Class Divisions Quotes

Shall we have recourse to the art of printing? But this has not destroyed property or aristocracy or corporations or paper wealth in England or America, or diminished the influence of either; on the contrary, it has multiplied aristocracy and diminished democracy.

Would you want your wife or your servant to read this book?

The real unifying force in American political life is whiteness, no matter its party, gender, region or, at times, even its class.

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.

The problem is that the U.K. in essence is a feudal society. It's everyone in their place.

The rule of law must apply equally to everyone, irrespective of status in society or class divisions; it is this equal application that is the bulwark of modern democracies.

Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.

Farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing élite set itself above the disease-ridden masses.

The longings of South Carolina are essentially monarchical rather than republican; even the common people have become so debauched in loyalty, that very many of them would readily accept the creation of orders of nobility. In Georgia there is something less of this spirit; but the upper classes continually assert their right to rule, and the middle and lower classes have no ability to free themselves. The whole structure of society is full of separating walls; and it will sadden the heart of any Northern man, who travels in either of these three States, to see how poor, and meagre, and narrow a thing life is to all the country people. Even with the best class of townsfolk it lacks very much of the depth and breadth and fruitfulness of our Northern life…

American democracy has never accorded all the people a meaningful voice. The masses have been given symbols instead, and they are often empty symbols. Nation-states traditionally rely on the fiction that a head of state can represent the body of the people and stand in as their proxy; in the American version, the president must appeal broadly to shared values that mask the existence of deep class divisions. Even when this strategy works, though, unity comes at the price of perpetuating ideological deception.

My major concern about leaving enhancement to the marketplace is that then the rich will be able to buy themselves genetically superior children and the poor will not - sharpening the class divisions we have now. That problem could be overcome if, genetic enhancement were available to all, subsidized by the state - and that would, over time, have benefits for society as well.

Because you have no memory for things that happened ten or twenty years ago, you're still mouthing the same nonsense as two thousand years ago. Worse, you cling with might and main to such absurdities as 'race,' 'class,' 'nation,' and the obligation to observe a religion and repress your love.

I remember trying to explain the class system to a Canadian friend when we started at RADA. The funniest thing was when I told her what bonfire night is all about. It's quite dark when you start breaking it down.

Whatever class and race divergences exist, top cats are tom cats.

No one dives a dumpster like a rich kid dives a dumpster, because there's no shame.

When my father was a young actor, it is absolutely true that the vast majority were fairly middle class. Then all of a sudden, people like Albert Finney burst through and turned all that on its head.

Education is transformational. It changes lives. That is why people work so hard to become educated and why education has always been the key to the American Dream, the force that erases arbitrary divisions of race and class and culture and unlocks every person's God-given potential.

It wasn't the ghetto here or anything like that. But it got rough. I'll put it this way. I always knew where I lived. I always knew I was in Seaside. That wasn't plush. I wasn't in Monterey. I wasn't in Carmel. I was in Seaside. I knew what that meant.

There is a close connection between socio-political development, the struggle between social classes and the history of ideologies. In general, intellectual movements closely reflect the trends of economic developments. In communal society, where there are virtually no class divisions, man's productive activities on outlook and culture is less discernible. Account must be taken of the psychology of conflicting classes.

That the young rich smell the stink of the poor and learn to find it a bit amusing. They had to laugh, otherwise it would be too terrifying.

Ours is a capitalist society. It is therefore inevitable that, in part- and I repeat- in part- we must address this goal of deracialisation within the context of the property relations characteristics of a capitalist economy.

If you take the contempt some Americans have for yuppies and multiply it by 10 you might come close to understanding their attitude towards the City, as they call it - London, the people of the south.

I wanted to show something that Americans don't usually think about when they think about Russia, which is the extreme stratification of Soviet society.

I stayed in the ghetto. Then I stayed in condos, then I stayed in penthouses, and then I stayed in mansions.

I had a lovely time growing up. But I was very aware of the miners' strike going on, friends' families collapsing, and people being unemployed.