Working Class Quotes - Page 14

• I'm from a pretty working-class background, and I really worked hard in my life to eradicate those parts of myself that were stupidly trapped in that world.Those of us who come up that way made a series of choices to benefit ourselves and make ourselves more generous and open.

  George Saunders

  Class, Choices, Benefits

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• In Cairo, these young men hanging around in the street, we're told these guys are lazy, they're uneducated, they don't care, they don't have any political instincts - just like the working class in America, apparently - and then suddenly what the hell happened? What was that? They changed the world by changing themselves. Now is that over? No. Is the civil rights movement over? No. These movements have not accomplished what they set out to accomplish.

  Bill Ayers

  Men, Rights, Class

  Source: thepointmag.com

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• One question is: Who is the working class today, and how has it changed? Where are we in that? I don't have a knee-jerk kind of 1930s thing about we must build the unions and that's the way to the future. I'm writing this book right now called Pallin' Around, and the subtitle is: "Talking to the Tea Party." And frankly I find talking to the Tea Party exhilarating, I love it.

  Bill Ayers

  Party, Book, Writing

  Source: thepointmag.com

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• Organizing the working class in England or the U.S. or any other advanced capitalist country has been a daunting challenge.

  Bill Ayers

  Country, Class, Challenges

  Source: thepointmag.com

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• The truth is that the antiwar movement was powered by the working class. The students were the ones that got the media and so forth, but it was the soldiers on the ground who really energized the antiwar movement in the late Sixties.

  Bill Ayers

  Media, Class, Soldier

  Source: thepointmag.com

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• Well, first of all I think that we have to be careful with terms like the working class, obviously. When [Karl] Marx wrote about the working class he was writing about something much more bounded than we're talking about.

  Bill Ayers

  Writing, Thinking, Talking

  Source: thepointmag.com

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• I was born in Oakland and grew up, probably about five miles from Oakland, in Hayward. And Hayward was OK. Like, Hayward wasn't - very much a working-class area and had definitely went through a decline and is now, seemingly, coming back around, which is nice to see.

  Mahershala Ali

  Nice, Oakland, Class

  Source: www.npr.org

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• My experience growing up in London and growing up in a working class background, is that when people are down and out, that's when they're probably the funniest. They have to be. That's what they do to cope, to find joy, cause they don't feel the joy inside. Or they use humor to keep people out.

  Daniel Kaluuya

  Growing Up, Class, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The light bulb going off in my head was a fear that in this pivotal moment in history, when America faces so many serious problems, when the middle class and working class of this country are being decimated, that there were not voices out there representing the tens of millions of people who needed a voice. And the idea of going through a campaign where there is not a serious discussion about the most important issues facing America, where there are not voices out there representing people who are hurting - that seemed to me unacceptable.

  Bernie Sanders

  Country, Hurt, Light

  Source: www.chicagotribune.com

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• Of course we can talk about the radical potential of youth. But in the U.S. it is still the case that most youth are conservative and not very sympathetic to the working class.

  Michael Yates

  Class, Conservative, Youth

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• The Vietnam War was so obviously evil and bore down most heavily upon working class youth that it made me think about things more deeply than I had before. It disillusioned me completely and forever about the government. And it made me aware that the media and the government lied almost as a matter of course. But it also opened my eyes to what was really going on in America.

  Michael Yates

  War, Eye, Thinking

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• I am sure that the experience of growing up in the heart of the working class and learning from my parents, and especially from my grandmother (who also worked on a barge boat as a cook and a servant for rich folks in Manhattan, Newport, Grosse Point, and Sewickley, all havens of the very rich), that life was not especially fair and always full of bad possibilities, helped shape my future take on life. Then what really transformed my thinking was the war in Vietnam and trying to be a good teacher.

  Michael Yates

  Teacher, Growing Up, War

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• A lot of people who voted for Trump, working class people, voted for Obama in 2008. They were seduced by the slogans "hope" and "change." They didn't get hope, they didn't get change, they were disillusioned. This time they voted for another candidate who is calling for hope and change and has promised to deliver all kinds of amazing things.

  Noam Chomsky

  Class, People, Calling

  Source: pennpoliticalreview.org

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• Policies are designed to undermine working class organization and the reason is not only the unions fight for workers' rights, but they also have a democratizing effect. These are institutions in which people without power can get together, support one another, learn about the world, try out their ideas, initiate programs, and that is dangerous. That's like a referendum in Greece. It is dangerous to allow that.

  Noam Chomsky

  Fighting, Class, Organization

  Source: pennpoliticalreview.org

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• Our tragedy today is not just that millions of people who called themselves communist or socialist were physically liquidated in Vietnam, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, not just that China and Russia, after all that revolution, have become capitalist economies, not just that the working class has been ruined in the United States and its unions dismantled, not just that Greece has been brought to its knees, or that Cuba will soon be assimilated into the free market - it is also that the language of the Left, the discourse of the Left, has been marginalised and is sought to be eradicated.

  Arundhati Roy

  Capitalist Economy, Iran, Class

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• Though the poorest Americans voted for Hillary Clinton, many relatively wealthy people voted for Trump and generally it's a mistake to think that economics explains Trump. The US is doing relatively well, the economy has significantly recovered since 2008, unemployment rates are low. I would say rather that his appeal to the working class was cultural: "I'll bring back the kinds of jobs your fathers had," and, by implication, the whiter, simpler post-war world when America had no real economic competition.

  Anne Applebaum

  Jobs, Mistake, Father

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• I'm not into branding - I'm trying to be organic to who I am on every level. I do really connect to being a part of the working class. Those are my roots. My family [consists of] farmers from Portugal, builders, housekeepers and stonemasons.

  Nelly Furtado

  Who I Am, Class, Roots

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• I had this idea for a long time to make a film about a poet in Paterson named Patterson. I wanted him to be working class. Eventually I thought a bus was a perfect visual way to move him, to drift him through the city, to have a measured kind of routine lifestyle. And all these things kind of congealed into the film "Paterson" eventually.

  Jim Jarmusch

  Moving, Class, Cities

  Source: www.npr.org

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• No faction is better or worse than any other. All come from the same mould; they are all products of capitalist influence in the working class movement. And they are a poison that destroys our Party and the working class movement in Korea.

  Kim Jong Il

  Party, Korea, Class

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• It's shameful that the elites basically have one-and-a-half political parties. Working class men and women have zero parties - or they have half a party. That's exactly what progressives are upset about.

  Nina Turner

  Zero, Party, Men

  Source: www.glamour.com

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• The first time I went to West Virginia I was surprised by how poor it was. It was like north India, there's kids running around in bare feet. The white working class has been disenfranchised as well. It's been disenfranchised by the liberal-left as well as the conservative-right. You really have to get people right across America and Britain and Europe and the world as a whole concentrating on the economic issues that affect them, because when you don't have that, you have all these phony, racist and cultural wars, and sexist wars.

  Irvine Welsh

  Running, War, Kids

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• Bowie's death is a very emotional thing. My generation of working-class Britain, it feels like we lost our spiritual leader, our guru. I always thought that if I was to be a hundred, somehow Bowie would be a hundred and fifteen. He'd be there to still steer me and guide me.

  Irvine Welsh

  Spiritual, Emotional, Class

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• I grew up in the suburbs, a calm suburb, without tension, with working-class and middle-class people mixed together.

  JR

  Class, People, Together

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• There's a false choice being put forward by some Democrats now. Either we double-down on our progressive values, or we go out there and talk about the middle class and the working class. I've never found them inconsistent. They go together.

  Joe Biden

  Class, Choices, Together

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Whole ideology of consumption almost to the point of religion. Whether it's the consumption of entertainment or the consumption around buying things, we're so caught up with our appetites that we don't have a clear distinction about what we need and what we just want. Plus, the decline of trade unions is a factor. When you have powerful unions, you have a working class that is politicized.

  Danny Glover

  Powerful, Class, Ideas

  Interview with Ed Rampell, progressive.org. February 8, 2012.

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