'Tanu Weds Manu's brilliance lies in the fact that it makes the middle class want to be aspirational.
When you look at a city, it's like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it.
'Black Messiah' is a hell of a name for an album. It can easily be misunderstood. Many will think it's about religion. Some will jump to the conclusion that I'm calling myself a Black Messiah. For me, the title is about all of us. It's about the world. It's about an idea we can all aspire to. We should all aspire to be a Black Messiah.
The middles cleave to euphemisms not just because they're an aid in avoiding facts. They like them also because they assist their social yearnings towards pomposity. This is possible because most euphemisms permit the speaker to multiply syllables, and the middle class confuses sheer numerousness with weight and value.
Black culture - we dance and sing. We're entertainers. James Brown said it best: the things we are make people want to be like us.
When I was six years old, I was always playing with the 10-year-olds. When I was 10, I was always playing with the 14-year-olds.
[William Jennings Bryan was] a poor clod, a peasant come home to the barnyard, motivated solely by the ambition of a common man to get his hand upon the collar of his superiors, or, failing that, to get his thumb into their eyes.
Our horizon is the creation of a noble society to which, like the medieval builder of those glorious cathedrals, you will have added your conception, your artful piece of stone.
The moral and social aspiration proper to American life is, of course, the aspiration vaguely described by the word democratic; and the actual achievement of the American nation points towards an adequate and fruitful definition of the democratic ideal.
Today, the general masses in this society are in this political-social condition that really encourages people to become rich and become a star and be unique.
Hey, you gotta love a gangsta girl. Even the suburban and preppy girls wanna be gangsta girls. That's the whole gimmick to it. Everybody wants to be a gangsta girl.
Celebrity culture is an aspirational culture regardless of how much you don't want it to be.
It seems to me that most people are interested in reading about characters who are richer than they are.
At a certain point in their existential experience, the oppressed feel an irresistible attraction toward the oppressor and his way of life. Sharing this way of life becomes an overpowering aspiration.
For somebody in my neighborhood to aspire or revere a person from the upper class, that is the most ugly and pathetic behavior you could exhibit.
For all its terrible faults, in one sense America is still the last, best hope of mankind, because it spells out so vividly the kind of happiness that most people actually want, regardless of what they are told they ought to want.
I think that society is aspiring towards racial indifference, but the reality of life is not that. And so when you meet someone, you can see their race - it's right there on their face - and I feel like it's interesting.
The working class of England today have no vision of society beyond the acquisitive - no version of themselves or their habits as anything other than transitional, on their way up or on their way out. The working class, at best, is a waiting room for people who aim to become middle class if possible.
I think people are learning to actually aspire to be objectified.
Marble flooring is to a Punjabi what a foreign degree is to a Tamilian
I set it down as a maxim, that it is good for a man to live where he can meet his betters, intellectual and social.
Seeking the invisible through the imagery of the visible, the Americans never can get quite all the way to the end of the American dream.
The health of a nation is not just about its consumption expenditures …. one of the things that makes America such a great nation, and why so many people aspire to this American ideal of middle-class security, is that it's about more than that. It's about more than how much you can purchase with the dollar. It's about this feeling of security and about being able to give your kids a better life than you had. And that is really the foundation—one of the major founding principles of our country
The measure of a society is not only what it does but the quality of its aspirations.
People want to feel aspirational; they want to feel that they can move to the next socioeconomic class.
