Charles Horton Cooley Quotes

An imbalance between the rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.

If you have extremes of haves and have-nots where the gap keeps growing, the have-nots group together and create social disorder, as they can't see a way out of their situation.

And understand: class differences will not save you.

It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.

We are undemocratic, then, in our religion, as is proved by our efforts to “raise” the poor.

You can have class in the ghetto and trash in the White House.

I think class is still an issue in this country.

I think America has dealt with - I mean, this is simplistic, and of course I don't live in America - but the impression I get is that there is not a kind of obligation to dislike those who are better off or be frightened of those who are worse off.

Colour is not the issue in America; class is.

When inequality gets too extreme, then it becomes useless for growth, and it can even become bad because it tends to lead to high perpetuation of inequality over time and low mobility.

Growing richer every day, for as rich and poor are relative terms, when the rich are growing poor, it is pretty much the same as if the poor were growing rich. Nobody is poor when the distinction between rich and poor is destroyed.

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.

They cannot divide us by saying that you're middle class or you're lower class.

In fact, the class divide in the black community is now seen by some as a permanent aspect of our existence.

It's not white versus black any more, it's haves versus have-nots. Unless the black middle-classes unite to promote the interests of the black underclass, tension between them is inevitable. What we, the black middle class have to do, is think of a strategy to avert that.

The forces in a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

Italy is divided between us and them, rich and poor, north and south, young and old, employed and unemployed.

There are huge divorces and divides and chasms in black America between the have-gots and the have-nots, between the monied and the poor, between the educated and the non-educated. And there are huge and growing chasms daily. And I want to say that it's not simply about generation. It's about genre.

Social inequality … divides society into two classes -- the wage-slaves and the grabbers of capital

Elites always tell poor people, “Work hard and play by the rules.”

The needs of the poor take priority over the desires of the rich

Society is composed of two great classes-those who have more dinners than appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners.

The middle class serves as a bridge between the haves and the have-nots. If it goes, so goes political stability.

There are no great lords who possess everything and a herd of people who have nothing

Poor men's words have little weight.