Lower Middle Class Quotes & Sayings

Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class. — Matthew Arnold

I will jump on anybody's private plane at the drop of a hat. I'm an old-fashioned lower-middle-class boy. — Eric Idle

There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class. — Judith Martin

Compared with the mobilization of all opponents to the government as such, the capturing of lower middle-class votes was a temporary phenomenon. — Hannah Arendt

They cannot divide us by saying that you're middle class or you're lower class. — H. Rap Brown

I like the idea of accessibility, coming from a lower-middle-class background myself, I feel like beauty and products should be accessible to all women over the world. — Diane Kruger

I want to lower taxes for the middle class. — Donald Trump

Capitalism in the 19th century did not doom the worker to a life of perpetual poverty. Instead, they kept creating new and better-paying employments as the decades went by. They produced the wealth and rising income that resulted in the emergence of a phenomenon completely new to human history: a self-supporting and educated middle class that grew more and more as they lower classes bettered their economic well-being. — Richard Ebeling

I am not an economic determinist. If I were, I would throw up my hands; I just would not bother. I think it's wrong to be an economic determinist. I think it's wrong to simply say, "Well, inevitably, if you're poor, you're going to get a lousy education; if you're lower-middle class, the cards are going to be stacked against you, and you'll probably never get anywhere." — Robert Reich

Everything is about class in England, whether it's upper, lower or middle. Why should that be? — Francesca Annis

Which class is happiest, the rich, the middle class or the poor? A very successful executive of a large organization touches upon this vital subject in a long letter to all his salesmen. He uses as his text a passage from Robinson Crusoe which included this: ""My Father bid me observe it, and I should always find that the calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind; but that the middle station had the fewest disasters, and were not exposed to so many vicissitudes as the higher or lower part of mankind. — B.C. Forbes

It is a function of entrenched, intergenerational poverty that isolates too many lower-income Americans from even middle-class economic, cultural, and social opportunities and norms. — Yuval Levin

The coach passed by many buildings of this sort, which would no doubt be little palaces to the occupants, who had escaped from Cockbill Street and Pigsty Hill and all the other neighbourhoods where people still dreamed that they could 'better themselves', an achievement that might be attained, oh happy day, when they had 'a little place of their own'. It was an inspiring dream, if you didn't look too deeply into words like mortgage and repayments and repossession and bankruptcy, and the lower middle classes of Ankh-Morpork, who saw themselves as being trodden on by the class above and illegally robbed by the one below, lined up with borrowed money to purchase, by instalments, their own little Oi Dong — Terry Pratchett

Because of England's lack of social mobility, unless they make truly heroic efforts, writers who are privately educated and then go on to Oxbridge or an institution like the BBC will generally embarrass themselves when they attempt to have a go at working- or lower middle-class characters. — Adrian McKinty

Liberals force lower middle-class families, who love their children, to dispatch them to ghetto schools dominated by gangs of fatherless boys bearing knives. — George Gilder

For 40 years, the American middle class has been disappearing. Millions of people are working longer hours for lower wages despite a huge increase in technology and productivity. And what we have seen during that period is a massive transfer of trillions of dollars from the middle class to the top one-tenth of 1 percent of America — Lindsey Graham

I'm sure everything has a bearing on what I'm doing. My family is a lower-middle-class family, there's lots of children, seven brothers, two sisters grew up together, fighting with each other, went to school. My mother went to school up to 4th grade. My father went to school up to 8th grade. So that's about the education level we had in the family. — Muhammad Yunus

First impressions of mediaeval life are usually coloured by the courtly romances of Malory and his later refiners. Chaucer brings us down to reality, but his people belong to a prosperous middle-class world, on holiday and in holiday mood. Piers Plowman stands alone as a revelation of the ignorance and misery of the lower classes, whose multiplied grievances came to a head in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. — William Langland

I'm from a lower middle class background; all my family were immigrants. — Billy Corgan

The taste of the more recent accessions to the leisure class proper and of the middle and lower classes still requires a pecuniary beauty to supplement the aesthetic beauty, even in those objects which are primarily admired for the beauty that belongs to them as natural growths. — Thorstein Veblen

Canada was settled, in the main, by people with a lower middle-class outlook, and a respect, rather than an affectionate familiarity, for the things of the mind. — Robertson Davies

We will lower the tax burden on middle class Americans by asking the very wealthy to pay their fair share. Middle class taxpayers will have a choice between a children's tax credit or a significant reduction in their income tax rate. — William J. Clinton

I noticed, rich people never toss away their pennies in their driveways, middle-class always chuck them there, and stray dogs lick up what little pennies they find on poverty ground. — Anthony Liccione

This is the whistle-stop memoir of how a lower-middle-class girl from the north of England one day changed the way she lived her life and set off on a bumpy path that ultimately led her to her own slice of the happily-ever-after pie. — Tillie Cole

The contented and economically comfortable have a very discriminating view of government. Nobody is ever indignant about bailing out failed banks and failed savings and loans associations. But when taxes must be paid for the lower middle class and poor, the government assumes an aspect of wickedness. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Many of the lower middle class are members of labor unions, churches, bowling clubs, fraternal, service, and nationality organizations. They are organizations and people that must be worked
with as one would work with any other part of our populations - with respect, understanding, and sympathy. — Saul Alinsky

I would like very much to see the American people saying to our Republican colleagues and some Democratic colleagues: Excuse me. Don't force my kids to have a lower standard of living in order to give tax breaks to the richest people. What the President and all of us should be doing is going out and saying to those people: Call the Members of the Senate, call the Members of the House and say: Excuse me. How about representing the middle class and working families, for a change, rather than the wealthiest people. That is what democracy is about. — Bernie Sanders

I was born in a poor family, a lower middle class family. My father was a clerk in the forest department. I was very bad at studies. I was not very good at sports, also. — Anupam Kher

All of my lower-middle-class Boston issues rose to the surface. I don't like it when bratty, privileged old white guys speak to me like I am their mouthy niece. I got that amazing feeling you get when you know you are going to lose it in the best, most self-righteous way. I just leaned back and yelled, "FUUUUUUUUUUUUCK YOU." Then I chased him as he tried to get away from me. — Amy Poehler

I think the ultimate challenge is to have some kind of style and grace, even though you haven't got money, or standing in society, or formal education. I had a very middle, lower-middle class sort of upbringing, but I identify with people who've had, at some point in their lives to struggle to survive. It adds another color to your character. — Madonna Ciccone

The American middle class always wants to be upper class and is scared to death of being lower class. It's a highly mobile group of people. They're not like the people that want to be shopkeepers forever, have always been shopkeepers and want always to be shopkeepers. These people mostly are insulted by being called middle class. — Sloan Wilson

A very large part of English middle-class education is devoted to the training of servants ... In so far as it is, by definition, the training of upper servants, it includes, of course, the instilling of that kind of confidence which will enable the upper servants to supervise and direct the lower servants. — Raymond Williams

A person like myself, born and raised in the inner city of Atlanta, Georgia, to lower-middle-class parents. But I had the opportunity to get an education, to go and earn a commission in the United States Army, to serve for 22 years, to lead men and women in combat. — Allen West

Morality is only for the middle class, sweet. The lower class can't afford it, and the upper classes have entirely too much leisure time to fill — Lisa Kleypas

Bemoan being lower-middle-class and colored in a police state that protects only rich white people and movie stars of all races, though I can't think of any Asian-American ones. — Paul Beatty

I was born in Montreal and came from a lower-middle-class family. — Maureen Forrester

I was a lower middle-class kid. My family had no money. There was no room in our small house where there were already four kids, including myself, living. — Patti Smith

Welfare corrupts the lower class much faster than the middle class. — James Cook

The rich survive and everyone else gets ready to work 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 jobs and what do you get? Blade Runner. Welcome to your science fiction. Your 21st century. I think that's where it goes. The rich get richer and everyone else ... the middle class kind of starts dropping lower and lower. — Henry Rollins

You know, without China there is no Wal-Mart and without Wal-Mart there is no middle class and lower class prosperity in the United States. — Arthur Laffer

The upper class desire to remain so, the middle class wish to overthrow the upper class, and the lower class want a classless system. — George Orwell

Another part of Bit's unifying urban theory is sprinklers, that you can gauge a neighborhood's wealth by the way people water. If every house has an automatic system, you're looking at a six-figure mean. If the majority lug hoses around, it's more lower-middle class. And if they don't bother with the lawns ... well, that's the sort of shitburg where Bit and Julie always lived, except for that little place they rented in Wenatchee the summer Bit worked at the orchard. — Jess Walter

She was not granted the luxury of forgetting her lower middle-class existence where life hangs by an unseen thread to every hope and where every slash of disappointment shrinks the life further. — Madhu Vajpayee

All fear of 'offensive' speech is bourgeois and reactionary. Historically, profane or bawdy language was common in both the upper and the lower classes, who lived together in rural areas amid the untidy facts of nature. Notions of propriety and decorum come to the fore in urbanized periods ruled by an expanding middle class, which is obsessed with cleanliness, respectability, and conformism. — Camille Paglia

Contrary to the rhetoric emanating from the American left, the 'rich' are currently paying a lot more than 'their fair share.' It is only a handful of mega-rich, those whose entire incomes are derived from dividends and capital gains, rather than salaries or business profits, who have the ability to pay lower tax rates than some members of the middle class. The left knows this but continues to build their 'freeloading millionaire' straw man because it makes good politics. — Peter Schiff

I came from a lower-middle-class postwar family in a time of austerity and retrenchment, with no one in the family who was in any way artistic or a potential mentor to a budding writer, and yet this is what I became. — Graham Swift

We have seen, then, that certain socioeconomic changes, notably the decline of the middle class and the rising power of monopolistic capital, had a deep psychological effect ... Nazism resurrected the lower middle class psychologically while participating in the destruction of its old socioeconomic position. It mobilized its emotional energies to become an important force in the struggle for the economic and political aims of Germain imperialism. — Erich Fromm

The CDO was, in effect, a credit laundering service for the residents of Lower Middle Class America. For Wall Street it was a machine that turned lead into gold. — Michael Lewis

I cannot take away the fact I am a small-town boy from India, from a lower-middle class family, and was actually standing in front of De Niro - not on an equal level, but as an actor, on the same pedestal. — Anupam Kher

THE AFRO-AMERICAN HAS BEEN HEIR TO THE MYTHS THAT IT IS BETTER TO BE POOR THAN RICH, LOWER-CLASS RATHER THAN MIDDLE OR UPPER, EASYGOING RATHER THAN INDUSTRIOUS, EXTRAVAGANT RATHER THAN THRIFTY AND ATHLETIC RATHER THAN ACADEMIC. — John Connolly

I once heard Jerry Yang, the cofounder of Yahoo!, quote a senior Chinese government official as saying, "Where people have hope, you have a middle class." I think this is a very useful insight. The existence of large, stable middle classes around the world is crucial to geopolitical stability, but middle class is a state of mind, not a state of income. That's why a majority of Americans always describe themselves as "middle class," even though by income statistics some of them wouldn't be considered as such. "Middle class" is another way of describing people who believe that they have a pathway out of poverty or lower-income status toward a higher standard of living and a better future for their kids. — Thomas L. Friedman

[Historian] Kevin Starr has written that "the San Diego free speech battles revealed the depths of reaction possible in the threatened middle- and lower-middle classes of California." He argues that vigilantes were recruited from an anxious petty bourgeoisie, "who were uncertain and insecure in what they had gained or thought they had gained by coming to California." As in late Weimar Germany, "the oligarchy, which is to say, the upper-middle and upper classes, loathed and feared the [Industrial Workers of the World]; but oligarchs did not take to the streets as vigilantes. They did, however, encourage the lower-middle classes to do such work. — Justin Akers Chacon

I was brought up in a very naval, military, and conservative background. My father and his friends had very typical opinions of the British middle class - lower-middle class actually - after the war. My father broke into the middle class by joining the navy. I was the first member of my family ever to go to private school or even to university. So, the armed forces had been upward mobility for him. — Christopher Hitchens

Some popular quotations smell of airless closets. They exhale the stale imagination of the intellectual lower middle class. "Suspension of disbelief" has become one of them. Dressed up as a scintillating double negation, it serves the pedestrian notion of art as illusion. — Rudolf Arnheim

Let's face the reality that if OJ Simpson had been poor or even lower-middle-class there would have been no media attention. Justice was never a central issue. Our nation's tabloid passion to know about the lives of the rich made class a starting point. — Bell Hooks

War is rich old men protecting their property by sending middle class and lower class young men off to die. It always has been. — George Carlin

Yet alongside this rebellion against the father, a respect for and acceptance of his authority continued to exist. This ambivalent attitude toward authority - rebellion against it coupled with acceptance and submission - is a basic feature of every middle-class structure from the age of puberty to full adulthood and is especially pronounced in individuals stemming from materially restricted circumstances. — Wilhelm Reich

I'm not working class anymore,' he said. 'I'm lower-middle. I use three types of oil in my kitchen. Admittedly one of them is WD-40, but that counts, doesn't it? — Christopher Fowler

Viveca's clients were mostly upper-middle class and lower-upper class.Being of these classes , they're easily offended. — Gillian Flynn

The golden years become lower-middle-class life revisited. That's a bittersweet ending. — Timothy Ferriss

Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes. — Howard Zinn

In general, I think what Donald Trump's message is, is: I'm a very practical, execution-oriented entrepreneur who built a successful business. I've demonstrated an ability to go global with my business. I can get along with a lot of different people. There are certain problems in the United States right now born from faulty policy. So what is happening right now is the lower and middle class are being left behind by the globalization and by the global elite. I think that's basically his message, and Bernie Sanders' is similar. — Anthony Scaramucci

On a recent HBO special, Roseanne Arnold, who, incidentally, collects Barbies, excoriated what she considered to be Barbie's middle-class-ness. Why didn't Mattel make, say, "trailer-park Barbie"? But to many upper-middle-class women, all post-1977 Barbies are Trailer Park Barbie. Ironically, given the knee-jerk antagonism to Barbie's body, it is one of her few attributes that doesn't scream "prole." Her thinness - indicative of an expensive gym membership and possibly a personal trainer - definitely codes her as middle- or upper-middle-class. In Distinction, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu notes that "working class women . . . are less aware of the 'market' value of beauty and less inclined to invest . . . sacrifices and money in cultivating their bodies." Likewise, Barbie's swanlike neck elevates her status. A stumpy neck is a lower-class attribute, Fussell says. — M.G. Lord

The people in their overwhelming majority are so feminine by nature and attitude that sober reasoning determines their thoughts and actions far less than emotion and feeling.

And this sentiment is not complicated, but very simple and all of a piece. It does not have multiple shadings; it has a positive and a negative; love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie, never half this way and half that way, never partially, or that kind of thing. — Adolf Hitler

So more than a century ago, everyone agreed: No more indentured servitude. But today's employers have conspired to bring it back with H-1B visas, then they strut around like they're Martin Luther King by invoking the magical word "immigration." Immigration covers a multitude of sins because we have all agreed to pretend mass immigration from the Third World is the same thing as black civil rights. In the 1960s, leftists were at least self-destructive: They wanted to damage the country in ways that would hurt them, their parents, and their kids. The New Left has found a way to be self-righteous only after checking to make sure they've completely exempted themselves from the destruction they're wreaking. Liberals will pull every string imaginable to prevent their own kids from having to compete with immigrants - and then demand cheap employees for themselves. The middle class and lower class take it in the shorts - and the elites get to feel noble. — Ann Coulter

The child of the lower or lower middle class is urged in both overt and subtle ways to surpass his background, his well-meaning parents and friends never anticipating that if their dream of upward mobility is realized, the child may adopt the prejudices of the class to which he's lifted and, with a touch of neurotic distress, may permanently scorn his former life and also, to a certain extent, himself, since the class he's invaded is unlikely to accept him fully. — John Gardner

The free enterprise concept inherent in the economic model of capitalism should mean common people, or lower and middle class wage-earners, have greater potential to rise up and gain financial independence. In reality, however, free enterprise all too often leads to an almost total lack of government regulation that in turn allows the global elite to run amuck in Gordon Gecko-style financial coups. — James Morcan

In economic panics throughout history, the wiping out of the savings accounts of lower earners and the middle class has often led to social revolution, sometimes violent upheavals. — Nick Clooney

Inequality has the natural and necessary effect, under the present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class. — Matthew Arnold

I do believe that we should substantially lower student debt in this country, which is crushing millions of people. We pay for it, in my view, by a tax on Wall Street speculation. The middle class bailed out Wall Street in their time of need. Now, it is Wall Street's time to help the middle class. — Bernie Sanders

I grew up in an all-black neighbourhood in Decatur, Georgia - a kinda lower-middle-class area. — Keri Hilson

The lower strata of the middle class - the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants - all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by the new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population. — Karl Marx

Left-leaning policies - I'm 52 years old, I've been to Cuba, I've been to dysfunctional state oriented places - left-leaning policies fail the lower and middle classes. — Anthony Scaramucci

We owe to every businessperson and worker in America the best environment in the world to create a job. We owe that to American businesses. Thirty-five percent corporate tax rate is the second highest in the world. We need to lower it so they don't leave. The goal is to help the middle class. — Lindsey Graham

Trend-setters are members of upper classes who adopt the styles of lower classes to differentiate themselves from middle classes, who wouldn't be caught dead in lower-class styles because they're the ones in danger of being mistaken for them. — Steven Pinker

In a process that had begun in the 1980s and suddenly accelerated in the early 2000s ... [t]he peaks of great wealth grew higher, rising up beyond the clouds, while the valleys of poverty sank lower into perpetual shadow. The once broad plateau of the middle class eroded away into a narrow ledge, with the white-knuckled occupants holding on for dear life. — Barbara Ehrenreich

I think what Donald Trump is saying to people is that America has way more leverage at the negotiating table than America has used in the past. And whether you like it or not, the government and trade representatives have made the decision not to use that leverage. And it has had an economic impact on the lower and middle class. — Anthony Scaramucci

If anything, taxes for the lower and middle class and maybe even the upper middle class should even probably be cut further. But I think that people at the high end - people like myself - should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we've ever had it. — Warren Buffett