Gore Vidal Quotes

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

We all like to think of ourselves as a standard, and I can see that it is genuinely difficult for the English middle class to suppose that the working class is not desperately anxious to become just like itself. I am afraid this must be unlearned.

None of us should be ashamed to speak of our class power or lack of it. Overcoming fear, even the fear of being immodest, and acting courageously to bring issues of class- especially radical standpoints – into the discourse of blackness is a gesture of militant defiance, one that runs counter to bourgeois insistence that we think of “money” in particular and class in general as private matters.

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.

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

In England we only make films about the working class or the aristocracy.

Choose equality …. Inequality has the natural and necessary effect … of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.

Our nation’s political spectrum is not left to right, but top to bottom. People can locate themselves on this rich-to-poor pole for this is not a theoretical positioning: It’s based on our actual experience with money and power.

I think the working-class part of me comes out. Sometimes the people who have the loudest mouths are upper-class, upper-middle-class. The quietest are often working-class people, people who are broke. There is a fear of losing whatever it is that you have. I come from that background.

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?

Social class means a hell of a lot and upper class people - no matter how well [Franklin ] Roosevelt did - it was stylish to hate him.

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

Were Kennedy not a millionaire, illiterate and ignorant, then he would obviously understand that you cannot revolt against the peasants.

Fred Astaire represented the aristocracy, I represented the proletariat.

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

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.

I'm a working-class person, working with class.

I've never felt entirely comfortable in high society. I'm more comfortable talking to the bar staff than the super-rich. I don't really get what makes them tick.

Democrats don't relate to middle-class people.

The working classes in England were always sentimental, and the Irish and Scots and Welsh. The upper-class English are the stiff-upper-lipped ones. And the middle class. They're the ones who are crippled emotionally because they can't move up, and they're desperate not to move down.

I think the class divide is going to change. I think a lot more working class people are going to get published. It is really class ridden, literature.

English people are so trapped in this class paradigm.

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

If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life.

I've never written nearly as much about place as people seem to think I do. I just write about class.