Vivienne Westwood Quotes

I am struck again by the fact that as soon as a working man gets an official post in the Trade Union or goes into Labour politics, he becomes middle-class whether he will or no. ie. by fighting against the bourgeoisie he becomes a bourgeois. The fact is that you cannot help living in the manner appropriate and developing the ideology appropriate to your income.

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.

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 didn't finish college; my parents didn't graduate college - we didn't have a pot to piss in. I'm from Newark, New Jersey. I had to work. I didn't think it would be possible for me to be an artist without having a job.

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.

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

I'm every bourgeois nightmare - a Cockney with intelligence and a million dollars.

I still consider myself working class. I know my circumstances have changed dramatically since I was growing up back in Birkenhead.

One of the basic tenets of the working class is you want to get out of the working class.

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.

I went to UCLA and studied studio art. I thought I was going to be a gallery painter, photographer, or ceramicist. Then, when I graduated, that didn't happen immediately. I didn't suddenly get solo shows in Chelsea, and I realized that is actually kind of difficult to break into.

My parents climbed their way to the middle class.

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

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.

To me, the term 'middle-class' connotes a safe, comfortable, middle-of-the road policy. Above all, our language is 'middle-class' in the middle of our road. To drive it to one side or the other or even off the road, is the noblest task of the future.

The galleries are simply corporations in the art world - "Here's a million dollars for this latest piece of crap" - but I'm not about to go along with the gallery system.

This business of the working class is on its way out I think. After all, aren't I working class? I work jolly hard, I can tell you.

Being Black and poor is, I think, radically different from being anything else and poor. Poor, to most Blacks, is a state of mind. Those who accept it are poor; those who struggle are middle class.

I know what it feels like to be in that middle and lower-middle class, and feel like the culture is passing you by; it translates into a great sense of personal frustration that can then morph into political frustration.

I never expected to sell my art. It wasn't like today where you come out of art school and they promise you a future. Now it's almost regulated in a way. When we came out of school, we just wanted to make art that'd blow your hair back and do it for sport. There was no commercial possibility that we saw.

Business Art is the step that comes after Art.

A working class hero is something to be.

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.