Harry Shearer Quotes

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.

That rich guy you've been seeing, must have put you down. Welcome back baby, to the poor side of town.

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

In middle-income countries, inequality becomes a problem because you can see there is a layer of people who are doing well, while the poor are still stuck there.

First of all, this whole idea of this one percent versus the 99 percent, it's a false statistic. There's nobody that is wealthy saying, let's go get the people that aren't. First of all, there's no versus. He's creating a false class warfare in a country where there is no class structure.

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

History shows that when you have continuing income inequality it is an invitation to class conflict.

The dirty truth is that the rich are the great cause of poverty.

Most Americans seem to be stuck in the economic strata to which they were born.

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?

More important than anything else is for Americans to wise up to class warfare demagoguery and reject the politics of envy.

Of all the hokum with which this country [America] is riddled, the most odd is the common notion that it is free of class distinctions.

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 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.

As long as there's anybody that's poor or middle class, there will not be satisfaction that there are rich people. Not 'til we get rid of all the rich can we say we have finished the job.

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.

Class is a way of looking at society that divides people into different categories based on how much money they're willing to make.

Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.

Society was cut in two: those who had nothing united in common envy; those who had anything united in common terror.

Half the U.S. population owns barely 2 percent of its wealth, putting the United States near Rwanda and Uganda and below such nations as pre-Arab Spring Tunisia and Egypt when measured by degrees of income inequality.

The world is richer than ever, and the gaps between rich and poor are wider.

The way corporate media likes to portray America is as a homogenous whole that high-five's each other at the Super Bowl. But what we have is a grotesque disparity between the rich and poor that is only getting wider.

Class structures are a luxury that we cannot afford.

American democracy in the past has always been known for its large middle class and its relatively few very wealthy people and very few very poor people, but that is gone to today and the middle class is shrinking.