Stephen Colbert Quotes

You can't define what's middle class, what is wealthy, what is poor.

Even when uttered by Democrats, "middle class" often sounds like a mealymouthed way of saying, "Us, and not them," where "them" includes poor people, snake handlers and those with pierced tongues.

Look, there is a sort of old view about class which is a very simplistic view that we have got the working class, the middle class and the upper class, I think it is more complicated than that.

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

The interesting thing about class warfare is that it's only class warfare if it's up, not down. If you talk about welfare cheats or something, that's not class warfare because it's down; you have to talk about rich people before it's class warfare.

The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else,and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.

The most efficient way of rendering the poor harmless is to teach them to want to imitate the rich.

The greatest trick the rich - and their cheerleaders on the right - ever pulled was convincing the world that class didn't exist. Out here in the real world, it is more real and more rigid than it has been for a century.

Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.

When I look out [the window] at the big houses on either side of the road, it's obvious we've entered the rich side of town. Poor people don't post signs like NO TRESPASSING, PRIVATE DRIVE, PRIVATE PROPERTY, MONITORED BY CAMERA SURVEILLANCE. I should know because I've been poor my entire life, and the only person I know who ever posted a sign like these is my friend...and he actually stole the sign off a rich guy's yard.

Do not mistake a crowd of big wage-earners for the leisure class.

The middle class, in the white population, encompasses a wide swath.

The poor generally follow behavior patterns established by the rich.

That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation.

Most Americans seem to be stuck in the economic strata to which they were born.

I am not biased against the rich because they are rich, but the most lively people are those without money who would like to have some

In verity we are the poor. This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands and thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of a stable upper class that is responsible for much of the vulgarity of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this deficiency?

I identify with the bottom of the pyramid, because, outside of having money, I am at the bottom of the pyramid.

For Henry James, class was 'the essentially hierarchial plan of English society' which was 'the great and ever-present fact to the mind of a stranger; there is hardly a detail of life that does not in some degree betray it'.

The middle has not enough class that I think about the middle class.

Being poor is like being a child. Being rich is like being an adult: you get to do whatever you want. Everyone is nice when they have to be; rich people are nice when they feel like it.

More important than anything else is for Americans to wise up to class warfare demagoguery and reject the politics of envy.

As the classes in modern life come together, we have become much more intensely class conscious. It's a very curious thing. But I deal with human beings with whom I've come in contact and have had a chance to closely observe. Their upper-classness is not a matter of particular fascination for me.

There are more differences between poor people than between middle-class people.