George Orwell Quotes

I was born into no true class and it was my decision early in life to insinuate myself into the middle class like a spy so that I would have an advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission, and to have taken my disguises too seriously.

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.

I would describe myself as having a healthy income, but I sure wouldn't describe the son of a postmaster and an encyclopedia saleswoman as upper class, by any stretch of the imagination. I would describe myself as decidedly middle class. I think I'm extremely fortunate.

We don't use the term 'working class' here because it's a taboo term. You're supposed to say 'middle class,' because it helps diminish the understanding that there's a class war going on.

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.

If you asked anybody in my family, they would have very stridently proclaimed themselves middle class. My mother and father were separated, so he doesn't count.

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

I was not from a middle-class family at all. I did not have middle-class possessions and what have you. But I had middle-class parents who gave me what was needed to survive in society.

The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I've met, and think they're incredibly witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.

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

In the States everyone aspires to be middle class. It's so engrained into the American psyche: As long as you work hard you're going to be rich some day. The history of Britain is that if you're born working class, you're going to stay there, although that is changing.

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

My parents were decent, aspirant first-generation middle class. They read 'Reader's Digest', listened to classical music; my grandparents had a bust of Stalin on the mantelpiece. The kids of that generation were terrified of being below par, class-wise.

I come from a blue collar background.

It's a very working-class thing, to get where you want and then not feel worthy.

I can tell you I'm pretty middle-class.

I'm a proud product of the American middle class.

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

I didn't know how a working-class girl like me could possibly make a living in the art world

A working class hero is something to be.

Historically and politically, the petit-bourgeois is the key to the century. The bourgeois and proletariat classes have become abstractions: the petite-bourgeoisie, in contrast, is everywhere, you can see it everywhere, even in the areas of the bourgeois and the proletariat, what's left of them.

... it's hard to be politically conscious and upwardly mobile at the same time.

There's a lot of people talking about elitism and all of that.Yes, I went to Princeton and Harvard, but the lens through which I see the world is the lens that I grew up with. I am the product of a working class upbringing.

I went to a middle-class school, but my background is working class. I got the best of both worlds, I saw both classes, so I have a pretty fair idea of how people live and why they do it.

In England, there are only two things to be, basically: You are either for the labor movement or for the capitalist movement. Either you become a right-wing Archie Bunker if you are in the class I am in, or you become an instinctive socialist, which I was.