. So the system does need to be revamped [to tax the rich less and the middle class more.]

  Orrin Hatch

  Class, Numbers, People

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• Who is an aam aadmi? AAP believes that the middle class is part of the aam aadmi, anyone who is tired of this corrupt system is aam aadmi.

  Arvind Kejriwal

  Believe, Tired, Class

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• This kind of inequality - a level that we haven’t seen since the Great Depression - hurts us all. When middle-class families can no longer afford to buy the goods and services that businesses are selling...it drags down the entire economy from top to bottom. America was built on the idea of broad-based prosperity... That’s why a CEO like Henry Ford made it his mission to pay his workers enough so that they could buy the cars he made. It’s also why a recent study showed that countries with less inequality tend to have stronger and steadier economic growth over the long run.

  Barack Obama

  Running, Country, Hurt

  Barack Obama's Remarks on the Economy in Osawatomie, Kansas, obamawhitehouse.archives.gov. December 6, 2011.

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• This kind of gaping inequality gives lie to the promise that’s at the very heart of America: that this is a place where you can make it if you try. We tell people - we tell our kids - that in this country, even if you’re born with nothing, work hard and you can get into the middle class. We tell them that your children will have a chance to do even better than you do. That’s why immigrants from around the world historically have flocked to our shores.

  Barack Obama

  Country, Children, Lying

  Barack Obama's Remarks on the Economy in Osawatomie, Kansas, obamawhitehouse.archives.gov. December 6, 2011.

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• The maiden Olympics had more to protest about than mere war, though. Central to its ethos was a rejection of two establishments the political one, certainly, but also that of the wider poetry world itself. It changed poetry for ever in the UK, ... It led to readings all over the country. You suddenly got more women reading and publishing poems, as well as gay guys and poets from all over the world. Until that time, published poetry had been very university-based white, male, middle-class. We were trying to break poetry out of its academic confines.

  Adrian Mitchell

  Country, War, Reading

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• If a budget is designed to show our values, it's clear where the majority stands: against opportunity, against education, and against America's hard-working, tax-paying middle class.

  Ellen Tauscher

  Education, Hard Work, Opportunity

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• There's a very big gulf between the black civil rights leadership in America and the black middle class in America. The black middle class are conservative. Many of those minorities can be persuaded to be members of the Republican Party.

  Pete du Pont

  Leadership, Party, Rights

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• I will not pretend to justify this espionage I carried on, and I will say openly that all these signs of a life full of intellectual curiosity, but thoroughly slovenly and disorderly at the same time, inspired me at first with aversion and mistrust. I am not only a middle-class man, living a regular life, fond of work and punctuality; I am also an abstainer and a nonsmoker, and these bottles in Haller's room pleased me even less than the rest of his artistic disorder.

  Hermann Hesse

  Love, Men, Class

  Hermann Hesse (1983). “Steppenwolf”, Bantam

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• I grew up in a middle class English family just outside London. I wasn't surrounded by that speedy city lifestyle, it was a little mellower.

  Ed Westwick

  Class, Cities, Littles

  "Ed Westwick: 'I can be a real bitch - people know when to stay away'". Interview with Mirror.co.uk, www.mirror.co.uk. May 3, 2009.

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• I came from a lower-middle-class postwar family in a time of austerity and retrenchment, with no one in the family who was in any way artistic or a potential mentor to a budding writer, and yet this is what I became.

  Graham Swift

  Class, Mentor, Austerity

  "How did I end up becoming a novelist?". Interview With Edward Marriott, www.theguardian.com. February 28, 2009.

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• The liberal wing of the feminist movement may have improved the lives of its middle- and upper-class constituency--indeed, 1992 was the Year of the White Middle Class Woman--but since the leadership of this faction of the feminist movement has singled out black men as the meta-enemy of women, these women represent one of the most serious threats to black male well-being since the Klan.

  Ishmael Reed

  Men, Years, Class

  Ishmael Reed (1995). “Airing Dirty Laundry”, Perseus Books

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• In my family, as in most middle-class Indian families I knew when I was growing up, science and mathematics were held in awe.

  Aravind Adiga

  Growing Up, Class, My Family

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• Too much of Indian writing in English, it seemed to me, consisted of middle-class people writing about other middle-class people - and a small slice of life being passed off as an authentic portrait of the country.

  Aravind Adiga

  Country, Writing, Class

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• A moderately honest man with a moderately faithful wife, moderate drinkers both, in a moderately healthy house: that is the true middle class unit.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Men, Class, Wife

  'Man and Superman' (1903) 'Maxims: Moderation'

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• I belong to the middle class that grew up very influenced by the Catholic church. The people of the novel are from a more pagan and practical world in which the Christianity is just a veneer.

  John McGahern

  Class, People, Catholic

  "The whole world in a community" by Robert McCrum, www.theguardian.com. January 5, 2002.

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• If you want to do something to destroy consumer spending, just eat away at the middle class because the other problem we have is the structural problem of middle class America.

  Wilbur Ross

  Class, America, Want

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• I want people to make a lot more than $9. $9 is not enough. The problem is that if you can't do that by mandating it in the minimum wage laws. Minimum wage laws never worked in terms of helping the middle class attain more prosperity.

  Marco Rubio

  Law, Class, People

  "Up" With Chris Hayes, www.nbcnews.com. February 16, 2013.

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• If she'd spaced her children out and had eleven babies in eleven years, she would have been no better than her own mother and sisters: irresponsible, a welfare cheat, another bit of Sawdust Lane white trash. But as luck would have it, she'd had them all at once, and now she was, overnight, middle-class. And respectable.

  Sheri Holman

  Mother, Baby, Children

  Sheri Holman (2007). “The Mammoth Cheese”, p.89, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Manufacturing and other unskilled professions that were union jobs, that allowed people to live a middle-class life, are disappearing both because unions are disappearing and because of the global nature of the economy.

  Andy Stern

  Jobs, Class, People

  Interview with Ezra Klein, voices.washingtonpost.com. April 14, 2010.

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• A smaller government reflecting the needs of the middle class and poor is superior to a big government reflecting the needs of the privileged and powerful.

  Robert Reich

  Powerful, Government, Class

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• America's real business leaders understand unless or until the middle class regains its footing and its faith, capitalism remains vulnerable.

  Robert Reich

  Real, Class, America

  "Real Business Leaders Want to Save Capitalism" by Robert Reich, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 19, 2014.

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• We already have an annual wealth tax on homes, the major asset of the middle class. It's called the property tax. Why not a small annual tax on the value of stocks and bonds, the major assets of the wealthy?

  Robert Reich

  Home, Class, Why Not

  "The Rise of the Non-Working Rich" by Robert Reich, www.huffingtonpost.com. July 15, 2014.

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