Class Quotes - Page 170

I know what it feels like to be in that middle and lower-middle class, and feel like the culture is passing you by; it translates into a great sense of personal frustration that can then morph into political frustration.

I was a journalism major, and I would take creative writing classes as part of that, but I would also look for opportunities to write stories for some of my other classes. So for my course in Scandinavian history, I asked if I could write historical fiction instead of term papers. Sometimes they’d say yes.

If... [Alban] Berg departs so radically from tradition, through his substitution of a symmetrical partitioning of the octave for the asymmetrical partionings of the major/minor system, he departs just as radically from the twelve-tone tradition that is represented in the music of Schoenberg and Webern, for whom the twelve-tone series was always an integral structure that could be transposed only as a unit, and for whom twelve-tone music always implied a constant and equivalent circulation of the totality of pitch classes.

I think in the '50s, the percentage of Americans employed by the private sector who were in unions was above 30 percent. And now it's in the single digits, so it plummeted. And with the plummeting of unions came the weakening of an organized working-class voice in politics.

Globalization looked like it was going to answer all the economic questions of class. Turned out not to be the case.

It used to be that the working class, broadly speaking - Americans who worked with their hands, who worked in factories, who were not in management - were an interest group, a political interest group. And their main spokespersons were the Democrats. Their platform was the Democratic Party. And that began to change after the 1960s. Not for black or other working class Americans, but for white working class.

The biggest issue for me is whether large numbers of Americans can begin to think that government can actually help make the country a fairer place. And that's partly a matter of policies that achieve results in terms of reducing inequality and raising middle-class and working-class incomes, which have been flat for decades. But it's also symbolic and rhetorical, it's whether Hillary Clinton can - or whoever's president - can persuade Americans that it's happening and that they can begin to trust their elected officials a little bit more and their institutions of government a little bit more.

Inequality saps the will to conceive of ambitious solutions to large collective problems, because those problems no longer seem very collective.

Inequality provokes a generalized anger that finds targets where it can--immigrants, foreign countries, American elites, government in all forms--and it rewards demagogues while discrediting reformers.

I reject absolutely the idea that people should know their place, and know their class.

If you ask any ordinary reader which of Dickens's proletarian characters he can remember, the three he is almost certain to mention are Bill Sykes, Sam Weller and Mrs. Gamp. A burglar, a valet and a drunken midwife-not exactly a representative cross-section of the English working class.

How right the working classes are in their "materialism." How right they are to realize that the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time!

The schedules are crammed with shows urging us to travel further, drive faster, build bigger, buy more, yet none of them are deemed to offend the rules, which really means that they don't offend the interests of business or the pampered sensibilities of the Aga class. The media, driven by fear and advertising, are hopelessly biased towards the consumer economy and against the biosphere.

If the members of a class do not understand -- if those directly addressed fail to listen, or listening, fail to recognize a power in the voice -- surely the fault lies with the speaker, who, having attempted to secure their attention and enlighten their understandings, has failed in the attempt.

The Class Clown album was done totally sober. I'd realized what a hell I'd made for myself and I cleaned up completely for three months. You can hear the clarity of my thinking and of my speech on that album.

I was a class clown, of the classic term for it. I would get the work done easily, and then I would try to deprive other people of their educations. I developed skills for mimicry, and I was a good showoff. I knew how to get attention, and I knew how to do it in a positive funny way.

Deep knowledge is not knowledge of the thing itself, but knowledge of a thing like the thing. Then, you gain not one knowledge, but two knowledges. Of the thing. And of the original thing with is like the thing. Which is the barbarism of the privileged class.

Democracy means the organization of society for the benefit and at the expense of everybody indiscriminately and not for the benefit of a privileged class.

The most sublime courage I have ever witnessed has been among that class too poor to know they possessed it, and too humble for the world to discover it.

Art is the one thing that's the universal virtue that you can have in any class.

My thing in high school was being the tallest kid in class. Always. I was always the tallest kid in class.

Women are in many ways second-class citizens in the United States in 2016, because of the way that we're portrayed in popular culture.

In France, like in most countries, the respect you receive depends on your class.

The French movies that are promoted abroad are the ones that give a trendy, cultural, petit bourgeois, upper class image of France, but it's true that people who are poor in France are the same in New York or in India.

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.