Kevin Barry Quotes

The working class is very under-represented in politics, literature, and everywhere else.

In Hungary the system … provided two real and important privileges for the ruling classes: The one was the exclusion of the middle classes of the non-Magyar races from all government offices and from the local county administrations, as well as from the higher spheres of cultural life. The other was the restricted suffrage, exercised with open balloting, which gave full opportunity to the dominating classes to nullify not only the political action of the national minorities but also of the pure Magyar landless peasantry and working classes.

There are a lot of communities within the Asian Pacific Islander umbrella that are predominantly more working-class or lower class, and those stories haven't been told yet, so my hope is that we see the gamut of perspectives.

Eccentricity is usually owned by middle-class and upper-class people. If you are working class and eccentric, then you're just mad.

Christ didn't choose the rich to preach the doctrine; he choose 12 poor ignorant workers - that is, he chose the proletariat of the times.

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.

There is a lot more opportunity now, and I welcome all the conversations we are having about diversity, about women and about class... I come from a very working-class background, and I think the class thing is still probably more tricky.

My family wasn't involved in the college. They were more of just your 'white trash' kind of family. And so I have that kind of background, but I always kind of aspired to be something else, and I made a lot of different friends over the years that were passing through.

We never see the fancy schools with the blazers and ties in films about Africa! But, in fact, we too have class and elitism.

I'm not a fan of the working class being mocked, including by some of our famous writers - even those who came from it.

We concentrate too much on ethnic diversity and not enough on class. It's dead important to represent loads of different cultures. But what the BBC doesn't do enough of is thinking about getting people from more working-class backgrounds.

I come from a lower-middle-class family and used to stay in a housing board colony.

Having grown up a trailer park kid on welfare and food stamps, becoming jaded is impossible, although now I make a good living, which I'm not ashamed of; when you've been poor, it never leaves you.

There's a part of me that's trying to represent kids that don't necessarily have the same outlet that I have. I'm not looking towards a new demographic. I'm looking towards the demographic I came from.

We have a myth of the classless society. You won't hear an American politician apart from Bernie Sanders talk about the working class. We are all middle class, apparently.

So often in English fiction, people are either upper-class twits, or else they're knockabouts, less than human.

There's such a wealth of literature from the 18th century and 19th century, George Eliot... Jane Austen... that's all about a genteel high society, relationships, all of that stuff. There wasn't ever really, apart from Dickens, a literary evocation of working class life.

Working-class actors have no identity. Our identity is playing every single poor person on 'Game Of Thrones.'

I come from the working-class area of Stockholm, and I grew up with Serbian and Chilean people.

I'm trying to make pop records for the middle-class, lower-middle-class - pop for the 99 percent.

Growing up in Middlesbrough I was taught to be resilient and competitive. My teachers made us believe that just because kids were at private school up the road, it didn't mean they were better than us.

There once was this powerful, both capital and political, class who cared about supporting and affirming a solid middle class in this country.

It's weird for minorities even just to buy tickets to the ballet. We feel like it's not a part of our lives and we're not a part of that world.

There's been a kind of inverse snobbery about culture. I get the feeling some people would look at Shakespeare and say, that's a bit too intimidating for working-class people.

I reckoned my accent and class would count against me; I didn't see actresses as being working-class.