Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

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

I think the working-class part of me comes out. Sometimes the people who have the loudest mouths are upper-class, upper-middle-class. The quietest are often working-class people, people who are broke. There is a fear of losing whatever it is that you have. I come from that background.

[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.

You have to live among rich liberals to understand what they're saying. You'll never believe what they mean by 'middle class.' They mean themselves.

Fred Astaire represented the aristocracy, I represented the proletariat.

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

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

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

There's always been a nasty strain of class prejudice ingrained in the condemnation of football's 'undeserving rich,' as if the working class is uniquely susceptible to being corrupted by money, and as if they deserve their wealth less than those born to it.

I have a class prejudice - against the upper class, which is foolish.

In verity we are the poor. This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands and thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of a stable upper class that is responsible for much of the vulgarity of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this deficiency?

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.

Wherever the appearance of a conventional aristocracy exists in America, it must arise from wealth, as it cannot from birth. An aristocracy of mere wealth is vulgar everywhere. In a republic, it is vulgar in the extreme.

In poverty she is envious. In riches she may be a snob. Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms.

The rich are different from us.

Were Kennedy not a millionaire, illiterate and ignorant, then he would obviously understand that you cannot revolt against the peasants.

If you're a rich guy, the best thing you can do is demand tax increases on the rich. That way the poor guy will leave you alone. The middle class and the poor will leave you alone.

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.

A broad definition of crime in England is that it is any lower-class activity that is displeasing to the upper class.

We all like to think of ourselves as a standard, and I can see that it is genuinely difficult for the English middle class to suppose that the working class is not desperately anxious to become just like itself. I am afraid this must be unlearned.

I hate almost all rich people, but I think I’d be darling at it.

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.