John Ruskin Quotes

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

Inequality has the natural and necessary effect, under the present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.

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

Let no one try to justify the glaring difference between the classes and the masses, the prince and the pauper, by saying that the former need more.

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.

Class still matters in Britain today.

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

I come from a very working-class background.

I think there's really strong social stratification in South Asia.

My job is to raise issues relating to class in Ireland.

Our rich people are not an ethnic minority. A poor person in Tennessee or Arkansas can say, "I'm not wealthy, but maybe my son or my daughter can grow up to be Bill Gates, or Bill Clinton." That's absolutely not true in countries like Zimbabwe, or Burma, or Indonesia, or Bolivia, where the majority of the people look around and they say, "Everybody who's rich belongs to a different ethnic group.

God help the rich, the poor can look after themselves

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

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

Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.

There were but two families in the world, Have-much and Have-little.

I'm not sticking up for white kids - I'm going to have a barrage of hate mail - but it's true. If you're poor, you're really poor.

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

I don't know enough about the lower classes to write about them. I don't feel with them, and that could be regarded as a defect, a limitation of my imagination. I could put myself in their position, but not politically. The idea of writing a story or a book about somebody completely devoid of appreciation of anything I care about is completely foreign to me.

There never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other.

Class is rarely talked about in the United States; nowhere is there a more intense silence about the reality of class differences than in educational settings.

I was told that the privileged and the people formed two nations.

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.

It's easier to ask for money from the poor than from the wealthy.

In the affairs of this world, poverty alone is without envy.