Quotes & Sayings About Upper And Lower Class

How often do the poor in the US get to stand in front of their nation's Marie Antoinette's and shove the stale, mass-produced cake of lower class reality back into their mouths? — M.B. Dallocchio

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

To prepare youth for success in entrepreneurial (and free) cultures, education tends to emphasize originality, creativity, breadth, depth and leadership skills rather than rote memorization, standardized curricula or socialization. The latter skill set is vital in societies with strong upper classes employing the lower castes, but the former is essential to free democratic nations. — Oliver DeMille

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

The whole famous Reign of Terror [of the 1790s] in fifteen months guillotined 2,596 aristos. The Versaillists [the anti-Communards of 1871] executed 20,000 before their firing squads in one week. Do these figures represent the comparative efficiency of guillotine and modern rifle or the comparative cruelty of upper and lower class mobs? — Guy Endore

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

We have here a forecast of the long history of American politics, the mobilization of lower-class energy by upper-class politicians, for their own purposes. This was not purely deception; it involved, in part, a genuine recognition of lower-class grievances, which helps to account for its effectiveness as a tactic over the centuries. As — Howard Zinn

When the Democrats are attacked for [inciting class warfare] they shrink back. They don't say what obviously should be said, "Yes, there is class warfare. There has always been class warfare in this country." The reason the Democrats shrink back is because the Democrats and the Republicans are on the same side of the class war. They have slightly different takes. The Democrats are part of the upper class that is more willing to make concessions to the lower class in order to maintain their power. — Howard Zinn

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

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

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

Look at All of them.they always feel that school is like a family. No one is upper or lower class except for few people who never really understood themselves. — Fahmid Hassan Prohor

These people - the employed, the somewhat privileged - are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls. — Howard Zinn

Professor Landry was a prime example of someone who marched to the beat of her own drum, as evidenced by her policy that no one precede her name with Professor. She firmly believed that titles had been created to distinguish the upper class from the lower class, and she wanted no part in perpetuating socio-economic stereotypes. So she either went by Landry, Neve, or Hey, you. She didn't really care, so long as the word "professor" never echoed off the walls she was within. She — Nicole Williams

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

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

(Charles Morgan, Jr., Southern Director of the ACLU in 1966, upon seeing conditions in the Jefferson County jail):

...I knew that [Southern whites] would have annihilated blacks had they been more literate and less useful. In Hitler's Germany armbands identified Jews. Those with black skin could have been annihilated more easily. But they were the labor pool with which to break strikes. They served as the pickers of cotton, the diggers of ditches. They emptied bedpans and cleaned the outhouses of our lives. Uneducated, property-less, disenfranchised, and excluded from justice, except as defendants, they were no threat to whites. While they remained useful and didn't get 'out of line,' their lives were assured, for no matter how worthless lower-class white folks said blacks were, the rich, well born, and able upper-class whites knew that they and black folks were really the only people indispensably required by Our Southern Way of Life. (188) — Wayne Greenhaw

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

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

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

Like overzealous religious converts, climbers originally from the lower rungs of society tend to go overboard when they ape the upper class. — Maureen Corrigan

Generosity toward the lower classes historically has never been an important part of upper-class awareness. — Michael Parenti

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

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 am not afraid of the priests in the long-run. Scientific method is the white ant which will slowly but surely destroy their fortifications. And the importance of scientific method in modern practical life
always growing and increasing
is the guarantee for the gradual emancipation of the ignorant upper and lower classes, the former of whom especially are the strength of the priests. — Thomas Huxley

The trouble with the lower classes is that they lack the sense of tragedy given to them by the upper classes. — Oscar Wilde

[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

Look at the high and the low, all the world over, and it's the same story, - the lower class used up, body, soul and spirit, for the good of the upper. — Harriet Beecher Stowe

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

A broad definition of crime in England is that it is any lower-class activity that is displeasing to the upper class. — David Frost

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

Conservatism, being an upper-class characteristic, is decorous; and conversely, innovation, being a lower-class phenomenon, is vulgar ... Innovation is bad form. — Thorstein Veblen