Charles Lamb Quotes

The one class you do not belong to and are not proud of at all is the lower-middle class. No one ever describes himself as belonging to the lower-middle class.

Uncertainty and fears of social decline and exclusion have reached the middle class in many societies.

In the indications of female poverty there can be no disguise. No woman dresses below herself from caprice.

Old maids like the houseless and unemployed poor, should not ask for a place and an occupation in the world: the demand disturbs the happy and the rich.

A common measure of poverty is how much money you have in relation to other people - that is useful as far as it goes, but that excludes the case of, say, a hunter in the rainforest who has no money but is not poor. And there can be a number of people with money but who can consider themselves unwanted or invisible or estranged from society.

Poverty is the frontier we have to be able to cross.

Footage of people camped out at Best Buy or elsewhere is not remotely a celebration. Rather, it's a reminder of just how economically distressed a large percentage of our populace is.

I was not born into a rich family or a family of government officials.

Cultivating literature as I do upon a little oatmeal, and driving, when in a position to be driven at all, in that humble vehicle, the 'bus, I have had, perhaps, exceptional opportunities for observing their mutual position and behaviour; and it is very peculiar.

There is a process of social and of political differentiation going on in the real working class all the time.

I am open-eyed about what poverty does to people.

Poverty is relative, and the lack of food and of the necessities of life is not necessarily a hardship. Spiritual and social ostracism, the invasion of your privacy, are what constitute the pain of poverty.

And understand: class differences will not save you.

You cannot sift out the poor from the community. The poor are indispensable to the rich.

Bums are the well-to-do of this day. They didn't have as far to fall.

Poverty is the parent of revolution.

There's no scandal like rags, nor any crime so shameful as poverty.

Poor men's words have little weight.

Poverty causes crime.

Problems of persistent poverty cannot be addressed unless they are acknowledged.

Poverty is a corrosive brew, capable of eating away at the underpinnings of democratic life itself.

… there are a great many people who not only can make no budget but can barely manage to exist with their families on what they earn from day to day

To one American family out of four, the idea of capitalism as a benign system of comfort, dignity, and personal advance is only a myth, or worse, a bitter mockery.

A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls.

I was by far the least popular of the Blue Collar crew when we started. There was a definite pecking order, and everybody knew it.