Jimmy Breslin Quotes

Any organized social group is always a stratified social body. There has not been and does not exist any permanent social group which is "flat" and in which all members are equal.

Neither the Christian attitude of love for all mankind nor humane hopes for an organized society must cause us to forget that the 'human stratum' may not be homogeneous.

There are three classes of men; the retrograde, the stationary and the progressive.

My upbringing was so middle-class and repressed. It wasn't until I was placed in Lunghua that I met anyone from any other social strata. When I did, I found them colossally vital.

Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.

English people are so trapped in this class paradigm.

The hierarchy of class in London was rigid. It was like a religion. It still is to a certain extent.

Laws are generally found to be nets of such a texture, as the little creep through, the great break through, and the middle-sized are alone entangled in it.

Everyone has class, one class or another.

For no continuity of social act is possible without a corresponding social status and the many different kinds of act required in an industrial state, with its high degree of specialization, make for corresponding classification of status.

The distribution of wealth ... depends on the laws and customs of society ... what the opinions and feelings of the ruling class make them, and are very different in different ages and countries; and might be still more different, if mankind so chose.

The division of society into estates or castes means in effect that conceptually and organizationally these ‘natural’ forms are established without their economic basis ever becoming conscious

To abolish class distinctions means abolishing a part of yourself.

In the local state school I attended in England, I saw and heard far more awareness of where a person stood in the social hierarchy than I had ever heard stateside.

I've been with all walks of life... All people from all status.

Coming out of university, one of my obsessions was that in the novels I was reading, they seemed to be portraying a world that had a social fabric. People knew each other in 'War and Peace.' They went to all the same balls. These were societies with tightly wound, woven, social textures.

Growing up in inner-city neighborhoods, there's a particular structure, which I'm sure is true of most social contexts. The type of person you are determines the role you play.

Class and the snobbery it provokes still matter far too much in Britain, but we are a far more mobile society than we used to be.

I don't want to become a serious, annoying sociologist. I try to regard sociology as a part of everyday life.

It is scarcely a mark of intellectual profundity to have noticed that our society is big.

In what purports to be an egalitarian society, the existence of class is the secret about which no one speaks.

It's not in our nature. Americans have never been a people that drive through a nice neighborhood and say, 'Oh, I hate the people who live in these nice houses.'

Being exposed to the enlisted Army was an eye-opener. I thought everyone was like me, but the enlisted Army is a constituency of the dispossessed.

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.