Bobbie Ann Mason Quotes

If you've got unemployment, low pay, that was just too bad. But that was the system. That was the sort of economy and philosophy against which I was fighting in the 1930s.

I am a coolie and the son of a coolie. I was born with the poor, and I am still poor. My sympathies have always been with the struggling mass.

The machines, which mark the triumph of science, become, by reason of the antithetic conditions of the social plexus, instruments which impoverish millions and millions of artisans and free peasants.

My family was mostly unemployed working class.

I'm from a working-class background, and I've experienced that worry of not having a job next week because the unions are going on strike. I know that because I don't come from a wealthy background.

I feel sympathy for the working class lad. I've always championed about ticket prices and try to equate that to people's salaries.

The controversies between the proletariat and the middle class had to be smoothed out and bridged over by each getting to know and understand the other.

I was in the heart and soul of Baltimore. I definitely felt a connection to the people. They're really hard-working people that want to have a better life. And I saw the struggle that exists there.

My sympathies have always been for working-class people.

There's a tradition in American fiction that is deadly serious and earnest - like the Steinbeckian social novel.

I grew up in a council house in a poor Scottish town. I came of age during the recession of the mid-1980s when unemployment in my area reached 40 per cent.

Certainly, the poverty, the discrimination, the episodic unemployment could not but strike an inquiring youngster: why did these exist, and what could we do about them.

The vast concourse of people who had assembled to witness the triumphant arrival of the successful travellers was of the lowest orders of mechanics and artisans, among whom great distress and a dangerous spirit of discontent with the government at that time prevailed.

It's hard for me to understand how working-class people support themselves.

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

I ain't a Communist necessarily, but I been in the red all my life.

Ever greater grows the mass of the proletariat, ever vaster the army of the unemployed, ever sharper the contrast between oppressors and oppressed, ever fiercer that war of classes between bourgeoisie and proletariat which divides modern society into two hostile camps and is the common characteristic of ever industrial country.

I am not given to Political Economy, but I can use my eyes. I have never seen the masters (mill owners) getting thin and haggard for want of food

I know of only three ways of living in society: one must be a beggar, a thief, or a wage earner.

Workers, the most absolutely necessary part of the whole social structure, without whose services none can either eat, or clothe, or shelter himself, are just the ones who get the least to eat, to wear, and to be housed withal — to say nothing of their share of the other social benefits which the rest of us are supposed to furnish, such as education and artistic gratification.

I'm not running from the left; I'm running from the bottom. I'm running in fierce advocacy for working-class New Yorkers.

The people who talk about the middle class aren't upholding their interests in the legislature.

In Manipur, mostly the top player's family background is very poor. I also come from a poor family, so we have to do more hard work to get money and a better life.

We're all born into whatever citizenship, circumstances, or class we happen to be born into. Immigrants and so many people in the working class work so hard every day for nickels and pennies and scraps to just barely get by and then realize that this precious life has been completely drained out of us.

I am a social realist writer.