Economic Class Quotes

The leaders of the petty bourgeoisie must teach the people to trust the bourgeoisie. The proletarians must teach the people to distrust the bourgeoisie.

The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

If class warfare is being waged in America, my class is clearly winning.

Rich people acquire assets. The poor and middle class acquire liabilities that they think are assets.

Where people really base their principles has nothing to do with the color of someone's skin, it has to do with money and their class.

Rich men belong to another nationality entirely, no matter what their actual nationality happens to be. The nationality of the rich.

OUR leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.

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

Nine-tenths of the people are at present freeholders... The time is not distant when this country will abound with mechanics and manufacturers who will receive their bread from their employers. Will such men be the secure and faithful guardians of liberty? Give the votes to people who have no property, and they will sell them to the rich who will be able to buy them.

Liberty is impossible if 36 thousand families at the top of the economic pyramid get as much income as 12 million families at the bottom.

Our greatest political disease -- the disease of thinking that the community is divided into the relatively rich and the relatively idle, and the laborious poor, and that every social and political controversy can be resolved into the question: What side are you on?

Being poor is like being a child. Being rich is like being an adult: you get to do whatever you want. Everyone is nice when they have to be; rich people are nice when they feel like it.

I just think the whole discussion of class is wrong. It's not what we do here in America. I don't think there's anything called 'middle class values' that are different from the values of other people in this country.

I hadn't found out yet that mankind consists of two very different races, the rich and the poor. It took me ... and plenty of other people . . . twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my class and ask the price of things before touching them, let alone setting my heart on them.

I come from a middle-class family, but we are open-minded people.

I think that social migration to another economic class requires a kind of negotiating with yourself. And also, there's so much ambivalence in your heart about who you are and who you're really not.

I don't think we should stop emphasizing race because I think, you know, race is still very, very important, and we have to recognize that and continue to introduce programs to address racial inequities. But we have to widen our vision and also address the growing problems of economic class.

Well, first of all I think that we have to be careful with terms like the working class, obviously. When [Karl] Marx wrote about the working class he was writing about something much more bounded than we're talking about.

Apparently, there is no bad economic turn a conservative cannot do unto his buddy in the working class, as long as cultural solidarity has been cemented over a beer.

As a rule, large capitalists are Republicans and small capitalists are Democrats, but workingmen must remember that they are all capitalists, and that the many small ones, like the fewer large ones, are all politically supporting their class interests.

The difference between rich and poor", said Francie, "is that the poor do everything with thier own hands and the rich hire hands to do things.

As long as there's anybody that's poor or middle class, there will not be satisfaction that there are rich people. Not 'til we get rid of all the rich can we say we have finished the job.

I am as much opposed as any member here to worthless money, to depreciated money, but unquestionably it is the interest of the great mass of our people that we should have cheap money and dear property; I do not mean worthless money, but I mean cheap money as compared with the property which it buys. Property is held by the many and money by the few.

There is a huge class conflict going on which is usually denied in the public discourse.

My mom was a pretty hard worker. She worked her ass off, but I'd say we were middle class. I had a car in high school, so I loved the idea that I could mimic this lifestyle.