Quotes & Sayings About Middle Class

In a sense the quest for the emancipation of black people in the U.S. has always been a quest for economic liberation which means to a certain extent that the rise of black middle class would be inevitable. — Angela Davis

Rather than showing themselves to be an ally to the middle class by ending the AMT or repealing it for years to come, my Republican colleagues refused to include it in today's legislation and America's middle class will surely suffer that choice greatly. — Ellen Tauscher

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

I regard affirmative action as pernicious - a system that had wonderful ideals when it started but was almost immediately abused for the benefit of white middle-class women. — Camille Paglia

To attain, and to keep, a professional-managerial job requires class-specific human capital. Developing and displaying that capital is a central preoccupation of upper-middle class life. — Susan T. Fiske

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers. — Camille Paglia

Yes, it is hard out there. But hard is relative. I come from a middle-class family, my parents are academics. I was born after the Civil Rights movement, I was a toddler during the women's movement, I live in the United States of America, all of which means I am allowed to own my freedom, my rights, my voice and my uterus. — Shonda Rhimes

Honestly, I grew up in pretty modest circumstances. We were a middle-class family. — Larry Gagosian

I did my BA in English lit, and hated the restriction - I'd always read more in translation than not; coming from a working-class background, what I knew of as British literature - the writers who made big prize lists and/or were stocked in WH Smith, Doncaster's only bookshop until I was 17 - seemed incredibly, alienatingly middle-class. Then in 2009, just after the financial crash, I graduated with no more specific skill than 'can analyse a bit of poetry'. — Deborah Smith

When journalists and politicians speak of a dwindling middle class that's under economic assault and a poor community that's getting bigger, they're talking about Ferguson. Independent of the racial demographics and dynamics of Ferguson, Missouri, there's a 'Ferguson' near you. — Jesse Jackson

The place where you got to get revenues has to come from the middle class. That's where the huge number of people that are there. So the system does need to be revamped [to tax the rich less and the middle class more.] — Orrin Hatch

Silence descended on the house. [....] Amma must have sensed that this was the sort of silence that, left unchallenged, could consume the family from within. — Vivek Shanbhag

Obama not only falsely represented the Republican position - as usual - he shamelessly pretended that he was The One 'fighting so hard to cut middle-class taxes.' Baloney! — Bob Beauprez

If facts are inconvenient, well, damn those who live and work with facts. — David Brin

I'd say that what I do is like a crack in the mirror. If you go back over the books from Carrie on up, what you see is an observation of ordinary middle-class American life as it's lived at the time that particular book was written. In every life you get to a point where you have to deal with something that's inexplicable to you, whether it's the doctor saying you have cancer or a prank phone call. So whether you talk about ghosts or vampires or Nazi war criminals living down the block, we're still talking about the same thing, which is an intrusion of the extraordinary into ordinary life and how we deal with it. What that shows about our character and our interactions with others and the society we live in interests me a lot more than monsters and vampires and ghouls and ghosts. — Stephen King

I was impressed with Jack [Kerouac]'s commitment to serious writing at the expense of everything else in his life. At a time when the middle class was burgeoning with new homes, two-tone American cars, and black-and-white TVs, when American happiness was defined by upwardly mobile consumerism, Kerouac etched a different existence and he wrote in an original language. — Sterling Lord

A Mother's Advice

Manners matter, regardless of your position in society. There is no excuse in this world to practice bad manners, especially at the table. I found that out in high school. I was invited to my boyfriend's house for dinner. His parents were somewhat formal, and I knew the dinner would be "fancy," at least in my mind. My family wasn't upper class (or even middle class), and my mother never had what would be called "social graces."
Before I left, my mother gave me a piece of advice: hold your head high, be quiet, and take the lead from his mother. Even though I was scared to death, I did what my mother advised and got through the experience with flying colors.
To this day, my mother's advice has gotten me through many difficult situations, especially ones that are totally new to me! With my mother's simple advice, I know I could dine with the Queen of England, just by following her lead. Thanks, Mother!

-Deborah Ford — Deborah Ford

One result of this productive system is that the middle class has grown from being about 15 percent of the population in 1920 to being 86 percent of the population in 2011. While some of the population always seem to live at the poverty line, the vast majority of Americans today are affluent compared to their grandparents. They have the money to buy the products produced by American industry. In the process, the definition of poverty has changed. The majority of Americans who are classified by the government as living at the poverty level have indoor plumbing, color television sets, cell phones, air-conditioning, washers and dryers, microwaves, automobiles, and access to free health care. They are also a significant buying group. — Arthur Hughes

I quite like the transitions of being an actor, because you get to explore these little pockets of life. So if you're playing a builder you get to know about building, if you're playing a scientist or a physician or something you get to know about physics. And similarly with this world I like exploring their culture, that very sort of upper middle class, addictive ... that's part of the reason I love it. — Matt Smith

I was born in 1923 into a middle class Jewish family in Vienna, a few years after the end of World War I, which was disastrous from the Austrian point of view. — Walter Kohn

The Democratic power elite on some level feels delegitimized by its working-class, black and female constituencies. What it wants are the "legitimate" votes of suburban, white, middle-class, affluent males. Even liberal voters and organizations tend on some tacit level to accept the idea that they are not the "real" Americans the Democrats must pursue. — Ellen Willis

As I wrote in Pastrix I, like any good middle-class mainline Protestant, tend to arrogantly look down my theological nose at talk of demon possession as superstitious snake-handling nonsense, as though it's the spiritual equivalent of a monster truck rally. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

The most sinister of all taxes is the inflation tax and it is the most regressive. It hits the poor and the middle class. When you destroy a currency by creating money out of thin air to pay the bills, the value of the dollar goes down, and people get hit with a higher cost of living. It's the middle class that's being wiped out. It is most evil of all taxes. — Ron Paul

I went to art school for about a year. I was born and raised in the Willamette Valley in Oregon into a middle-class family who didn't have the funds to say, "Here, kid. Here's your money for school." So I worked real hard during the summer and saved money and was able to go to school for a year and borrowed a little money which I paid back after that first year. — Mike Royer

An insular country, subject to fogs, and with a powerful middle class, requires grave statesmen. — Benjamin Disraeli

We lived a lovely, middle-class, suburban life in Philadelphia. And I really thought that the TV programs of the '50s, like 'Father Knows Best' and 'The Adventures Of Ozzie And Harriet' Nelson were documentaries filmed with hidden cameras in our neighborhood. — Richard Corliss

I don't mind the rich getting richer, but the poor shouldn't be getting poorer, and there should be more people moving into the middle class. — Dannel Malloy

Angst is for the Middle Class - Marcus in Rough Canvas — Joey W. Hill

The radical implication of the expansion of higher education has been disguised by a myth which dubs all educated working class people as middle class. By definition working class people are not intelligent, so if you've got a degree you must be middle class. This nonsense is reinforced by the fact that acedemic traditions are laden with class assumptions and are presented in upper class styles even in the Polytechnics. — Stefan Szczelkun

I'm just a public-schoolboy. I've got a degree. I'm from a middle-class family in Devon. I've got no story. — Chris Martin

Her aunt and uncle worked fifteen hours a day in their desperate attempt to keep the corner shop in profit, and their Sundays were marked by exhaustion. The moral code by which they lived was that of cleanliness, respectability and prudence. Religion was for those who had the time for it, a middle-class indulgence. — P.D. James

Unpleasant questions are being raised about Mother's Day. Is this day necessary? ... Isn't it bad public policy? ... No politician with half his senses, which a majority of politicians have, is likely to vote for its abolition, however. As a class, mothers are tender and loving, but as a voting bloc they would not hesitate for an instant to pull the seat out from under any Congressman who suggests that Mother is not entitled to a box of chocolates each year in the middle of May. — Russell Baker

Hunger justifies the middle classes. — Julien Torma

My mission is to raise incomes for hard working middle class families. If you work hard and do your part you should be able to get ahead and stay ahead. — Bernie Sanders

Thatcher forged consent through the cultivation of a middle class that relished the joys of home ownership, private property, individualism, and the liberation of entrepreneurial opportunities. — David Harvey

Cities with a black middle class provide the narrow minded an opportunity to realize that cultural differences are largely economic. — Dov Davidoff

I've always believed that the things middle class families struggle with around their kitchen tables should define my work in Washington. — Gary Peters

In middle school, I had this one teacher who would kick me out all the time. He just didn't like me. I could ask a person next to me to borrow a pencil, and he'd kick me out of class. Besides that, I've never been in trouble. — Arnaz Battle

Women in Jesus' day were less than second-class citizens. — Madeleine L'Engle

There are certain people in whom you can detect the seeds of madness - seeds that have remained dormant only because the people in question have lived relatively comfortable, middle class lives. They function perfectly well in the world, but you can imagine, given a nasty parent, or a prolonged bout of unemployment, how their potential for craziness might have been realized. — Zoe Heller

Middle class was defined by having certain values and only a certain amount of money. But this new middle class seems to have absolutely no values and an unlimited amount of money. — Fran Lebowitz

'Middle class' used to be synonymous with secure, with steady, with boring, because middle-class people were people who were pretty much safe from the time they first started work on through retirement and until their deaths. No longer. — Elizabeth Warren

Thus, towards the end of the eighteenth century a change came about which, if I were rewriting history, I should describe more fully and think of greater importance than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses. The middle-class woman began to write. For if Pride and Prejudice matters, and Middlemarch and Villette and Wuthering Heights matter, then it matters far more than I can prove in an hour's discourse that women generally, and not merely the lonely aristocrat shut up in her country house among her folios and her flatterers, took to writing. — Virginia Woolf

The most ironic outcome of the black Civil Rights movement has been the creation of a new black middle class which is increasingly separate from the black underclass. — Henry Louis Gates

This kind of inequality - a level we haven't seen since the Great Depression - hurts us all. When middle-class families can no longer afford to buy the goods and services that businesses are selling, it drags down the entire economy, from top to bottom. America was built on the idea of broad-based prosperity - that's why a CEO like Henry Ford made it his mission to pay his workers enough so that they could buy the cars they made. It's also why a recent study showed that countries with less inequality tend to have stronger and steadier economic growth over the long run. — Barack Obama

Latinos are concerned about the same pocketbook issues that matter to most middle class Americans - creating good-paying jobs in this country, making sure our children get a quality education, and ensuring that our families have access to affordable and quality healthcare. — Linda Sanchez

The cardinal rule of taxation is that whatever you put a levy on, you'll inevitably get less of. Taxing corporate activity means less investing, less hiring, fewer jobs and a smaller economy, which hurts the rich, the poor and the middle class alike. — Adam Davidson

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

This is one way that wealthy Americans could really contribute. They could put hundreds of millions of dollars into the infrastructure bank, be a good investment for them, for their children, for their grandchildren, and they would directly contribute to revitalizing a big sector of middle-class wages in America and making our country more productive, so that we could create more opportunity. But I think that we could get a lot of grassroots support from, like, local chambers of commerce and other things if they understood exactly how this infrastructure bank would work. — William J. Clinton

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

The American people know the economy is too weak. Too many of them are suffering. So the question for Washington is, are we going to continue to play political games and - and - or are we going to say, we can do something right now to create jobs, to put money in the pockets of the middle-class, hire construction workers, teachers, veterans? — David Plouffe

Congress had the opportunity to extend tax relief to working families without increasing the deficit. Instead, we were handed a bill that favors the wealthy and eliminates deductions that benefit the middle class. — Rick Larsen

Bill Clinton says the middle-class folks in Topeka who contribute to The 700 Club or Focus on the Family are radicals whose beliefs pose a mortal danger to this nation! — Don Feder

So, as middle-class families have been tumbling downhill, working-class families have been tumbling into poverty. And — Amy Goldstein

It is extremely interesting to live in a private house and to see the externalities, at least, of domestic life in a Japanese middle-class home. — Isabella Bird

I was born into a middle class family in New Jersey. My dad came home from serving in the Army after having lost his father, worked in the Breyers ice cream plant in Newark, New Jersey. Was the first person to graduate from college. — Chris Christie

I didn't actually know what the protesters in the West really wanted. It was fantastic here, so much freedom, and that was what they were calling musty, middle-class, and fascistic, a bleak period. Bleak was what the GDR was, and it alone had adopted, almost unchanged, Nazi Germany's methods of intimidation and ideas about propaganda and the use of force. — Gerhard Richter

The change in rhetoric has constituted a revolution in how people view themselves and how they view the middle class, the Bourgeois Revaluation. People have become tolerant of markets and innovation. — Deirdre N. McCloskey

The sense that materialism has gotten out of hand is magnified by the pressures facing middle-class American families. — Robert Wuthnow

Anti-smoking sentiment has replaced middle-class morality entirely. The smoker has taken the place of the homosexual. Today you hear people say things about smokers that used to be said about homosexuals
they pollute the environment; you don't want them around your children ... — Fran Lebowitz

And I will repeat today what I have said throughout this campaign. I will not raise taxes on the middle class. I will give you tax relief to help ease these burdens. — Hillary Clinton

We need the middle class to feel more confident about its prospects and about its future. We need to cut down on this anxiety that sees some people succeeding and the majority struggling - having to make choices between paying for their kids' education or saving for their own retirement. — Justin Trudeau

The class stared at the new girl with admiration. They had never met anyone like Gooney Bird Greene. She was a good student. She sat down at the desk Mrs. Pidgeon provided, right smack in the middle of everything, and began doing second grade spelling. — Lois Lowry

Well the thinking is we have the highest tax rate in the world. In the entire world, we have the highest tax rate. There's gridlock in Washington because there's no leadership. So what I'm doing is a large tax cut especially for the middle class and they're gonna- we're going to have a dynamic country. We're going to have dynamic economics. And it's going to be something really special. And people are going back to work. — Donald Trump

A quantified family would be upper middle class. Likely working in big tech," said Theodore. "Their employers would have required it." Piece by piece, the projectors filled in the available data on the house, including on the kitchen wall, a large screen of blurred graphs, smudged letters and numbers, all in motion. "This is the hearth," he said. "The data flickering at the heart of the family. Location, activity, well-being." He squinted at the screen. "Can you bring this into resolution? — Matthew De Abaitua

This, then, is the global significance of Chungking Mansions. It is a building of the periphery within a city of the core, a city located between the developing world's manufacturing hub and its poorest nether regions. It is a ghetto of middle-class striving within a city of wealthier middle-class striving, viewing its denizens with fear and scorn yet letting business as usual be the law of the day. Chungking — Gordon Mathews

Since the heady days of the 2009 Inauguration, middle-class independents have grown increasingly distant from Obama. Working-class voters - always more enamored of Clinton - have grown even more wary and distrustful of the Chicagoan. Both voting blocs pose the danger of serious defection in 2012. Without their support, Obama cannot win. — Douglas Wilder

To me, women's lib was mainly a white, upper-middle class affair of little use to a reservation Indian woman. — Mary Brave Bird

There is a new face to hunger today. Many of the people who come to food pantries and soup kitchens are people who never thought they would need help - people who were once part of the middle class and are now unemployed or underemployed - people who are struggling to get by from day to day and week to week. — Vicki Escarra

The United States is a country where practically everybody considers himself middle class. — Timothy Noah

The middle-class ladder has rungs that no longer exist for many trying to climb higher. Instead, for too many, in too many places, their chore is simply trying to hang on. — Mike Barnicle

I come from a wonderful family. My mother was a pianist and my father was a salesman. They were very middle-class, very middle-Western. — Charles Kimbrough

I basically believe that until China stop stealing our intellectual property, and until they stop keeping our companies out that do good things, the amount we will gain from export jobs is minimized, and the amount we lose in middle class incomes is maximized. — Charles Schumer

Bill Clinton has done more to help the middle class than any leader in decades. — Mario Cuomo

I think the state has some serious problems. Just look at the layoffs going on across the state, not just in Chicago. It affects the middle class. It pushes people down. — Richard M. Daley

I was born in a middle class Muslim family, in a small town called Myonenningh in a northern part of Bangladesh in 1962. My father is a qualified physician; my mother is a housewife. I have two elder brothers and one younger sister. All of them received a liberal education in schools and colleges. — Taslima Nasrin

When I think about the folks who are out there at home tonight watching ... They know that this country is not respected around the world anymore. They know that this country is pushing the middle class, the hardworking taxpayers, backwards, and they saw a president who doesn't understand their pain, and doesn't have any plan for getting away from it. — Chris Christie

The rise of the global middle class will pave the way for a new golden age in Australian society. — Asher Judah

Although it is a fantasy film, it's as real as it can be. You have to imagine that an audience will buy their ticket to a cinema and get on a first-class flight and journey to Middle Earth. — Orlando Bloom

I talked to lots of people who are vaccine-hesitant, and I actually was one myself until I got further into this project, and most of them actually are in my demographic: so well-educated people with advanced degrees who are upper middle-class and have read quite a bit on the subject. — Eula Biss

If this was a middle-class family in Alfheim, I didn't want to split a lunch tab with the one-percenters. — Rick Riordan

Because I came from the working class, I still identify with them. I don't identify with the middle class. — Allison Anders

Once Christianity became acceptable, and even mandatory, it lost the early poverty of spirit which sustained it when any group gathered together for bread and wine in his Name had to have one ear open for the knock on the door. But don't we ever have opportunities for poverty of spirit, we middle-class, comfortable Americans? We do, though what is asked of us is not as spectacular or as dangerous as what was asked of the first Christians. But it is our response to the small things which conditions our response to the large. If I am unable to be poor in spirit in the small tests, I will be equally unable in the great. There — Madeleine L'Engle

My brother and late sister and I were raised in Detroit; it was where the middle class across racial lines, the middle class was able to develop, build a home, have for the first time retirement benefits, have a job, and yes, their kids began to go to college. — Sander Levin

Urban development initiatives must match the aspirations of the middle class and the neo middle class. — Narendra Modi

The concept of a troubled, lonely, middle-class, gay fifty-eight-year-old living alone in dusty squalor in a chocolate-box cottage in the heart of the Cotswolds was a hard one to grasp in the context of his sweaty, noisy, hectic, foreign, red-light existence. — Lisa Jewell

My composition often goes toward the black middle class or the black super-wealthy or strong historical black figures. — Rashid Johnson

The black middle-class in America is a prosperous community that is now larger in absolute terms than the black underclass. Does its existence not suggest that economic adversity is the result of failures of individual character rather than the lingering after-effects of racial discrimination and a slave system that ceased to exist well over a century ago? — David Horowitz

I did not study science at school until I was 13, when I was totally turned on by a seemingly dreary old teacher who suddenly, unannounced, manufactured a huge explosion in the middle of a totally boring monologue. From then on, all of his class wanted to make explosions. — Robert Winston

I think the success of democracy is not really police security; it's the presence of a broad middle class. The stronger the middle class of a people is, the less you have to worry about one group coming in and exploiting the democratic process for its own ends. — Abdallah II Of Jordan

A knot grew in his chest. All signs of weakness, nerves, stress. He looked around him at the true examples of men - at least it seemed that way. Six years ago he had graduated from New York University, around the middle of his class in film school. He quickly learned that the middle meant "unemployable. — Derek Blass

If there are indeed any iron laws of history, one of them is surely that in any major crisis of the capitalist system, a sector of the liberal middle class will shift to the left, and then shift smartly back again once the crisis has blown over. — Terry Eagleton

Yanukovych has changed everything in Ukrainian jails - real criminals have been released, while representatives of the middle class and politically rebellious free-minded people have filled the prisons. — Yulia Tymoshenko

Let's not forget we created that ideal middle class by destroying all of our industrial competitors during World War II. — Jeff Greene

We are not going back to the failed policies of the past. We are fighting for the middle class! — Nancy Pelosi

Why would affluence make him mad?"
"Maybe he's mad that this is as good as it gets. Your big house. His good school. I think it's very difficult for kids these days, in a way. The country's very prosperity has become a burden, a dead end. Everything works, doesn't it? At least if you're white and middle class. So it must often seem to young people that they're not needed. In a sense, it's as if there's nothing more to do. — Lionel Shriver

The situation of women living in Islam-stricken
societies and under Islamic laws is the outrage
of the 21st century. Burqa-clad and veiled women
and girls, beheadings, stoning to death,
floggings, child sexual abuse in the name of
marriage and sexual apartheid are only the most
brutal and visible aspects of women's
rightlessness and third class citizen status in the Middle East — Maryam Namazie

And so whether it's failing to move forward on the Dream Act, failing to move forward on putting teachers back to work, failing to do all the things we could do right now to help the economy and middle class, this Congress is just saying no. — David Plouffe

Listen to the women. Women say exactly what they want. Who has concrete plans - not macroeconomics but kitchen table economics. Who will change the situation for their families, and help restore the middle class. Women are also sick to death of having their bodies and their lives treated as a political football. — Celinda Lake

Wealthy people are often criticized for being obsessed with money, but the truth is, it's the poor, working, and middle class that spend the most time thinking about it. — Steve Siebold