Martin Sheen Quotes

The thing that really struck me when I went to junior high was class. I grew up on a pretty poor street, but the school district I was in included some fine neighborhoods - so I got to know a couple of the kids from those places and went to their houses and experienced such culture shock.

People talk about places like Mumbai as a tale of two cities, as if the rich and poor don't have anything to do with each other.

Growing up I always felt like I was living on the other side of the tracks. I knew the people on the other side had more resources, more money, happier families.

I grew up in poverty on the edge of a golf course. I saw how people lived on the other side of the tracks, the upper crust and the WASPs at the country club. We had chickens and pigs in our yards. We butchered every year. I'll never forget those things.

As a kid, my dad moved us to the upper town, which was in a higher class of people, and we would see the lower town below. Every day, we could see where we came from and where we were now.

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.

The poor live slow and hard; the rich, fast and easy. The rest of us shuffle along as we may.

The rich get richer and the poor get - children.

One thin's sure and nothing's surer The rich get richer and the poor get - children. In the meantime, In between time...

The extremes of opulence and of want are more remarkable, and more constantly obvious, in [Great Britain] than in any other place that I ever saw.

The chasm between rich and poor is becoming larger, and I think it's interesting terrain to talk about and expose.

Choice dependent on wealth; those are the Tory words.

Economic chasm between people is something that is of interest to me. And something that I used to write about even as a child. It's something I've revisited a few times in my writings.

Class envy is dangerous.

It's quite confusing being one of the less wealthy people at a posh place.

Growing up on, say, the Upper East Side, you're so isolated. If you go to the Hamptons every weekend, you never talk to a construction worker, and the construction worker would never talk to you.

We live in a very unequal society.

And understand: class differences will not save you.

Growing richer every day, for as rich and poor are relative terms, when the rich are growing poor, it is pretty much the same as if the poor were growing rich. Nobody is poor when the distinction between rich and poor is destroyed.

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.

My parents worked their tails off, but we weren't the poorest people in town. Some people I went to school with, you could tell they were dirt poor.

They cannot divide us by saying that you're middle class or you're lower class.

This erosion of the middle class is happening all over the place. The opening of a wider gap between rich and poor is always accompanied by such a process.

There was a time in my life when I was going in and out of houses that were extraordinarily different - from a working-class terrace in Northampton to the homes of friends who were really very wealthy. It was quite an odd position to be in, I realise looking back, and quite a nice one.

In fact, the class divide in the black community is now seen by some as a permanent aspect of our existence.