Class Barriers Quotes

As class barriers tumbled and Britain became a more meritocratic society, young, well-educated Scots were best placed to exploit the new social mobility.

The idea that working a blue-collar job and living in a working-class community provides barriers that are unique to your circumstances - that's not a very controversial subject anymore. I think it's something that people on both the Left and the Right probably accept.

Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight Protestants, today it's open to anybody who owns hideous clothing.

The Sixties was a time of breaking down class barriers, although I think class still exists today in some areas.

More than any other institution in American life, the public schools have broken down the barriers of class, race, religion, gender, ethnicity, language and disability status that separate people.

The American Dream, that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores in the past century has not been a dream of material plenty, though that has doubtlessly counted heavily. It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as a man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in the older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class.

Barriers today are largely class-based - income, networks, education. And those affect many white people as well.

In bypassing barriers between different classes, maturities, rating categories, debt seniority levels and so on, credit derivatives are creating enormous opportunities to exploit and profit from associated discontinuities in the pricing of credit risk.

[C]lass consciousness is not one of our national diseases; we suffer, indeed, from its opposite-the delusion that class barriers are not real. That delusion reveals itself in many forms, some of them as beautiful as a glass eye. One is the Liberal doctrine that a prairie demagogue promoted to the United States Senate will instantly show all the sagacity of a Metternich ... another is the doctrine that a moronrun through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will cease thereby to be a moron.

The philosophic aim of education must be to get each one out of his isolated class and into the one humanity.

Education is a liberating force, and in our age it is also a democratizing force, cutting across the barriers of caste and class, smoothing out inequalities imposed by birth and other circumstances.

The class barricades have been stormed by the forces of a broad culture, which is made up of clusters of individuals who have decided for themselves what they will be in society.

In England, there is this tradition of the upper classes going to very expensive drama schools and then going on having careers. I knew that wasn't an option for me. My mother would never have been able to afford that.

I'm a great candidate for why arts funding shouldn't be cut, because I had no experience other than what was at school, I'm from a working-class town, there were no theaters, and the cinema closed when I was a kid. Anything that gave me a voice or a way to express myself I went running headlong toward.

I reckoned my accent and class would count against me; I didn't see actresses as being working-class.

Marriage shall not take place between a patrician and a plebeian.

The school in the Yorkshire mining village in which my father grew up in the 1920s and 1930s allowed only a few children to go to high school, and my father was not one of them. He spent much of his time as a young man repairing this deprivation, mostly at night school.

I got a chance to be in a society where the barriers between classes - social and economic - are not insuperable, where money is not everything all the time. Americans have been manipulated into a space by those who profit from the arrangements of that system. People feel a conscious disease - a dis-ease or an unease - but I don't think they know what causes it.

There were no examples of girls like myself becoming successful actresses. To be an actress in England was a serious, upper-middle class girl's profession. I just thought I would never be accepted unless I pretended to become somebody I wasn't.

When I was a little kid it was my dream to go to drama school, but it was never something I thought would happen to me. I was a Jewish girl from North London and things like that don't happen to Jewish girls from North London called Amy Winehouse.

I feel that I helped the working class by just saying there are no barriers, which I consider to be true.

Today the crime novelist has one advantage denied to writers of 'straight' or 'literary' novels. Unlike them he can range over all levels of society, for crime can easily breach the barriers that exist in our stratified society. Because of these barriers the modern literary novel, unlike its 19th-century predecessors, is often confined to the horizontal, dealing only with one class. But crime runs through society from top to bottom, and so the crime novelist can present a fuller picture of the way we live now.

It is actually getting much harder for someone from an ordinary background to break through the ranks. In the period from 1964 to 1997, every single Prime Minister - from Harold Wilson to John Major - was the product of a state school.