John Lennon Quotes

But we're still in somewhat a Puritanical society in a lot of ways.

The Eugenic Society . . . is perpetually bewailing the fact that wage-earners breed faster than middle-class people.

Somewhere, I had received the impression that Fine Folks were people who did the best they could with the sense they had, but Aunt Alexandra was of the opinion, obliquely expressed, that the longer a family had been squatting on one patch of land the finer it was.

The Church commends the law-makers for their prompt reaction to outlaw same-sex relationships in Nigeria and calls for the bill to be passed since the idea expressed in the bill is the moral position of Nigerians regarding human sexuality.

I think the working-class part of me comes out. Sometimes the people who have the loudest mouths are upper-class, upper-middle-class. The quietest are often working-class people, people who are broke. There is a fear of losing whatever it is that you have. I come from that background.

We must not depict socialism as if socialists will bring it to us on a plate all nicely dressed. That will never happen. Not a single problem of the class struggle has ever been solved in history except by violence. When violence is exercised by the working people, by the mass of exploited against the exploiters -- then we are for it!

We're working-class people, which means we don't get rich or have maids. Be content with what you are and what you have.

It was hard for an American to understand the contented acceptance by English men and women of permanent places in the lowest social rank.

When you are around people who have money, you realise money isn't that impressive, it's about your class, morals and how you conduct yourself.

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.

In all the areas of life where people have sought and found consolation through forbidding their desires-sex in particular, and taste in general-the habit of judgment is now to be stamped out.

It's awful to be afraid of sex, but I'm afraid that's what the '50s did to people. It was just sex is disgusting, it shouldn't be talked about. Nudity is disgusting, we just don't talk about those kinds of things.

There's a lot of people talking about elitism and all of that.Yes, I went to Princeton and Harvard, but the lens through which I see the world is the lens that I grew up with. I am the product of a working class upbringing.

I went to a middle-class school, but my background is working class. I got the best of both worlds, I saw both classes, so I have a pretty fair idea of how people live and why they do it.

There's an underlying puritanicalness in America that is not that different to the prudishness of Britain - it just manifests itself in different ways.

I make films about working class people. All my films have always been about that. For example, the brothel is a workplace. It's aberrant, but a workplace nonetheless. I was more interested as opposed to glamorizing and saying, oh, this is a great erotic place, it's a place of business. The commodity is sex.

What foolsmiddle-classgirls are to expect other people to respect the same gods as themselves and E M Forster.

The terrible thing in England is if you interview a thousand people, five hundred of them will talk like they're going into a Guy Ritchie movie and the other five hundred will be Mr. Darcy. So we had to find cool, working class kids with no profile who could be John Travolta and James Dean and people like that.

I have never said, as is sometimes believed, or even suggested that lower-class children should not learn the so-called educated norm of the Portuguese language of Brazil. What I have said is that the problems of language always involve ideological questions and, along with them, questions of power.

My basic position is that the more mixed the society and the more mobility there is in it, the better. That's what makes things interesting. When you get a homogenous society, it's very, very dull, whether that's all working class or all upper class, because everybody thinks the same, everybody looks the same.

What is very troubling is that people who have tried to write literature, even, for example, proletarian writers, seem to write within the norms of the dominant class.

There is such a reluctance to address sex as an inherent part of the human experience in this country... The true perversion to me is crushing it and hiding it.

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

Even when uttered by Democrats, "middle class" often sounds like a mealymouthed way of saying, "Us, and not them," where "them" includes poor people, snake handlers and those with pierced tongues.

How right the working classes are in their "materialism." How right they are to realize that the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time!