Jenny Shipley Quotes

You're looking at a middle-class guy. I am who I am.

The United States is a country where practically everybody considers himself middle class.

The working class of England today have no vision of society beyond the acquisitive - no version of themselves or their habits as anything other than transitional, on their way up or on their way out. The working class, at best, is a waiting room for people who aim to become middle class if possible.

The Porsche was just a vehicle to get to another place. I used it to change people's perceptions of me. I had grown up really middle class. USC was filled with elitists, richies who would go skiing every weekend. So I pretended like I was part of that world - to be accepted.

The charm of Britain has always been the ease with which one can move into the middle class.

There are no human beings whose sense of social identity is fully and exclusively given for themselves by the membership of the working (or any other) class

In modern civilized communities... the members of each stratum accept as their ideal of decency the scheme of life in vogue in the next higher stratum.

We were working class, and you don't lose that. Later on, I bolted on media middle class... and now people like me are in the House of Lords.

I think you will find me to be a typical middle-class American.

I'm not posh or common, I'm in between.

We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.

The middle class is so funny, it's the class I know best, and it's the class where you find the most pretension, so that's what makes the middle classes so funny.

I am hard-core middle class.

I'm always represented as a bit of a class warrior - a bit Down With Men and Down With Middle-Class People. Whereas I'm actually very fond of men and am middle-class. I even went to boarding school in Perthshire.

For the better part of my life, I was always trying to manufacture somehow what I would consider 'living.' Because I grew up sort of upper-middle class and I didn't relate so much to that as a life, and I wanted to really find 'living.'

More and more surveys in the US are indicating a change in values taking place among consumers, who become more concerned about quality of life, food, health and the environment.

One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.

I'm not a bourgeois person, never will be.

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.

Americans sometimes say to me that they have no class system themselves. All human beings have class systems. It can be based on a different thing in a different country, but the thing about breeding is, you can't buy it. You can't buy class.

Everyone has class, one class or another.

My upbringing was middle-class but my parents' families were both working-class so I had this odd combination of working-class background but in a privileged position.

The intellectual is a middle-class product; if he is not born into the class he must soon insert himself into it, in order to exist. He is the fine nervous flower of the bourgeoisie.

Lots of middle class people are running around pretending to be Cockney.

I had an Edinburgh, middle-class childhood and a public school education.