Rashid Johnson Quotes

Class is really interesting to me, maybe because I'm from England where there is a pretty hideous, deep-rooted obsession with class. I don't like the obsession with class, but it certainly interests me.

During the Blair-Brown decade social concerns - what kind of society we have become - have gradually replaced economic worries. People fear that we have become an increasingly fragmented, boorish, more violent society.

It was hugely helpful to me, being South African. I have never felt uncomfortable in posh society because I don't see what it is that I'm meant to be bowing the knee about.

We have a myth of the classless society. You won't hear an American politician apart from Bernie Sanders talk about the working class. We are all middle class, apparently.

I am obsessed with the Great Depression and with former showgirls - and the Victorians - the idea of wistful, dark romance.

Notwithstanding the supposed egalitarian ethos of some hunter-gatherer societies, humans are a hierarchical social species. We care greatly about where we stand in comparison to some relevant reference group.

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.

When people listen to Jay-Z, they're working all day or trying to work and pay their bills, and what they hear is someone who's free. Who doesn't have to worry about the electricity. But all we're taught is that those who are rich deserve to be rich because they worked harder than the rest of us, or they're smarter.

I was very struck by the fact that Robin Hood became increasingly taken over by the middle and upper classes. He starts out a bandit but becomes a fully fledged aristocrat.

I never like the TV or movie Harvard characters. The fact of the matter is that most people who go to Harvard went to public schools and weren't in final clubs. I didn't even know that final clubs existed until I was a senior.

Pen names have always fascinated me, in part because I understand the professional and economic and even societal reasons to do so.

When humans invented inequality and socioeconomic status, they came up with a dominance hierarchy that subordinates like nothing the primate world has ever seen before.

I showed that once again a guy from the 'favela,' from the community, it taking over the world.

For decades now, Republicans and Democrats have shared the same mythology around the great American meritocracy. The only real difference was that republicans thought the American meritocracy was already perfect and Democrats believed it could be perfected if we just dealt with racism and sexism and other forms of bigotry.

I am from a very vague caste. I don't belong to any of the four. I am kayastha. They are well read, largely clerks so they get treated respectfully.

If you look at European societies since the financial crisis began in 2008, with very, very few exceptions, the differences between rich and poor have increased, and sometimes hugely.

We live in a very classist society, and it's sad and depressing.

If the U.S. is the richest country in the world, why is it also the most unequal?

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

As class barriers tumbled and Britain became a more meritocratic society, young, well-educated Scots were best placed to exploit the new social mobility.

No one in Switzerland knows me as the Swiss Machine, and that's good, because I don't like it.

What I see happening to this country is a neo-caste system.

I reckoned my accent and class would count against me; I didn't see actresses as being working-class.

Working-class people don't tend to be wooed by celebrity.

I've learnt that it's possible to be as anonymous as you want. It's a choice, and I've become very, very good at being anonymous.