Working Class Quotes

My mother was a teacher, my father was a community organizer. I come from a working class background.

I grew up in the suburbs, a calm suburb, without tension, with working-class and middle-class people mixed together.

The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I've met, and think they're incredibly witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.

We are committing ourselves to basic protections of our people... We will not permit banks to repossess the homes of working class and middle class people. That's the end of that, it is not negotiable.

And middle-class women, although taught to value established forms, are in the same position as the working class: neither can use established forms to express what the forms were never intended to express (and may very well operate to conceal).

I think neoliberalism is vulnerable to protest. And it's under protest because people are beginning to realize that these austerity policies are really market-driven policies designed to punish the poor, the working classes, and the middle classes by simply distributing wealth upwards.

You could say that the vote to withdraw from Europe is, it's really a vote of the British middle class, the working class, to withdraw from the U.S. neoliberalism that has been running Europe for the last ten years.

The working class must break up, smash the "ready-made state machinery," and not confine itself merely to laying hold of it.

When a doctor arrives to attend some patient of the working class, he ought not to feel his pulse the moment he enters, as is nearly always done without regard to the circumstances of the man who lies sick; he should not remain standing while he considers what he ought to do, as though the fate of a human being were a mere trifle; rather let him condescend to sit down for awhile.

The working class is my home country, and my future is linked with the proletariat.

I come from a very working-class background, so my family would have been downstairs in the past, as opposed to upstairs. People are often quite surprised to hear that, that I'm not actually posh.

There's no hall of fame for that working class hero, no statue carved out of stone. And his greatest reward is the love of a woman and his children.

If there ever was a poet for the working class Billy Joe Shaver and Merle Haggard would be my nomination

I'm a product of state schools. I had a working-class family. We had no books. I was the first to go to college. But I didn't really think about it, or about making money. I was just going to be an artist, and I've been fortunate. I've never had to work for anybody nor have I had to write for money. Maybe that's another reason that I've been able to be productive. I haven't had to use my writing to make a living.

We don't have enough folks who grew up in working class rural communities.

What's really striking here is that a candidate who ran as the Paladin of the working class who'd deliver them picks a guy who heads a fast-food company, [Donald] Trump says he wants to bring back manufacturing.

There's a lot of people talking about elitism and all of that.Yes, I went to Princeton and Harvard, but the lens through which I see the world is the lens that I grew up with. I am the product of a working class upbringing.

The thing about this [Donald] Trump phenomenon is that there's a lot of good stuff in it; the anti-elitism, the concern for working class jobs.

I project that this next election - the 2016 election - if it is about anything thematically, it is going to be about that sense of rage and displacement among white working-class voters.

We don't use the term 'working class' here because it's a taboo term. You're supposed to say 'middle class,' because it helps diminish the understanding that there's a class war going on.

I keep my house tidy, because then I can think clearly. I feel the same about myself. Presenting yourself well is a working-class thing - my dad was a printer, but he wore a tie most days. The ungroomed look belongs more to the middle classes.

That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.

Receiving far less attention are the working class heroes, who go about their solitary work routines with quiet dignity, come home from another grueling day, yet still find time to interact with their children.

My upbringing was middle-class but my parents' families were both working-class so I had this odd combination of working-class background but in a privileged position.

The working class of England take their deracination completely for granted. Disenchantment is the happy code that informs every byway of the underclass: service jobs, celebrity dreams, Lotto wins, leisured poverty on pre-crunch credit cards, it's all there, part of the story of an English people whose grandparents never had it so good.

Friends told me that the latest trend, at least in Europe, is public sex. They showed me some clips, and they're terrifying. A couple enters a streetcar, half-full, simply takes a seat, undresses, and starts to do it. You can see from surprised faces that it's not staged. It's pure working-class suburb. But what's fascinating is that the people all look, and then they politely ignore it. The message is that even if you're together in public with people, it still counts as private space.

I didn't want to be in the teeming mass of the working class.[...] I didn't want to live and die in the same place with only a week at the seaside in between. I dreamed of escape - but what is terrible about industrialisation is that it makes escape necessary. In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community - to society?

I'm not working-class: I come from the criminal classes.

People are very proud of Newcastle, very proud to come from here. This is a working class City and they just want to enjoy themselves and live life to the full. They work all week, pick their wages up at the end of the week and they spend it over a weekend by having a good time and watching the football. That's our life.

The greatest historical events in the twentieth century - in fact, in all of human history - have been the overthrow of capitalism and establishment of societies run by and for the working class in the two great communist revolutions in Russia and China.

I make films about working class people. All my films have always been about that. For example, the brothel is a workplace. It's aberrant, but a workplace nonetheless. I was more interested as opposed to glamorizing and saying, oh, this is a great erotic place, it's a place of business. The commodity is sex.

I'm not into branding - I'm trying to be organic to who I am on every level. I do really connect to being a part of the working class. Those are my roots. My family [consists of] farmers from Portugal, builders, housekeepers and stonemasons.

Bowie's death is a very emotional thing. My generation of working-class Britain, it feels like we lost our spiritual leader, our guru. I always thought that if I was to be a hundred, somehow Bowie would be a hundred and fifteen. He'd be there to still steer me and guide me.

I come from a pretty working-class neighborhood in Chicago. Hard work was just expected of you. It wasn't some noble thing you did; it was a prerequisite. It's what a man did. You get up, you put on your boots, and you work hard. We've lost a lot of that, I'm afraid.

It's very well known that the Republicans have problems with minorities. The Democrats have big problems with white people. Obama only got 39% of the vote. He only got 36% of the working-class white people.

My parents grew up working class, but in that way that working class families do, they spent a fortune on education to better me.

My experience growing up in London and growing up in a working class background, is that when people are down and out, that's when they're probably the funniest. They have to be. That's what they do to cope, to find joy, cause they don't feel the joy inside. Or they use humor to keep people out.

I'm from a pretty working-class background, and I really worked hard in my life to eradicate those parts of myself that were stupidly trapped in that world.Those of us who come up that way made a series of choices to benefit ourselves and make ourselves more generous and open.

If you want to really sort of quantify the dereliction of the Republican establishment, those two facts are the most important two facts. One, that they didn`t even understand the base of their own party, white working class voters who you know what, don`t care about tax cuts for the rich, really aren`t interested in the things that the elite part of their party want, including immigration reform. And number two, they spent eight months avoiding finding opposition research to use against the guy who was becoming the front-runner in their party that they don`t want.

Donald Trump is targeting the traditional Republican voters, the average person with an average income, the working class, a certain group of entrepreneurs and those people who embrace traditional values.

In the States everyone aspires to be middle class. It's so engrained into the American psyche: As long as you work hard you're going to be rich some day. The history of Britain is that if you're born working class, you're going to stay there, although that is changing.

Capitalism improves the quality of life for the working class not just because it leads to improved wages but also because it produces new, better, and cheaper goods.... Indeed, with capitalism, the emphasis shifted to producing goods as cheaply as possible for the masses--the working class--whereas artisans had previously produced their goods and wares mostly for the aristocracy. Under capitalism every business wants to cater to the masses, for that is where the money is.

In England we only make films about the working class or the aristocracy.

All the world suffers from the usury of the Jews, their monopolies and deceit. They have brought many unfortunate people into a state of poverty, especially the farmers, working class people and the very poor. Then as now Jews have to be reminded intermittently anew that they were enjoying rights in any country since they left Palestine and the Arabian desert, and subsequently their ethical and moral doctrines as well as their deeds rightly deserve to be exposed to criticism in whatever country they happen to live.

I was a working class Jewish girl. In my girlhood, anti-Semitism was a daily fact of life in Detroit. I did not come from people who had many options in their lives or many choices open to them. I was a girl in a family in which women were, as in society at large, very much second-class citizens. I did not see why I should accept these forced limitations without a fight. Being free to make my own choices thus became very important to me at an early age.

The People's democratic dictatorship is based on the alliance of the working class, the peasantry and the urban petty bourgeoisie, and mainly on the alliance of the workers and the peasants, because these two classes comprise 80 to go per cent of China's population. These two classes are the main force in overthrowing imperialism and the Kuomintang reactionaries. The transition from New Democracy to socialism also depends mainly upon their alliance.

Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

[French intellectuals] could never address themselves to the working classes. They don't know what it means, and that gives them a bad conscience about it. [Albert] Camus has a greater proximity to those in poverty.

If you want to get at African American poverty, the income gap, wealth gap, achievement gap, that the most important thing is to make sure that the society as a whole does right by people who are poor, are working class, are aspiring to a better life for their kids.

We did not adopt socialism out of books, abstractions, humanism, or pity, but rather out of need for the Arab working class is the mover of history in this period.