John Maynard Keynes Quotes

There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.

We don't use the term 'working class' here because it's a taboo term. You're supposed to say 'middle class,' because it helps diminish the understanding that there's a class war going on.

The struggle for power in our day lies not between Crown and people, or between a caste of nobles and a bourgeoisie, but between the classes who have property and the classes who have none.

The middle has not enough class that I think about the middle class.

Social class means a hell of a lot and upper class people - no matter how well [Franklin ] Roosevelt did - it was stylish to hate him.

The rich are different from us.

And so class will some day supplant race in world affairs. Race war will then be merely a side-show to the gigantic class war which will be waged in the big tent we call the world.

Fred Astaire represented the aristocracy, I represented the proletariat.

Bums are the well-to-do of this day. They didn't have as far to fall.

A doctrine of class war seemed to provide a solution to the problem of poverty to people who know nothing about how wealth is created.

If class warfare is being waged in America, my class is clearly winning.

Leaders of the business community ... have chosen to wage a one-sided class war today in this country - a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old. .

Is the great working class oppressed? Yes, undoubtedly it is. God has intended the great to be great and the little to be little.

That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation.

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

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.

I can be influenced by what seems to me to be justice and good sense; but the class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.

Medical statistics will be our standard of measurement: we will weigh life for life and see where the dead lie thicker, among the workers or among the privileged

The competition of the poor takes away from the reward of the rich.

If anyone’s declared class warfare, it’s the people who inhabit the top rungs of big corporations and Wall Street … They have declared it on average workers.

If the upper classes, through their political representatives, pass legislation that diminishes the income of the middle class and reduces services to the poor and further enrich the affluent, this is not class warfare. But if the middle class and the poor, and their representatives, complain that this is unfair, that is class warfare. So say some of our politicians who oppose class warfare.

We deny your internationalism, because it is a luxury which only upper classes can afford; the working people are hopelessly bound to their native shores.

In Canada, we just have rich and poor, but we don't constantly remind poor people about it.

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.

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?