Karl Lagerfeld Quotes

Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.

The middle class, in the white population, encompasses a wide swath.

There once was this powerful, both capital and political, class who cared about supporting and affirming a solid middle class in this country.

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.

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.

Class is real. It can't be faked.

We're seeing quite a lot of people who really would like a return to class-based politics.

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

The middle class is always a firm champion of equality when it concerns a class above it; but it is its inveterate foe when it concerns elevating a class below it.

Keep up the middle class; lop off aristocracy on the one hand, and a rabble at the other; let the middle class ... have the power.

There are no great lords who possess everything and a herd of people who have nothing

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.

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.

There were the well-to-do intellectuals, pushed toward Fascism by their hostility to the working masses and by their disdain of the uncouth ways of the Socialists who, without adequate preparation, had taken possession of many municipalities and had been administering them in a manner even more ridiculous than dishonest.

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.

Our nation’s political spectrum is not left to right, but top to bottom. People can locate themselves on this rich-to-poor pole for this is not a theoretical positioning: It’s based on our actual experience with money and power.

The patience and forbearance of the poor are among the strongest bulwarks of the rich.

If there is any law governing the distribution of income between classes, it still remains to be discovered.

The oligarchic character of the modern English commonwealth does not rest, like many oligarchies, on the cruelty of the rich to the poor. It does not even rest on the kindness of the rich to the poor. It rests on the perennial and unfailing kindness of the poor to the rich.

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.

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

I'm one of the undeserving poor: that's what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that he's up agen middle class morality all the time.... What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything.

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