Class Dynamics Quotes

The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor; the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich.

Brahmins cannot hope to claim a high and superior status forever. Times are changing. They have to come down.

There are things I don't like, like sitting at the head of the class. It makes me uncomfortable. I'll do it in a seminar if I have to, but with a workshop, I try to put myself in the circle somewhere. Because that hopefully frees up some people by making somebody else sit at the nominal head of the table.

I read "Pride and Prejudice" [by Jane Austen]. I was gobsmacked by it - it's so funny and so modern. Unbelievable. You don't expect funny to come through after 200 years - humor doesn't transcend decades, let alone centuries.

Never was Catholicism, never were the ideas of chivalry, impressed on men so deeply, so multifariously, as the bourgeois ideas.

Every capitalist who suffers from the competition of still greater capitalists denounces those above him and cries out for help on behalf of the middle class

In the United States of America, where, true enough, the classes already exist, but have not yet acquired permanent character, are in constant flux and reflux, constantly changing their elements and yielding them up to one another

The poor man wishes to conceal his poverty, and the rich man his wealth: the former fears lest he be despised, the latter lest he be plundered.

While admiring the pleasing evidence of wealth, we become complicit in - or, at the very least, recognize the extent to which we, too, are beneficiaries of - an economic system we routinely deplore.

As long as men are men, a poor society cannot be too poor to find a right order of life, nor a rich society too rich to have need to seek it.

I wasn't the class clown. I wasn't that obvious. There would be a circle of guys, and they're watching the class clown. And I'm standing in the back, and I turn to the guy next to me and I say something funny to him, and he starts to laugh. And the guy next to him says, 'What did he say?'

I don't think, generally speaking, people become writers because they were the really good, really cool, attractive kid in class. I'll be honest. This is our revenge for people who were much better looking and more popular than us. I was a bit like that, I suppose.

Kids that I went to school with didn't know how to interact with black people like that. There were only, like, three or four black kids in the class.

All great revolutions are led by aristocrats.

Once in a while our school has half days, and the teachers spend the afternoon 'in service,' which I think must be a group therapy for having to deal with us.

'Downton Abbey' didn't have the impact it had just because it was a good story about people. It was something about that period and that world that was fascinating to people on a level that wasn't just as an entertainment.

The rich cannot accumulate wealth without the co-operation of the poor in society.

As the classes in modern life come together, we have become much more intensely class conscious. It's a very curious thing. But I deal with human beings with whom I've come in contact and have had a chance to closely observe. Their upper-classness is not a matter of particular fascination for me.

I'm not sure who invented dodgeball, but I can almost guarantee you that it wasn't the shortest kid in the class.

All fear of 'offensive' speech is bourgeois and reactionary. Historically, profane or bawdy language was common in both the upper and the lower classes, who lived together in rural areas amid the untidy facts of nature. Notions of propriety and decorum come to the fore in urbanized periods ruled by an expanding middle class, which is obsessed with cleanliness, respectability, and conformism.

I do not deny that there may be other well-founded causes for the hatred which various classes feel toward politicians, but the main one seems to me that politicians are symbols of the fact that every class must take every other class into account.

There should be a tacit code or understanding among privileged people not to endorse things that give others an inferiority complex.

Budgets are not merely affairs of arithmetic, but in a thousand ways go to the root of prosperity of individuals, the relation of classes and the strength of kingdoms.

Political change and academic change and intellectual change are obviously crucial, but they don't necessarily change society. They can change a particular class and give everybody in that class great arguments, but that doesn't necessarily translate into the body of the culture.

Felicity grimaced in agreement. “No, you are perfectly correct. I did not realize how vital the approbation of one’s butler is in allowing for nocturnal autonomy.