The Americans never use the word peasant, because they have no idea of the class which that term denotes; the ignorance of more remote ages, the simplicity of rural life, and the rusticity of the villager have not been preserved among them; and they are alike unacquainted with the virtues, the vices, the coarse habits, and the simple graces of an early stage of civilization.
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59) French Historian, Political Scientist
Upper classes are a nation’s past; the middle class is its future.
—Ayn Rand (1905–82) Russian-born American Novelist, Philosopher
We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.
—George Orwell (1903–50) English Novelist, Journalist
Fit yourself for the best society, and then, never enter it.
—John Ruskin (1819–1900) English Writer, Art Critic
I weigh the man, not his title; ’tis not the king’s stamp can make the metal better.
—William Wycherley (c.1640–1716) English Dramatist
Mankind is divided into rich and poor, into property owners and exploited; and to abstract oneself from this fundamental division ;and from the antagonism between poor and rich means abstracting oneself from fundamental facts.
—Joseph Stalin (1878–1953) Soviet Leader
It is to the middle-class we must look for the safety of England.
—William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–63) English Novelist
The most perfect political community must be amongst those who are in the middle rank, and those states are best instituted wherein these are a larger and more respectable part, if possible, than both the other; or, if that cannot be, at least than either of them separate.
—Aristotle (384BCE–322BCE) Ancient Greek Philosopher, Scholar
Snobs talk as if they had begotten their own ancestors.
—Herbert Agar (1897–1980) American Journalist, Historian, Poet, Critic
By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.
—Friedrich Engels (1820–95) German Socialist Political Philosopher
The distinctions separating the social classes are false; in the last analysis they rest on force.
—Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born Physicist
When we say a woman is of a certain social class, we really mean her husband or father is.
—Zoe Fairbairns (b.1948) British Feminist Novelist
If experience has established any one thing in this world, it has established this: that it is well for any great class and description of men in society to be able to say for itself what it wants, and not to have other classes, the so-called educated and intelligent classes, acting for it as its proctors, and supposed to understand its wants and to provide for them. A class of men may often itself not either fully understand its wants, or adequately express them; but it has a nearer interest and a more sure diligence in the matter than any of its proctors, and therefore a better chance of success.
—Matthew Arnold (1822–88) English Poet, Critic
There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talent.
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish Historian, Essayist
I am his Highness dog at Kew; pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744) English Poet
The doctrine of human equality reposes on this: that there is no man really clever who has not found that he is stupid. There is no big man who has not felt small. Some men never feel small; but these are the few men who are.
—G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English Journalist, Novelist, Essayist, Poet
It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) American Philosopher
I simply contend that the middle-class ideal which demands that people be affectionate, respectable, honest and content, that they avoid excitements and cultivate serenity is the ideal that appeals to me, it is in short the ideal of affectionate family life, of honorable business methods.
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American Writer
People of quality know everything without ever having learned anything.
—Moliere (1622–73) French Playwright
Lady Hodmarsh and the duchess immediately assumed the clinging affability that persons of rank assume with their inferiors in order to show them that they are not in the least conscious of any difference in station between them.
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British Novelist, Short-Story Writer, Playwright
What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary.
—Frantz Fanon (1925–61) French-Martinique Psychoanalyst, Philosopher
The working-class is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman’s heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes.
—Matthew Arnold (1822–88) English Poet, Critic
Between richer and poorer classes in a free country a mutually respecting antagonism is much healthier than pity on the one hand and dependence on the other, as is, perhaps, the next best thing to fraternal feeling.
—Charles Cooley (1864–1929) American Sociologist
Real good breeding, as the people have it here, is one of the finest things now going in the world. The careful avoidance of all discussion, the swift hopping from topic to topic, does not agree with me; but the graceful style they do it with is beyond that of minuets!
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish Historian, Essayist
Aristocrats: Fellows that wear downy hats and clean shirts-guilty of education and suspected of bank accounts.
—Ambrose Bierce (1842–1913) American Short-story Writer, Journalist
I have to live for others and not for myself: that’s middle-class morality.
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish Playwright
An intelligent class can scarce ever be, as a class, vicious, and never, as a class, indolent. The excited mental activity operates as a counterpoise to the stimulus of sense and appetite.
—Edward Everett (1794–1865) American Politician, Scholar
A theory of the middle class: that it is not to be determined by its financial situation but rather by its relation to government. That is, one could shade down from an actual ruling or governing class to a class hopelessly out of relation to government, thinking of government as beyond its control, of itself as wholly controlled by government. Somewhere in between and in gradations is the group that has the sense that gov’t exists for it, and shapes its consciousness accordingly.
—Lionel Trilling (1905–75) American Literary Critic
Every attempt, by whatever authority, to fix a maximum of productive labor by a given worker in a given time is an unjust restriction upon his freedom and a limitation of his right to make the most of himself in order that he may rise in the scale of the social and economic order in which he lives. The notion that all human beings born into this world enter at birth into a definite social and economic classification, in which classification they must remain permanently through life, is wholly false and fatal to a progressive civilization.
—Nicholas Murray Butler (1862–1947) American Philosopher, Diplomat, Educator
At a round table there is no dispute about place.
—Italian Proverb
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