Class Privilege Quotes

In order to understand why George W. Bush doesn't get it, you have to take several strands of common Texas attitude, then add an impressive degree of class-based obliviousness. What you end up with is a guy who sees himself as a perfectly nice fellow - and who is genuinely disconnected from the impact of his decisions on people.

Piety's hard enough to take among the poor who have to practice it. A rich man's piety stinks. It's insufferable.

Class is often invisible in America in the movies, and usually not the subject of the film.

We need never have white slaves in the South, because we have black ones. Our citizens, like those of Rome and Athens, are a privileged class. We should train and educate them to deserve the privileges and to perform the duties which society confers on them. Instead, by a low demagoguism depressing their self-respect by discourses on the equality of man, we had better excite their pride by reminding them that they do not fulfill the menial offices which white men do in other countries.

Among poor people, there's not any question about women being strong -- even stronger than men -- they work in the fields right along with the men. When your survival is at stake, you don't have these questions about yourself like middle-class women do.

The CIA is made up of boys whose families sent them to Princeton but wouldn't let them into the family brokerage business.

Melancholy has ceased to be an individual phenomenon, an exception. It has become the class privilege of the wage earner, a mass state of mind that finds its cause wherever life is governed by production quotas.

To tax the community for the advantage of a class is not protection. It is plunder!

If the educated and influential classes in a community either practice or connive at the systematic violation of laws that seem to them to cross their convenience, what can they expect when the lesson that convenience or a supposed class interest is a sufficient cause for lawlessness has been well learned by the ignorant classes?

For most Americans nepotism is first and last a class issue—a way for the rich to warehouse their unemployable offspring while keeping the lower classes in their place. In fact however systematic nepotism has been practiced more or less continuously by both the upper and the lower classes without ambivalence or apology. It was the middle class that pushed the merit principle, rising as it did through the institutions of the market and the state.

Remember 'The Brady Bunch' TV show? That 1970s family had a full-time live-in housekeeper called Alice. Mrs. Brady worked at the PTA and did community work. She didn't clean her own house. That was middle class. Now you have to be very rich to employ a housekeeper. Everything it meant to be middle class has changed dramatically.

I didn't say one negative word about poor people or about middle-class people or anything else. All I said was that the rich deserve our gratitude.

People say, 'Well, why don't they get another job, why don't they pick themselves up by their bootstraps?' Well, the people that say that probably have the kind of jobs where they don't work that hard, so maybe they could have another job.

While I live, no rich or noble knave shall walk the world in credit to his grave.

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

Wherever a class or profession possesses more than its numerical share of power, it has usually less than its proportion of physical vigor. This is easily shown from the vast body of evidence collected during our Civil War. In the volume containing the medical statistics of the Provost Marshal General's Bureau, we have the tabulated reports of about 600,000 persons subject to draft, and of about 500,000 recruits, substitutes, and drafted men; showing the precise physical condition of more than a million men. It appears that, out of the whole number examined, rather more than 257 in each 1000 were found unfit for military service. It is curious to see how generally the physical power among these men is in inverse ratio to the social and political prominence of the class they represent. Out of 1000 unskilled laborers, for instance, only 348 are physically disqualified; among tanners, only 216; among iron-workers, 189. On the other hand, among lawyers, 544 out of 1000 are disqualified; among journalists, 740; among clergymen, 954.

I certainly don't think that the heirs of the American Revolution were a particularly noble class.

I'm no different to other working class players.

I guess if you have had a good education as opposed to someone who hasn't been to school, you start off on this journey having studied Shakespeare for years and years or studied classics. I suppose why people see this big divide - the boarding school boys getting all the roles - is because they feel like some people have had a head start.

If there is anyone who knows what a rigged system looks like, it's Donald Trump, who was able to evade the draft during the height of the Vietnam War when the U.S. was losing on average 1,000 troops every month. That system was clearly rigged in favor of young men from politically influential families, but Donald Trump never complained about that.

My greatest fear about a world in which racial reassignment surgery becomes common is that it then becomes an expression of all kinds of class privilege. You have a truly dystopian society divided between the people who can afford to be racially altered and perfected and the ones who can't.

I had to admit that in his old-fashioned way O'Hara was still romantic about sex; like Scott Fitzgerald, he thought of it as an upper-class prerogative.

Charity has always been a expression of the guilty consciences of a ruling class.

If one individual, or one class, can call in the aid of authority to ward off the effects of competition, it acquires a privilege and at the cost of the whole community; it can make sure of profits not altogether due to the productive services rendered, but composed in part of an actual tax upon consumers for its private profit' which tax it commonly shares with the authority that thus unjustly lent its support.

The rich don't have to kill to eat. They employ people, as they call it. The rich don't do evil themselves. They pay. People do all they can to please them, and everybody's happy.