Working Class Quotes - Page 17

• I project that this next election - the 2016 election - if it is about anything thematically, it is going to be about that sense of rage and displacement among white working-class voters.

  Joy-Ann Reid

  Class, White, Voters

  Source: www.msnbc.com

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• It's just about bein' yourself...even when you're on the dole, it's about your leather jacket. Music is the last refuge of the working class, along with football...in fact, gigs and riots are the only things left.

  Pete Doherty

  Football, Leather Jackets, Class

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• Fifty years ago, great schools like the University of California and the City University of New York - as well as many state colleges - were tuition free. Today college is unaffordable for many working class families. For the sake of our economy and millions of Americans, we must make higher education more affordable.

  Bernie Sanders

  New York, School, College

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• We are moving in exactly the wrong direction in higher education. Forty years ago, tuition in some of the great American public universities and colleges was virtually free. Today, the cost is unaffordable for many working class families. Higher education must be a right for all - not just wealthy families.

  Bernie Sanders

  Moving, College, Years

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• As a working-class actor, leaving school with no qualifications, being a printer and then becoming an actor and then working with people who to a certain extent had had a leg up. I never had that advantage. It's less an artistic need to express myself and more a need to prove myself.

  Eddie Marsan

  School, Class, People

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• If Hillary can't win the nomination - and it's clearly very, very hard for her - she's basically a stalking horse for McCain. She's preparing the demographic ground for McCain, by getting white working-class Democrats used to (if you will) not voting for Obama.

  Rich Lowry

  Horse, Winning, Class

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• I was a working-class macho guy who was used to being served and Yoko didn't buy that. From the day I met her, she demanded equal time, equal space, equal rights.

  John Lennon

  Rights, Class, Space

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• Donald Trump is accomplishing getting, particularly white, working-class voters, who are turned off by their own party.

  Joy-Ann Reid

  Party, Class, White

  Source: www.nbcnews.com

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• We did phenomenally well with young people. I think we did well with working class people.

  Bernie Sanders

  Thinking, Class, People

  "Meet the Press" with Chuck Todd, www.nbcnews.com. February 21, 2016.

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• The areas in which I teach are working-class history and African-American Studies and at its best the critical study of whiteness often grows out of those areas. The critical examination of whiteness, academic and not, simply involves the effort to break through the illusion that whiteness is natural, biological, normal, and not crying out for explanation.

  David Roediger

  Break Through, Class, Effort

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• People don't work in factories, [they aren't] big muscular guys. The working class is flabby because they're sitting in front of a computer all day, but it's still their labor being extracted.

  Eric Drooker

  Class, People, Guy

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I lived in a little working-class town that had no black neighborhoods at all - one high school. We all played together. Everybody was either somebody from the South or an immigrant from East Europe or from Mexico. And there was one church, and there were four elementary schools. And we were all, pretty much until the end of the war, very, very poor.

  Toni Morrison

  War, School, Europe

  "'I Regret Everything': Toni Morrison Looks Back On Her Personal Life". "Fresh Air", www.npr.org. April 20, 2015.

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• Ultimately, imperialism made even the British working classes suffer. This is a point which the British working classes found quite difficult to swallow, but they did, actually.

  Amartya Sen

  Class, Suffering, Imperialism

  Interview with David Barsamian, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. September 29, 2011.

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• I'm a product of state schools. I had a working-class family. We had no books. I was the first to go to college. But I didn't really think about it, or about making money. I was just going to be an artist, and I've been fortunate. I've never had to work for anybody nor have I had to write for money. Maybe that's another reason that I've been able to be productive. I haven't had to use my writing to make a living.

  T.C. Boyle

  Book, Writing, School

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Marriage equality is a very middle-class issue and voting rights is a very working-class issue. If you do not vote, who are you speaking for? Who will be the next Fannie Lou Hamer? If not you or someone you know, then who?

  Darryl Pinckney

  Rights, Class, Issues

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• My mother was a housewife. Both from - well, my father was from a farming family, agricultural family in the north of England. And my mother came from a very working class.

  David Bowie

  Mother, Father, Class

  "David Bowie On The Ziggy Stardust Years: 'We Were Creating The 21st Century In 1971'". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. 2002.

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• We will do well when young people, when working-class people come out. We do not do well when the voter turnout is not large. We did not do as good a job as I had wanted to bring out a large turnout.

  Bernie Sanders

  Jobs, Class, People

  "Meet the Press" with Chuck Todd, www.nbcnews.com. February 21, 2016.

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• I was a working-class kid from Boston. But I never lost my accent because I felt like that was what I was doing. I didn't have to perform Woody Guthrie like Bob Dylan did in the '60s, I just had to make myself be Eileen Myles and let that be my shield.

  Eileen Myles

  Kids, Boston, Class

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• My working-class Italian-American parents didn't go to school, there were no books in the house.

  Martin Scorsese

  Book, School, Italian

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• I still remember how upset I was in the aftermath of President Obama's election, where people in Republican leadership didn't say that, "Hey, I want to focus on the issues and values of our country," but, "My number one goal is to see that Barack Obama is not a two term president." That to me is outrageous. I would never do that. My number one goal is to fight to protect poor people, ethnic and religious minorities, working class folks.

  Cory Booker

  Country, Religious, Fighting

  Source: www.nbcnews.com

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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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• If there ever was a poet for the working class Billy Joe Shaver and Merle Haggard would be my nomination

  David Allan Coe

  Class, Would Be, Nominations

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• The hope that poverty and ignorance may gradually be extinguished derives indeed much support from the steady progress of the working classes during the 19th century.

  Alfred Marshall

  Philosophy, Ignorance, Class

  Alfred Marshall (1977). “Principles of Economics: An Introductory Volume”

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• It's very well known that the Republicans have problems with minorities. The Democrats have big problems with white people. Obama only got 39% of the vote. He only got 36% of the working-class white people.

  Bill Maher

  Class, White, People

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• If emancipation of the working classes requires their fraternal conncurrence, how are they to fulfill that great mission with a foreign policy in pursuit of criminal designs, playing upon national prejudices, and squandering in piratical wars the people's blood and treasure? It was not the wisdom of the ruling classes, but the heroic resistance to their criminal folly by the working classes of England, that saved the west of Europe from plunging headlong into an infamous crusade for the propagation of slavery on the other side of the Atlantic.

  Karl Marx

  War, Blood, Europe

  Karl Marx, David McLellan (2000). “Karl Marx: Selected Writings”, p.581, Oxford University Press, USA

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