Mary McCarthy Quotes

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

There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.

There is a world-wide conflict between capital and labour, and the poor envy the rich.

Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.

Choose equality …. Inequality has the natural and necessary effect … of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.

Eat with the rich, but go to the play with the poor, who are capable of joy.

The middle has not enough class that I think about the middle class.

More important than anything else is for Americans to wise up to class warfare demagoguery and reject the politics of envy.

The interesting thing about class warfare is that it's only class warfare if it's up, not down. If you talk about welfare cheats or something, that's not class warfare because it's down; you have to talk about rich people before it's class warfare.

Of all the hokum with which this country [America] is riddled, the most odd is the common notion that it is free of class distinctions.

[The word class has] been excised from the acceptable political vocabulary, except in the limited usage of right-wingers when they accuse liberals of inciting 'class warfare' - a charge that means it's okay for rich people to vote their economic interests but it's not all right to encourage poor people to do so.

Fred Astaire represented the aristocracy, I represented the proletariat.

The greatest trick the rich - and their cheerleaders on the right - ever pulled was convincing the world that class didn't exist. Out here in the real world, it is more real and more rigid than it has been for a century.

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.

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.

Class is a way of looking at society that divides people into different categories based on how much money they're willing to make.

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

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

America is about class. To pretend that it isn't is very ignorant. No society has ever existed without some kind of a ruling class.

The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.

None of us should be ashamed to speak of our class power or lack of it. Overcoming fear, even the fear of being immodest, and acting courageously to bring issues of class- especially radical standpoints – into the discourse of blackness is a gesture of militant defiance, one that runs counter to bourgeois insistence that we think of “money” in particular and class in general as private matters.

We lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the 'lower classes' when we mean humanity minus ourselves.

Look, there is a sort of old view about class which is a very simplistic view that we have got the working class, the middle class and the upper class, I think it is more complicated than that.

Class still matters in Britain today.

Texas has arguably the most extreme separation between the well off and everyday people in the United States.