Class Shift Quotes

Millions of middle-class Americans, in free fall during the economic collapse that began around 2008, have had a taste of what it means to be poor.

The aristocracy of feudal parchment has passed away with a mighty rushing, and now, by a natural course, we arrive at aristocracy of the money-bag.

I grew up in a working class neighborhood in Sweden, which, during my teens, gentrified and is now completely middle class and even upper middle class.

It's quite an interesting time, the '20s, because the politics of England were changing quite a lot, and the class structure was starting to shift a little.

Slowly but surely the old establishment is being replaced by a new, larger, more meritocratic middle class—a middle class that will include millions of people who traditionally may see themselves as working class but whose ambitions are far broader than their parents and grandparents.

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.

My great-grandfather was prime minister of Canada, and I had a very Edwardian upbringing. It was a beautiful, romantic way of growing up, until the family lost its money. And I decided to be bad and rough and find the streets rather than the gates.

Robots are the new middle class. And everyone else will either be an entrepreneur or a temp staffer.

Every thing is moving and changing. Persons in poverty, are rising to opulence, and persons of wealth, are sinking to poverty.

As someone who came to New York in the 1970s, I was, like so many of my friends, a certified member of what we now call the 99 percent - and I was a lot closer to the bottom than to the top of that 99 percent. At some point during the intervening years, I moved into the 1 percent.

There has been a change in heroes within the working-class community

If there are indeed any iron laws of history, one of them is surely that in any major crisis of the capitalist system, a sector of the liberal middle class will shift to the left, and then shift smartly back again once the crisis has blown over.