Harry S. Truman Quotes

I come from an immigrant culture. I'm only a couple of generations away from having been a servant girl myself.

I'm a working-class person, working with class.

You can't rise as a class. You have to rise individually. It's what many of the civil rights-era people don't understand.

I never considered the working class anything other than something to get out of.

Being a monarchist, and fawning over those 'above' you, you must naturally despise those 'below' or on the same socioeconomic level as yourself, because that is how hierarchy worship works.

I'm not a bourgeois person, never will be.

I am a man by nature and a Frenchman only by accident.

I am one of them. I am a black woman, the daughter of a dining car waiter. You do not seem to understand who I am.

A man's ethnic identity has more to do with a personal awareness than with geography.

Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist he goes haywire. I've found very, very few who remember their past condition when prosperity comes. Look at the Congressional attitude on DPs — and they all come from DPs.

There are no human beings whose sense of social identity is fully and exclusively given for themselves by the membership of the working (or any other) class

The likelihood that inborn differences are one contributor to social status does not mean that it is the only contributor.

I think that we must face the fact that in reality, you cannot have economic and political equality without having some form of social equality. I think this is inevitable.

In the affairs of this world, poverty alone is without envy.

There's nothing the British like better than a bloke who comes from nowhere, makes it, and then gets clobbered.

The stress laid on upward social mobility in the United States has tended to obscure the fact that there can be more than one kind of mobility and more than one direction in which it can go. There can be ethical mobility as well as financial, and it can go down as well as up.

Let me just say, at once: I am not now nor have I ever been a white man. And, leaving aside the joys of unearned privilege, this leaves me feeling pretty good.

Money sometimes makes fools of important persons, but it may also make important persons of fools.

I'm a millionaire, I guess, but I'm just a normal person and I like everybody, taxi drivers, whoever you are, to call me by my first name and talk to me on a man-to-man basis. I think the garbage collector is as important as the goddamned president.

Education must be a great equaliser in our society. It must be the tool to level the differences that our various social systems have created over the past thousands of years.

Social change rarely comes about through the efforts of the disenfranchised. The middle class creates social revolutions.

People say it's hard at the top, but it's even harder at the bottom.

I am Jewish. My real name is Chris Tuckenberg. A lot of people don't know about that.

Socially, I never belonged to any class, rich or poor. To the rich I was poor, and to the poor I was poor pretending to be like the rich.

To my friends, I’m kind of sexually gay but ethnically straight.