Gore Vidal Quotes

Senators will associate only with men of their own class; and thus become strangers to the condition of the common people.

His lordship may compel us to be equal upstairs, but there will never be equality in the servants hall.

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

In England we only make films about the working class or the aristocracy.

The Privileged and the People form Two Nations.

There are no great lords who possess everything and a herd of people who have nothing

The lower middle classes as well as the peasants, … always side with the strongest

The First Law of Class Warfare: Once inequalities develop, the upper classes can, with relative ease, drastically reduce the probability of success for any equalizing challenges to the system.

Our elite has not evolved in 20 years, and the instincts of this elite are not democratic.

The U. S. business class is highly class conscious and its members have long seen themselves as fighting a bitter class war, except that they don’t want anybody to know about it.

There were the well-to-do intellectuals, pushed toward Fascism by their hostility to the working masses and by their disdain of the uncouth ways of the Socialists who, without adequate preparation, had taken possession of many municipalities and had been administering them in a manner even more ridiculous than dishonest.

There's nothing like white trash at the White House.

I think America has dealt with - I mean, this is simplistic, and of course I don't live in America - but the impression I get is that there is not a kind of obligation to dislike those who are better off or be frightened of those who are worse off.

Colour is not the issue in America; class is.

And understand: class differences will not save you.

What I quickly discovered is that our so-called new South Africa has as much material for a story-teller as the old one. The landscape hasn't really changed. Who is in power now is different to who was in power then, but the squatter camps grow like cancer, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

I look at my people, and I look at those who control them - the political elite. And the sad thing is that the elites are just not interested in the welfare of the people.

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

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

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.

Between richer and poorer classes in a free country a mutually respecting antagonism is much healthier than pity on the one hand and dependence on the other, as is, perhaps, the next best thing to fraternal feeling.

Class structures are a luxury that we cannot afford.

It's not white versus black any more, it's haves versus have-nots. Unless the black middle-classes unite to promote the interests of the black underclass, tension between them is inevitable. What we, the black middle class have to do, is think of a strategy to avert that.

Many times, people attack the well-to-do people. They see an opportunity.

The forces in a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.