Class Structure Quotes

In England, the class system is about a thousand years old, and it's not going to change any time soon.

No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.

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

I think you could ask 10 English people the same question about class and get a very different answer.

One class did not overthrow another; the poor did not supplant the rich. But social relationships—the way people were connected one to another—were changed and decisively so.

I am accused of creating dukes, barons and knights. But who gave the white man the sole right to create the social order.

Political institutions are a superstructure resting on an economic foundation.

Influence must ever be in proportion to property; and it is right it should.

In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement.

No reform ever came from the bottom, and it was always people who understood how the ruling class worked who turned out to be the reformers.

Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.

It is hard to redistribute wealth of there is no productive class producing it.

What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary.

What I see happening to this country is a neo-caste system.

Those 25 dancers we worked with for a day, in as highly productive a way as possible - a long class, a period of teaching bits of the repertory - in fact I didn't teach Bank, I've used parts of Oil and Water.

Upward mobility across classes peaked in the U.S. in the late 19th century. Most of the gains of the 20th century were achieved en masse; it wasn't so much a phenomenon of great numbers of people rising from one class to the next as it was standards of living rising sharply for all classes. You didn't have to be exceptional to rise.

The economic owning class is always the political ruling class.

In democratic countries as well as elsewhere most of the branches of productive industry are carried on at a small cost by men little removed by their wealth or education above the level of those whom they employ.

The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black. And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.

The militia is filled with Children, Apprentices and Men of Low Rank ... as everyone who could pay a small Fine, thought it beneath them to appear on Muster.

Everyone has to contribute, or they become laborers.

The societal division of labor obtains the dignity of an ontological condition.

Class is a way of looking at society that divides people into different categories based on how much money they're willing to make.

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

I think there's really strong social stratification in South Asia.