Bell Hooks Quotes

Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about.

I grew up poor, black, and working class.

I'm not sticking up for white kids - I'm going to have a barrage of hate mail - but it's true. If you're poor, you're really poor.

It is no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.

Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes.

The real difference between democracy and oligarchy is poverty and wealth. Wherever men rule by reason of their wealth, whether they be few or many, that is an oligarchy, and where the poor rule, that is a democracy.

Poor people who had escaped from poverty as I had, feared it, hated it and fled from it all their lives. Those born rich could afford to be touched by it.

There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor.

I am upset and completely disappointed in the government, the millionaires and billionaires in the U.S. See what's happening to the country? Look at all the health problems, the economy, the recession and crime.

The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I've met, and think they're incredibly witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.

If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life.

It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.

A recession is predominantly for the middle class. Where I come from, the majority of people have always lived in a recession.

I think the state has some serious problems. Just look at the layoffs going on across the state, not just in Chicago. It affects the middle class. It pushes people down.

I'm working class, my family was working class, and we have struggled the same way our neighbors here in San Francisco have struggled.

The rich don’t want the poor to get ahead of them.

The poor don’t know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.

The poor generally follow behavior patterns established by the rich.

The working poor is a growing population in this country.

Pauperism is the hospital of the labor army.

God help the rich, the poor can look after themselves

The poor are little folks living on little lands who want what we already have.

I did not grow up with a silver spoon in my mouth.

I come from the lower middle class, originally. We didn't have anything.

In the neighborhood where I grew up, it was a rough neighborhood - well, not rough, but it certainly wasn't upper class or anything. But I remember hearing things like, 'The little man just can't get ahead.' And if you start to believe that, then you know what? You don't get ahead.