Dalton Trumbo Quotes

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

The working class of England today have no vision of society beyond the acquisitive - no version of themselves or their habits as anything other than transitional, on their way up or on their way out. The working class, at best, is a waiting room for people who aim to become middle class if possible.

The American middle class always wants to be upper class and is scared to death of being lower class. It's a highly mobile group of people. They're not like the people that want to be shopkeepers forever, have always been shopkeepers and want always to be shopkeepers. These people mostly are insulted by being called middle class.

My parents came from working-class, small-peasant, farm-labourer backgrounds and had made the grade during the fascist years; my father came out of the army as a captain.

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.

Everything is about class in England, whether it's upper, lower or middle. Why should that be?

I didn't necessarily grow up in a trailer park, but there is a brief part of that in my life. So I can make fun of it a little bit. I'm not too much of an outsider, where I'm just making fun of someone.

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

My parents grew up working class, but in that way that working class families do, they spent a fortune on education to better me.

I grew up in a working-class family, so I guess you could say I write from what I know.

The one class you do not belong to and are not proud of at all is the lower-middle class. No one ever describes himself as belonging to the lower-middle class.

There are no human beings whose sense of social identity is fully and exclusively given for themselves by the membership of the working (or any other) class

I was brought up in a strong working-class community by working-class parents and relations until I was 18, and that's what I really am. Now all sorts of things have been added, but that's what I am.

People have to recognise I'm a working-class lad. Forget what I've done and where I've been. I'm a working-class lad. I've come from nothing and I've not forgotten that.

You can't kid the public. When they see me they see I'm just a kid off a council estate - no more, no less.

The thing is with boxers we don't come from Cambridge and places like that, we come from council estates. So in boxing it's very, very hard.

I think Ant and I were ambitious because of where we come from. Both of us are from working-class families on council estates in Newcastle.

One of the nicest things about receiving the accolade of Australia is that, previously, the knighthood was historically for what was termed 'the establishment.' Now, this is an accolade for somebody who comes from a working-class background. Someone whose father was a truck driver and decided to buy a truck.

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.

Groups that rose from poverty to prosperity seldom did so by having their own racial or ethnic leaders to follow.

Several people, not just reviewers, took me to task for writing about what they called the working classes - something I've been doing for 40 years. I thought that was contemptible - what do they want to do, ghettoize the working class as a subject? Can you only write about your own class? I've written about royalty, am I not allowed to do that?

Joanna points her camera at a section of society unused to having cameras pointed at it. But I don't know about categorizing them in terms of class; I'm a bit wary of that. My dad is the son of a shipbuilder.

The conclusion you can draw from these characteristics is that you have an uneven development of class activity and an uneven development of class consciousness in the working class.

There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.

I have no relationship to the French bourgeoisie. I don't like connecting with them.