Jose Ortega y Gasset Quotes

No real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist.

No writer before the middle of the 19th century wrote about the working classes other than as grotesque or as pastoral decoration. Then when they were given the vote certain writers started to suck up to them.

A populist is someone who sees politics from an economic perspective rather than an ideological perspective. I’m a populist. The only thing that really matters is who is gets screwed and who is doing the screwing.

More often than not, when someone affirms their privilege or points out the privilege of others, they do so in a way that betrays an utter cluelessness about that very privilege. “Privilege talk” is regularly accompanied by hypocritical accusations, outrage over trivialities, and uncritical hatred of important modern institutions, which are attitudes that would neither exist nor be tolerated but for the privilege that we all enjoy. When someone says, “Speaking from a position of privilege,” it’s a safe bet that what follows will display an indifference to their privilege (or even an implication that it’s some kind of burden), which, of course, is an attitude only a very privileged person could hold.

From class consciousness to class hatred was but a step.

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.

Marriages are so complicated that no one person is the culprit. But, I am really interested in class without really realizing that I am. It's more the manifestations of different classes that interest me.

Necessity is the constant scourge of the lower classes, ennui of the higher ones.

In the Conservative Party we have no truck with outmoded Marxist doctrine about class warfare. For us it is not who you are, who your family is or where you come from that matters, but what you are and what you can do for your country that counts.

The kind of people I myself represent in parliament; salary earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers and so on, these are, in a political and economic sense, the middle class. They are for the most part unorganised and unselfconscious.

By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.

The university and in a general way, all teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class.

History is only a tiresome repetition of one story. Persons and classes have sought to win possession of the power of the State in order to live luxuriously out of the earnings of others

I'm just seeing as I grow older, and hopefully wiser, that a lot of things I see from a race perspective are class problems too, so I should be advocating for all.

A smaller government reflecting the needs of the middle class and poor is superior to a big government reflecting the needs of the privileged and powerful.

All fear of 'offensive' speech is bourgeois and reactionary. Historically, profane or bawdy language was common in both the upper and the lower classes, who lived together in rural areas amid the untidy facts of nature. Notions of propriety and decorum come to the fore in urbanized periods ruled by an expanding middle class, which is obsessed with cleanliness, respectability, and conformism.

Donald Trump has a lot of supporters with a deep hatred of Hillary Clinton and access to incredibly powerful lethal weapons.

Most armies are in fact run by their sergeants - the officers are there just to give things a bit of tone and prevent warfare becoming a mere lower-class brawl.

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.

What is economics? A science invented by the upper class in order to acquire the fruits of the labor of the underclass

Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid.

The wage-earning class the world over are the victims of society.

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.

The natural tendency of representative government, as of modern civilisation, is towards collective mediocrity: and this tendency is increased by all reductions and extensions of the franchise, their effect being to place the principal power in the hands of classes more and more below the highest level of instruction in the community.

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