Richard Jefferies Quotes

It would astonish if not amuse the older citizens to learn that I (a strange, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working at ten dollars per month) have been put down as the candidate of pride, wealth, and aristocratic family distinction.

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.

My family was mostly unemployed working class.

One of the most considerable advantages the great have over their inferiors is to have servants as good as themselves.

I was born in a poor family, a lower middle class family. My father was a clerk in the forest department. I was very bad at studies. I was not very good at sports, also.

I don't think the elite class is only speaking the good English.

My sympathies have always been for working-class people.

I come from a very working-class background.

The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I've met, and think they're incredibly witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.

I come from a very working-class background.

I could actually care less about the poor. We have some living near us, and pee-yew. They are always coming and going to their three or four jobs at all hours of the day and night. Annoying!

Nowadays nothing but money counts: a fortune brings honors, friendships; the poor man everywhere lies low.

'No Sweetness Here' is the kind of old-fashioned social realism I have always been drawn to in fiction, and it does what I think all good literature should: It entertains you.

Of course the lower classes have always felt downtrodden and aspired to a better life. But there is this theory that people respond to a class structure in England - there was a time when people knew who they were and knew whom they served and as long as management wasn't abusive, it was a good life for people.

My background's working class. My parents had to work to make ends meet. We don't come from any sense of privilege.

The civility which money will purchase, is rarely extended to those who have none.

Financial hardships were rough on us, even though Mom had a good job at G.M.

To be poor and independent is very nearly an impossibility.

The working poor is a growing population in this country.

The working class’s share in the national product is constantly diminishing – there is not a shade of doubt about that. The working class is becoming poorer not only relatively, but absolutely too; its income, far from increasing in the same progression as those of other classes in society, is falling; the real wages of the modern proletarian (the quantity of consumer goods falling to his share) are less than the worker’s pay was five hundred years ago

‘The laboring poor’ is a detestable, canting phrase.

In some countries the laboring poor were called freemen and in others they were called slaves but that the difference of the state was imaginary only…. the condition of the laboring poor in most countries, that of the fishermen particularly in the Northern states, is as abject as that of slaves.

There’s been an economic war going on in this country and the middle class and the poor have been losing..

I come from the lower middle class, originally. We didn't have anything.

Eccentricity is usually owned by middle-class and upper-class people. If you are working class and eccentric, then you're just mad.