socioeconomic hierarchy Quotes

The economic owning class is always the political ruling class.

And so class will some day supplant race in world affairs. Race war will then be merely a side-show to the gigantic class war which will be waged in the big tent we call the world.

And what an example of the power of dress young Oliver Twist was! Wrapped in the blanket which had hitherto formed his only covering, he might have been the child of a nobleman or a beggar;—it would have been hard for the haughtiest stranger to have fixed his station in society. But now he was enveloped in the old calico robes, that had grown yellow in the same service; he was badged and ticketed, and fell into his place at once—a parish child—the orphan of a workhouse—the humble, half-starved drudge—to be cuffed and buffeted through the world, despised by all, and pitied by none.

The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.

The condemned social order has not been built up on paper and ink, and I don't fancy that a combination of paper and ink will ever put an end to it.

A democracy exists whenever those who are free and are not well-off, being in the majority, are in sovereign control of government, an oligarchy when control lies with the rich and better-born, these being few.

Whoring is like military service...okay in the upper brackets, not so good lower down.

The middle class is collapsing and we are moving toward an oligarchic form of society, where the billionaires will control the economy and the political life of the country.

Globalization is a form of totalitarianism... It is the rich who rule, and the poor live as they can.

The wealth of the well-to-do of an industrial society is both the cause and effect of the masses' well-being.

Abraham Lincoln was on the side of the social scientists when he said, "God must have loved the people of lower and middle socioeconomic status, because he made such a multiplicity of them.

The slaving Poor are incapable of any Principles: Gentlemen may be converted to true Principles, by Time and Experience. The middling Rank of Men have Curiosity and Knowledge enough to form Principles, but not enough to form true ones, or correct any Prejudices that they may have imbib'd: And 'tis among the middling Rank, that Tory Principles do at present prevail most in England.

You have to live among rich liberals to understand what they're saying. You'll never believe what they mean by 'middle class.' They mean themselves.

The man possessed of a dollar, feels himself to be not merely one hundred cents richer, but also one hundred cents better, than the man who is penniless; so on through all the gradations of earthly possessions - the estimate of our own moral and political importance swelling always in a ratio exactly proportionate to the growth of our purse.

Historically and politically, the petit-bourgeois is the key to the century. The bourgeois and proletariat classes have become abstractions: the petite-bourgeoisie, in contrast, is everywhere, you can see it everywhere, even in the areas of the bourgeois and the proletariat, what's left of them.

Americans ... do not naturally apply the term "bourgeois" to themselves, or to anyone else for that matter. They do like to call themselves middle class, but that does not carry with it any determinate spiritual content. ... The term "middle class" does not have any of the many opposites that bourgeois has, such as aristocrat, saint, hero, or artist - all good.

The lowest people are generally the first to find fault with show or equipage; especially that of a person lately emerged from his obscurity. They never once consider that he is breaking the ice for themselves.

Hitherto, every form of society has been based ... on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes.

Gross and vulgar minds will always pay a higher respect to wealth than to talent; for wealth, although it be a far less efficient source of power than talent, happens to be far more intelligible.

There is no country in which so absolute a homage is paid to wealth. In America there is a touch of shame when a man exhibits theevidences of large property, as if after all it needed apology. But the Englishman has pure pride in his wealth, and esteems it a final certificate. A coarse logic rules throughout all English souls: if you have merit, can you not show it by your good clothes and coach and horses?

You know well I couldn't bear to live with a low common man after you two; and it's wicked and cruel of you to insult me by pretending I could.

I was born into no true class and it was my decision early in life to insinuate myself into the middle class like a spy so that I would have an advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission, and to have taken my disguises too seriously.

Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. Nothing in the world was irrelevant: the stars on a general's sleeve, the stock-market quotations, the olive harvest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, flower-beds. Nothing. This order, fearful and feared, whose details were all inter-related, had a meaning: my exile.

The oligarchic character of the modern English commonwealth does not rest, like many oligarchies, on the cruelty of the rich to the poor. It does not even rest on the kindness of the rich to the poor. It rests on the perennial and unfailing kindness of the poor to the rich.