Thomas Paine Quotes

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

In 1750, 75 percent of people on the planet worked to support the top 25 percent.

Class structures are a luxury that we cannot afford.

The 19th-century pure capitalist model of society was a pyramid, concentrations of enormous wealth in a small group at the top, a not very big middle-class in the middle, and an enormous percentage of the population in the bottom part of the pyramid.

Inequality hardens society into a class system. Inequality divides us from one another... Inequality undermines democracy.

There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.

So long as there are nobles and commoners, the wealthy and the poor, those with power will be heard, and those without ignored. That's the world.

Inequality has the natural and necessary effect, under the present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.

I believe that Britain is becoming more class-conscious, and I quake at the very idea of Old Etonians ruling the world again.

Class still matters in Britain today.

There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.

Class - or the economic status of individuals - is evident in all societies, some very well stratified by a rigid caste system determined by birth.

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

I think there's really strong social stratification in South Asia.

The rich are richer, and the poor are poorer, in the city than elsewhere; and, as a rule, the greater are the riches of the rich and the poverty of the poor.

Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

In every commercial state, notwithstanding any pretension to equal rights, the exaltation of a few must depress the many.

It has often been said, that there is but one rank of men in America… we have no artificial distinctions of men into noblemen and commoners among us, but it ought to be remarked, that superior degrees of industry and capacity, and above all, commerce, have introduced inequality of property among us, and these have introduced natural distinctions of rank in Pennsylvania, as certain and general as the artificial distinctions of men in Europe. This will ever be the case while commerce exists in this country.

Allow not the abject to rule over and dominate them who are noble and worthy of honour, and suffer not the high-minded to be at the mercy of the contemptible and worthless, for this is what We observed upon Our arrival in the City (Constantinople), and to it We bear witness. We found among its inhabitants some who were possessed of an affluent fortune and lived in the midst of excessive riches, whilst others were in dire want and abject poverty. This ill beseemeth thy sovereignty, and is unworthy of thy rank…. strive thou to rule with equity among men

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

The rich man in his castle / The poor man at his gate, / God made them high or lowly. / And ordered their estate.

Is the great working class oppressed? Yes, undoubtedly it is. God has intended the great to be great and the little to be little.

If you have more rich people and more poor people and fewer people in the middle, what you lose is democracy.

What the poor did to the poor was the business of the poor, not the business of the proper people who ran the city.