Bell Hooks Quotes

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

A lot of the things that we think of as being racial differences are really class differences in America.

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.

The thing that really struck me when I went to junior high was class. I grew up on a pretty poor street, but the school district I was in included some fine neighborhoods - so I got to know a couple of the kids from those places and went to their houses and experienced such culture shock.

Growing up on, say, the Upper East Side, you're so isolated. If you go to the Hamptons every weekend, you never talk to a construction worker, and the construction worker would never talk to you.

I didn't necessarily grow up in a trailer park, but there is a brief part of that in my life. So I can make fun of it a little bit. I'm not too much of an outsider, where I'm just making fun of someone.

And understand: class differences will not save you.

The difference between rich and poor is becoming more extreme, and as income inequality widens the wealth gap in major nations, education, health and social mobility are all threatened.

The Sixties was a time of breaking down class barriers, although I think class still exists today in some areas.

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

Unlike the Tory millionaires, I live in the heart of the proud working-class community of the Bogside in Derry.

I think class is still an issue in this country.

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

I hadn't found out yet that mankind consists of two very different races, the rich and the poor. It took me ... and plenty of other people . . . twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my class and ask the price of things before touching them, let alone setting my heart on them.

I don't know enough about the lower classes to write about them. I don't feel with them, and that could be regarded as a defect, a limitation of my imagination. I could put myself in their position, but not politically. The idea of writing a story or a book about somebody completely devoid of appreciation of anything I care about is completely foreign to me.

It was hard for an American to understand the contented acceptance by English men and women of permanent places in the lowest social rank.

I'm not one of these people who thinks everyone born into privilege should wear sack cloth and ashes. But it's something I wrestle with. I know a lot of people who live below the poverty level and have for a long time and it makes them uneasy to think they'll have to interact with people from different economic levels. Everyone has some sort of load put on them, whatever the circumstances they're born into.

Of all the hokum with which this country [America] is riddled, the most odd is the common notion that it is free of class distinctions.

Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.

In Caribbean there is no middle class: you're either rich or you're poor. And the ladder to success is not really a ladder, it's a chain; once you reach a certain level, you can't go back and you can only keep going forward.

The Class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.

I can assure you that the class system is alive and well and living in people's minds in England.

There is a working class - strong and happy - among both rich and poor: there is an idle class - weak, wicked, and miserable - among both rich and poor.

I think there's a certain sense of grounding that comes from not being a rich kid from a media-elite school.

Choice dependent on wealth; those are the Tory words.