Katherine Boo Quotes

Groups that rose from poverty to prosperity seldom did so by having their own racial or ethnic leaders to follow.

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 - or the economic status of individuals - is evident in all societies, some very well stratified by a rigid caste system determined by birth.

Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young.

My parents were determined to move into the middle class.

Slowly but surely the old establishment is being replaced by a new, larger, more meritocratic middle class—a middle class that will include millions of people who traditionally may see themselves as working class but whose ambitions are far broader than their parents and grandparents.

Brahmins cannot hope to claim a high and superior status forever. Times are changing. They have to come down.

As America has grown less economically equal, a citizen's ability to move upward has fallen behind that of citizens in other Western democracies. We are no longer the country where anyone can become anything.

Upward mobility across classes peaked in the U.S. in the late 19th century. Most of the gains of the 20th century were achieved en masse; it wasn't so much a phenomenon of great numbers of people rising from one class to the next as it was standards of living rising sharply for all classes. You didn't have to be exceptional to rise.

That's one thing you Americans take for granted, you know? That you can grow up, you know, not so good circumstances, and you can move. Just because you are born in rural Arkansas, whatever, that doesn't define who you are.

What history taught me is that societies are not static and that the straight line of progressive ideals - this thinking we have that a society will just magically become more egalitarian over time - is patently false.

I had a very easy middle class upbringing and never had to worry about anything. But my parents came from nothing and from broken homes, and their stories were always very interesting.

My parents were decent, aspirant first-generation middle class. They read 'Reader's Digest', listened to classical music; my grandparents had a bust of Stalin on the mantelpiece. The kids of that generation were terrified of being below par, class-wise.

People have to recognise I'm a working-class lad. Forget what I've done and where I've been. I'm a working-class lad. I've come from nothing and I've not forgotten that.

You can't kid the public. When they see me they see I'm just a kid off a council estate - no more, no less.

The youth doesn't know what they want while the older generation remains stuck in the past. But the basic concept of entertainment remains the same - demand and supply - and that won't change.

'Tanu Weds Manu's brilliance lies in the fact that it makes the middle class want to be aspirational.

It feels that while the young people are trying to fight for a world where there's equality, everyone's the same, everyone's helping each other, we want to take care of the planet... it seems like the people that are ruling and are being presidents right now want to do it the other way round.

We live in an age of generational turmoil. Baby-boom parents are accused of clinging on to jobs and houses which they should be freeing up for their children. Twentysomethings who can't afford to leave home and can't get jobs are attacked as aimless and immature.

People often think of America as a classless society, but, of course, that isn't true. Within immigrant communities, there's an enormous distinction of class, depending on who your parents are, and that kind of thing comes out really quick in things like marriage and interpersonal relationships.

When I would go to the barrio, people saw me as a rich person, but when I'm around rich people, they see me as someone from the ghetto. It's all perceptions. I like moving between worlds. I feel equally comfortable in both.

Football is generally a working-class sport, and because of the fact I went to private school and was brought up slightly differently, people think that makes me a different person.

What I see happening to this country is a neo-caste system.

'High Cotton' is more conscious of class than 'Black Deutschland.'

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.