Middle Class Quotes - Page 36

• If you want a future of shared prosperity, where the middle class is growing and poverty is declining, where the American Dream really is alive and well again, and where the United States remains the leading force for peace and justice and prosperity in a highly competitive world, you have to vote for Barack Obama.

  William J. Clinton

  Dream, Class, United States

  "2012 Democratic Convention: Bill Clinton Goes All-In for Obama's Reelection in Rousing Speech" by Tina Daunt, www.hollywoodreporter.com. September 5, 2012.

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• When the women's movement began, it was a middle-class phenomenon. Certainly, black women had other stuff to think about in the '60s besides a women's movement. Working-class women were slow to get into it.

  Gail Collins

  Thinking, Class, Black

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• I'm from a lower middle class background; all my family were immigrants.

  Billy Corgan

  Class, My Family, Middle

  "The Great Pumpkin: Billy Corgan Discusses Tour, New Album, Personal Philosophy". Stereo IQ interview, www.huffingtonpost.com. November 7, 2012.

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• In a sense the quest for the emancipation of black people in the U.S. has always been a quest for economic liberation which means to a certain extent that the rise of black middle class would be inevitable.

  Angela Davis

  Mean, Class, People

  "Frontline", www.pbs.org. 1997.

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• What I think is different today is the lack of political connection between the black middle class and the increasing numbers of black people who are more impoverished than ever before.

  Angela Davis

  Thinking, Class, Numbers

  Interview, www.pbs.org. 1998.

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• I've had people ask me in interviews what it's like to have money, but that's not how it is. I have a middle-class life. I have a room in London but not a house, nor a BMW.

  Beth Ditto

  Bmw, Class, People

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• Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Thinking, Class, America

  "Tomdispatch Interview: Ehrenreich, The Prey and the Predators". Interview with Tom Engelhardt, www.tomdispatch.com. June 4, 2006.

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• colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middle-class non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstacy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization.

  Jack Kerouac

  Stars, School, Dark

  Jack Kerouac (1986). “The Dharma Bums”, p.39, Penguin

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• By making college more affordable for all and more accessible for minority students, the first new higher education authorizing legislation in a decade will help strengthen our nation and America's middle class, and spur a new age of innovation and ingenuity in our country.

  Nancy Pelosi

  Country, College, Class

  "Pelosi: Higher Education Bill is Bipartisan Investment in College Affordability and in America's Middle Class". Press release, July 31, 2008.

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• The image the Republicans have of themselves needs the image they have of the Democrats to bring it into sharp focus. The Democrats are plainly a disreputable crowd; the Republicans, by contrast, are men of standing and sobriety. Many a middle-class American in many a small town has had to explain painfully why he chose to be a Democrat. No middle-class American need feel uneasy as a Republican. Even when he is a minority--for example, among the heathen on a college campus--he can, like any white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant, warm himself before his little fire of self-esteem.

  Clinton Rossiter

  Self Esteem, College, Men

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• First impressions of mediaeval life are usually coloured by the courtly romances of Malory and his later refiners. Chaucer brings us down to reality, but his people belong to a prosperous middle-class world, on holiday and in holiday mood. Piers Plowman stands alone as a revelation of the ignorance and misery of the lower classes, whose multiplied grievances came to a head in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.

  William Langland

  Holiday, Ignorance, Reality

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• As a child I used to watch clouds, and in them, see faces, castles, animals, dragons, and giants. It was a world of escape--fantasy; something to inject wonder and adventure into the mundane, regulated life of a middle-class boy leading a middle-class life.

  Barry B. Longyear

  Children, Adventure, Animal

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• By laying the groundwork for a system centered on home ownership rather than the public housing popular in Europe, the New Deal made possible the great postwar housing boom that populated the Sun Belt and boosted millions of Americans into the middle class, where, ironically, they often became Republicans.

  Jonathan Alter

  Home, Europe, Class

  Jonathan Alter (2007). “The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope”, p.284, Simon and Schuster

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• Most people are middle class. Most people do wish their lives were better than they are. And I think by making my main characters ordinary, average guys, it helps readers identify with their problems. It also helps ground the supernatural events that follow in a recognizable reality and perhaps gives some of my wilder scenarios a little verisimilitude.

  Bentley Little

  Character, Reality, Thinking

  "Bentley Little: The Elusive Dark Scribe Speaks". Interview with Vince A. Liaguno, www.darkscribemagazine.com. September 24, 2007.

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• The Democratic power elite on some level feels delegitimized by its working-class, black and female constituencies. What it wants are the "legitimate" votes of suburban, white, middle-class, affluent males. Even liberal voters and organizations tend on some tacit level to accept the idea that they are not the "real" Americans the Democrats must pursue.

  Ellen Willis

  Real, Class, Organization

  "The Democrats and Left Masochism". "New Politics", Vol. 8, No. 3, issue #31, Summer 2001.

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• I quite like the transitions of being an actor, because you get to explore these little pockets of life. So if you're playing a builder you get to know about building, if you're playing a scientist or a physician or something you get to know about physics. And similarly with this world I like exploring their culture, that very sort of upper middle class, addictive... that's part of the reason I love it.

  Matt Smith

  Class, Pockets, Physicians

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• To me, women's lib was mainly a white, upper-middle class affair of little use to a reservation Indian woman.

  Mary Brave Bird

  White, Class, Use

  "Lakota Woman". Book by Mary Brave Bird edited by Richard Erdoes (p. 244), 1990.

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• The church of Jesus needs to wake up from the exile of passivity and embrace liminality and adventure or continue to remain a religious ghetto for culturally co-opted, fearful, middle-class folk.

  Alan Hirsch

  Religious, Jesus, Adventure

  Michael Frost, Alan Hirsch (2011). “The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage”, p.92, Baker Books

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• By default, we have created a "system" of nursing-home care for the aged in which middle-class people pay exorbitant rates to for-profit nursing-home entrepreneurs - and then when private resources are consumed and the patient qualifies as a pauper, the nursing home begins billing Medicaid. This is precisely the antithesis of social citizenship; instead of the poor being accorded the dignity associated with the middle class, equality of treatment is achieved by making the middle class undergo pauperization.

  Robert Kuttner

  Home, Nursing, Class

  "The Economic Illusion". Book by Robert Kuttner, 1984.

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• One of the most insidious consequences of the present burden of personal income tax is that it strips many middle class families of financial reserves & seems to lend support to campaigns for socialized medicine, socialized housing, socialized food, socialized every thing. The personal income tax has made the individual vastly more dependent on the State & more avid for state hand-outs. It has shifted the balance in America from an individual-centered to a State-centered economic & social system.

  William Henry Chamberlin

  America, Avid, Hands

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• We choose forward. We choose inclusion. We choose growing together. We choose American economic might and muscle, standing strong on the bedrock of the American ideal: a strong, empowered and ever-growing middle class.

  Cory Booker

  Strong, Class, Together

  "Cory Booker Speech Text: Read The Democratic Convention Remarks". www.huffingtonpost.com. September 4, 2012.

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• I grew up sort of middle class, safe and suburban.

  Colum McCann

  Class, Safe, Grew Up

  "Colum McCann Links Communities With Storytelling". "Talk of the Nation" with Neal Conan, www.npr.org. June 26, 2012.

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• Community colleges provide higher education where people live, helping to build strong ladders of opportunity that allow people to secure a foothold in the middle class.

  Thomas Perez

  Strong, Opportunity, College

  "Investing in Skills to Build a Secure Middle Class" by Thomas E. Perez, www.huffingtonpost.com. April 17, 2014.

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• The privilege of a middle-class, stable, bourgeois life is that you can pretend that you are not complicated and project yourself as a solid, uncomplicated person, with refined life goals and achievements.

  Aleksandar Hemon

  Class, Goal, Achievement

  "Aleksandar Hemon: A personal history of Sarajevo". Interview with John Freeman, www.theguardian.com. February 23, 2013.

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• The middle class has just fallen further and further behind the rich.

  William Julius Wilson

  Class, Rich, Middle

  "William Julius Wilson: Ending Poverty Is Possible". "Tell Me More" with Michel Martin, www.npr.org. September 13, 2012.

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