Joseph Brodsky Quotes

I think the reason working-class people don't write books is because they are encouraged to believe that only certain people are permitted to write books.

There's been a kind of inverse snobbery about culture. I get the feeling some people would look at Shakespeare and say, that's a bit too intimidating for working-class people.

Labor, under their current leadership, want to be the Downtown Abbey party when it comes to educational opportunity. They think working class children should stick to the station in life they were born into - they should be happy to be recognized for being good with their hands and not presume to get above themselves.

With a few notable exceptions, literary fiction in the U.K. is dominated by an upper and upper middle-class clique who usually have a tin ear for the demotic and who portray working-class characters with, at best, a benevolent condescension.

The blue-collar is not supposed to read Horace, nor the farmer in his overalls Montale or Marvell. Nor, for that matter, is the politician expected to know by heart Gerard Manley Hopkins or Elizabeth Bishop. This is dumb as well as dangerous.

This College system went into practice to draw a line of demarcation between the two classes of society—it separated the children of the rich from the children of the poor.

The few are always crying up the advantages of costly colleges, national acadimys and grammar schools, in order to make places for men to live without work .... But [they] are always opposed to cheep schools and woman schools, the only or princaple means by which learning is spred among the Many.

What everyone knows" is the line between us and them.

The cultural barriers and social and economic differences separating the Africans and African-Americans is sometimes the cause of a simmering hostility and misunderstanding between them. Sharing the common physical characteristic of skin color has not ensured cultural and economic unity between African immigrants and American-born blacks.

‘The laboring poor’ is a detestable, canting phrase.

The fundamental error of Europe has been to confine the light of knowledge to the wealthy and great, while the humble and the depressed have been as sedulously excluded from its participation as the wretched criminal, immured in a dungeon, is from the light of Heaven.

When English education was introduced in this country, the Mahomedans did not accept it… They did not accept English education and at the same time they were divorced from the culture which their fathers had advanced. The result was that whereas the Hindus got on in life, got into government employment, got many things which people value in life, the Mahomedans were left without it and gradually there came to be a sort of estrangement between the two nationalities

Some have objected to the instruction of the lower classes from an apprehension that it would lift them above their sphere, make them dissatisfied with their station in life, and, by impairing the habits of subordination, endanger the tranquility of the state; an objection devoid surely of all force and validity.

We once had a society stratified by bloodlines, in which the Protestant Establishment was in one class, immigrants were in another and African-Americans were in another. Now we live in a society stratified by education. In many ways this system is more fair, but as the information economy matures, we are learning it comes with its own brutal barriers to opportunity and ascent.

The ‘poor white’ is actually degraded; the mountain white is a person not yet graded up.

If you're white working class, it's very easy to caricature the elites, and if you're elite, it's very easy to caricature the white working class.

My family has artists, but they are all working artists. They are not movie stars. They don't get paid. I really respect that blue-collared ideology where they're just trying to make a living.

Eccentricity is usually owned by middle-class and upper-class people. If you are working class and eccentric, then you're just mad.

People think if you're working class, there has to be some fascist element underneath.

In the West, it's just a given that art exists in this high-class place. But in Japan, there's no high class. The minute you come out, you're low class.

The 'Fargo' characters, they're the characters of my people. They're stoic, hardworking, uncomplaining, and I loved them.

Not that I am hugely working class, but in the U.K. I'm always perceived, casting-wise, as being working class.

A lot of my activity in the theatre, and even in writing poems, was a kind of retrospective aggro on the English teacher who wouldn't allow me to read poetry aloud.

Trust me: I entertain Joe Six-Pack 30 weekends a year. I don't really think that I'm an elitist.

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.