W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

I can be influenced by what seems to me to be justice and good sense; but the class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.

There's always been a nasty strain of class prejudice ingrained in the condemnation of football's 'undeserving rich,' as if the working class is uniquely susceptible to being corrupted by money, and as if they deserve their wealth less than those born to it.

Every class is unfit to govern.

It is the corpse of the bourgeoisie that separates us. With us, it is that class that is the carrier of the chromosome of banality.

Charity has always been a expression of the guilty consciences of a ruling class.

It doesn't dawn on this depraved bourgeois world that this is positively a sin against all reason; that it is criminal lunacy to keep on drilling a born half-ape until people think they have made a lawyer out of him, while millions of members of the highest culture- race must remain in entirely unworthy positions; that it is a sin against the will of the Eternal Creator if His most gifted beings by the hundreds and hundreds of thousands are allowed to degenerate in the present proletarian morass, while Hottentots and Zulu Kaffirs are trained for intellectual professions.

Tough love is just the right phrase: love for the rich and privileged, tough for everyone else.

Passive resistance is a sport for gentleman (and ladies)-just like the pursuit of war, a heroic enterprise for the ruling classes but a grievous burden on the rest.

All the old history was written for the amusement of the ruling classes. The lower classes couldn't read, and their rulers didn't care about remembering what happened to them.

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

People with a culture of poverty suffer much less from repression than we of the middle class suffer and indeed, if I may make the suggestion with due qualification, they often have a hell of a lot more fun than we have.

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

It is one of history's ironies that Communism, advertised as a classless society, tended to breed a privileged class of feudal proportions.

From class consciousness to class hatred was but a step.

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

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 pathos of it all is that the America which is to be protected by a huge military force is not the America of the people, but that of the privileged class.

I was told that the privileged and the people formed two nations.

The very mudsills of society. We call them slaves. But I will not characterize that class at the North with that term; but you have it. It is there, it is everywhere, it is eternal.

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

And so class will some day supplant race in world affairs. Race war will then be merely a side-show to the gigantic class war which will be waged in the big tent we call the world.

The majority decision constitutionalizes a distinction between a red leather pouch and a paper bag that is necessarily based at least in some part on economic and class differences and perceptions.

The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist.

We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.

If I had to guess and put a name on it, I'd say that at some point, the drug war was as much a function of class and social control as it was of racism.