Working Class Quotes - Page 4

• It doesn't make sense. [Republicans are] not for us. You're not for my values. We're working class people mostly and blue collar. We're your cops, we're your firemen, we're your carpenters and the things we need - we need to protect our unions, we need to protect our Medicare, we need to protect the working class person.

  John Leguizamo

  Blue, Class, People

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• Any measure that establishes legal charity on a permanent basis and gives it an administrative form thereby creates an idle and lazy class, living at the expense of the industrial and working class.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Class, Giving, Lazy

  Alexis de Tocqueville (2006). “Memoir on Pauperism: Does Public Charity Produce an Idle And Dependent Class of Society?”, p.26, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Liberals lost touch with working-class Americans because they never had to have a conversation about values with those voters; they could just rely on the courts to impose their views.

  David Brooks

  Class, Views, Voters

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• You must drop all your democracy. You must not believe in ''the people.'' One class is no better than another. It must be a case of Wisdom, or Truth. Let the working classes be working classes. That is the truth. There must be an aristocracy of people who have wisdom, and there must be a Ruler: a Kaiser: no Presidents and democracies.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Believe, Class, People

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• I didn't know how a working-class girl like me could possibly make a living in the art world

  Vivienne Westwood

  Girl, Art, Class

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• The working class of England take their deracination completely for granted. Disenchantment is the happy code that informs every byway of the underclass: service jobs, celebrity dreams, Lotto wins, leisured poverty on pre-crunch credit cards, it's all there, part of the story of an English people whose grandparents never had it so good.

  Andrew O'Hagan

  Dream, Jobs, Winning

  "The age of indifference" by Andrew O'Hagan, www.theguardian.com. January 9, 2009.

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• Where I grew up, learning was a collective activity. But when I got to school and tried to share learning with other students that was called cheating. The curriculum sent the clear message to me that learning was a highly individualistic, almost secretive, endeavor. My working class experience...was disparaged.

  Henry Giroux

  Cheating, Learning, School

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• All the world suffers from the usury of the Jews, their monopolies and deceit. They have brought many unfortunate peoples into a state of poverty, especially farmers, working-class people, and the very poor.

  Pope Clement VIII

  Class, People, Suffering

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• There's something retro about your persona. It's like the pre-World War II generation of reporters - those unpretentious, working-class guys who hung around saloons and used rough language. Now they've all been replaced with these effete Ivy League elitists who swarm over the current media. Nerds - utterly dull and insipid.

  Camille Paglia

  War, Class, Ivy

  "DRUDGE MATCH: Camille Paglia Gets Intimate With The Shady Wizard Of The Web". Interview with Matt Drudge, freerepublic.com. November 6, 2003.

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• In the States everyone aspires to be middle class. It's so engrained into the American psyche: As long as you work hard you're going to be rich some day. The history of Britain is that if you're born working class, you're going to stay there, although that is changing.

  Nigel Cole

  Hard Work, Class, Long

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• Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper. ... poetry has been the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women. A room of one's own may be a necessity for writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter, and plenty of time.

  Audre Lorde

  Art, Writing, Typewriters

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• If one fourth of the capital of a country were suddenly destroyed, or entirely transferred to a different part of the world, without any other cause occurring of a diminished demand for commodities, this scantiness of capital would certainly occasion great inconvenience to consumers, and great distress among the working classes; but it would be attended with great advantages to the remaining capitalists.

  Thomas Malthus

  Country, Class, Causes

  "Principles of political economy considered with a view to their practical application". Book by Thomas Malthus, Book II, Chapter I, "On The Progress of Wealth", Section X, p. 414, 1836.

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• In prosperous times the mercantile classes often realize fortunes, which go far towards securing them against the future; but unfortunately the working classes, though they share in the general prosperity, do not share in it so largely as in the general adversity.

  Thomas Malthus

  Adversity, Class, Realizing

  "Principles of political economy considered with a view to their practical application". Book by Thomas Robert Malthus, Book II, Chapter I, "On The Progress of Wealth", Section X, p. 437, 1836.

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• Michael Jackson was part of that tremendous wave in the ocean of human expression and it happened to be located first and foremost in Gary, Indiana, working class.

  Cornel West

  Ocean, Expression, Class

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Aline and I have travelled a very long, very hard road together, from our working class homes in rural Quebec to the palaces of London, Paris, Moscow, and Beijing. Politics was the route, public service the reward.

  Jean Chretien

  Home, Class, Paris

  Jean Chretien (2010). “My Years as Prime Minister”, p.408, Vintage Canada

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• the principles of political economy have elevated the working class above the place they ever filled before.

  Richard Cobden

  Class, Political, Principles

  Richard Cobden (1870). “Speeches on Questions of Public Policy”, p.373

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• Cockburn's personal history links him to the politics of the Communist Party, and there are still moments in his writing - debating the number of people estimated to have perished in Stalin's gulags, claiming that 'the Brezhnev years were a Golden Age for the Soviet working class', when aspects of his father's convictions can be glimpsed.

  Alexander Cockburn

  Father, Party, Writing

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• What would happen if capital succeeded in smashing the Republic of Soviets? There would set in an era of the blackest reaction in all the capitalist and colonial countries, the working class and the oppressed peoples would be seized by the throat, the positions of international communism would be lost.

  Joseph Stalin

  Country, Class, Would Be

  "On the Opposition" by J. V. Stalin, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1974.

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• The self-discipline of the Social Democracy is not merely the replacement of the authority of bourgeois rulers with the authority of a socialist central committee. The working class will acquire the sense of the new discipline, the freely assumed self-discipline of the Social Democracy, not as a result of the discipline imposed on it by the capitalist state, but by extirpating, to the last root, its old habits of obedience and servility.

  Rosa Luxemburg

  Self, Class, Roots

  "Revolutionary Socialist Organization". Book by Rosa Luxemburg, www.marxists.org. 1934.

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• There's a place in the world for the angry young man
  With his working class ties and his radical plans
  He refuses to bend, he refuses to crawl
  He's always at home with his back to the wall
  And he's proud of his scars and the battles he's lost
  And he struggles and bleeds as he hangs on the cross
  And he likes to be known as the angry young man.

  Billy Joel

  Wall, Struggle, Home

  "Prelude". Song by Billy Joel, 1976.

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• Friends told me that the latest trend, at least in Europe, is public sex. They showed me some clips, and they're terrifying. A couple enters a streetcar, half-full, simply takes a seat, undresses, and starts to do it. You can see from surprised faces that it's not staged. It's pure working-class suburb. But what's fascinating is that the people all look, and then they politely ignore it. The message is that even if you're together in public with people, it still counts as private space.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Sex, Couple, Europe

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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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• a great deal of the wealth at the top is built on the low-wage labor of the poor. Take Wal-Mart, our largest private employer and premiere exploiter of the working class. ... You think it's a coincidence that this union-busting low-wage retail empire happens to have generated a $65 billion family fortune?

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Thinking, Class, Retail

  Barbara Ehrenreich (2008). “Going to Extremes: Notes from a Divided Nation”, Granta Books (UK)

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• Working-class families in the north of England used to hear the 1611 Bible regularly at church and at home ... for us, the language didn't seem too difficult. I especially liked 'the quick and the dead' - you really get a feel for the difference if you live in a house with mice and a mousetrap.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Death, Home, Class

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• Being an MP is a good job, the sort of job all working-class parents want for their children -- clean, indoors and no heavy lifting. What could be nicer?

  Diane Abbott

  Jobs, Children, Mps

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