Douglas Coupland Quotes

I don't think it would be very difficult for me to open the chapters of my life because there isn't much there.

I am afraid that if you want to go down into history you'll have to do something for it.

To Barack and Michelle Obama - America owes you an enormous debt of gratitude.

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.

Class is much more than Marx's definition of relationship to the means of production. Class involved your behavior, your basic assumptions, how you are taught to behave, what you expect from yourself and from others, your concept of a future, how you understand problems and solve them, how you think, feel, act.

The best example of all, to me, that our problems are both personal and cultural and political and social is the whole condition of the middle class economically.

We all like to think of ourselves as a standard, and I can see that it is genuinely difficult for the English middle class to suppose that the working class is not desperately anxious to become just like itself. I am afraid this must be unlearned.

By the time I was in my early teens, we were able to move into a much more middle-class area. I had a comfortable adolescence.

Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid.

The Class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.

I just wanted to be the first one to fly for America, not because I'd end up in the pages of history books.

Millionaires are just as patriotic as poor people. The very wealthy are just as noble and patriotic as the middle class. But nothing has been asked of them in this horrendous recession. And it's time we just ask.

My success has allowed me to strike out with a higher class of women.

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.

It's going to be years and years before most people realize how greatly he contributed to American music.

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.

I don't feel that any of my greatness has been covered over.

In England, there are only two things to be, basically: You are either for the labor movement or for the capitalist movement. Either you become a right-wing Archie Bunker if you are in the class I am in, or you become an instinctive socialist, which I was.

I have learned that I, we, are a dollar-a-day people (which is terrible, they say, because a cow in Japan is worth $9 a day). This means that a Japanese cow would be a middle class Kenyan... a $9-a-day cow from Japan could very well head a humanitarian NGO in Kenya. Massages are very cheap in Nairobi, so the cow would be comfortable.

Everyone can recognize history when it happens. Everyone can recognize history after is has happened; but only the wise man knows at the moment what is vital and permanent, what is lasting and memorable.

It changed my life in an extreme way. I dont know if you could calculate just how much it does [change your life]. There was so much notoriety for me in my first season, and to finish by winning the Super Bowl and get the MVP set my place in history. It cements it and its very special. There is something that comes with it, something everyone recognizes and knows. No one can ever take it away from you.

Today, the message is that we have to help the middle class and the aspirational worker in the United States.

The middle class in America is at a tipping point. It will not last another generation if we don't boldly change course now.

I realized early I can manipulate the ceiling in the middle class. The allure becomes how far I can make the ceiling rise.