Judith Martin Quotes

Look, there is a sort of old view about class which is a very simplistic view that we have got the working class, the middle class and the upper class, I think it is more complicated than that.

Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.

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

They cannot divide us by saying that you're middle class or you're lower class.

In the States everyone aspires to be middle class. It's so engrained into the American psyche: As long as you work hard you're going to be rich some day. The history of Britain is that if you're born working class, you're going to stay there, although that is changing.

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.

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

We were working class, and you don't lose that. Later on, I bolted on media middle class... and now people like me are in the House of Lords.

I've always enjoyed studying the small clues that indicate a particular class level.

Class still matters in Britain today.

Class - or the economic status of individuals - is evident in all societies, some very well stratified by a rigid caste system determined by birth.

Everything is about class in England, whether it's upper, lower or middle. Why should that be?

Of course the lower classes have always felt downtrodden and aspired to a better life. But there is this theory that people respond to a class structure in England - there was a time when people knew who they were and knew whom they served and as long as management wasn't abusive, it was a good life for people.

The middle-class America of my youth was another country.

The one class you do not belong to and are not proud of at all is the lower-middle class. No one ever describes himself as belonging to the lower-middle class.

In this respect, higher education is now causing most of the growing inequality and strengthening class structure of the United States.

Americans have historically been more willing than Europeans to tolerate high inequality levels if accompanied by strong economic growth and a healthy middle class.

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

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.

America is about class. To pretend that it isn't is very ignorant. No society has ever existed without some kind of a ruling class.

Britain's is traditionally a rigid class society.

I can assure you that the class system is alive and well and living in people's minds in England.

There's no such thing as median income; there's a curve, and it really matters what side of the curve you're on. There's no such thing as the middle class. It's absolutely vanishing.

Class is real. It can't be faked.

And I am interested in the fact that class is very much a factor in America, even though it's not supposed to be.