Middle Class Family Quotes

Mr. Cosby wanted to do a show not about an upper-middle-class black family, but an upper-middle-class family that happened to be black. Though it sounds like semantics, they're very different approaches. ~ Malcolm-Jamal Warner

I'm sure everything has a bearing on what I'm doing. My family is a lower-middle-class family, there's lots of children, seven brothers, two sisters grew up together, fighting with each other, went to school. My mother went to school up to 4th grade. My father went to school up to 8th grade. So that's about the education level we had in the family. ~ Muhammad Yunus

I never have issues in handling the fame. I was in a boarding school, as I am from a middle-class family. We didn't have a lot of money, so we all learned to respect money and understood its real value. ~ Suresh Raina

Liberals force lower middle-class families, who love their children, to dispatch them to ghetto schools dominated by gangs of fatherless boys bearing knives. ~ George Gilder

I came from Nebraska, a very middle class family with a progressive father. ~ Theodore C. Sorensen

TV has gone back to basics, relating to middle class family with real characters, less make-up and simple shots. I feel as an actor it is a delight to work in such shows. ~ Mona Singh

For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish ora German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making "ladies" dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase. ~ Stephanie Coontz

I was born in a poor family, a lower middle class family. My father was a clerk in the forest department. I was very bad at studies. I was not very good at sports, also. ~ Anupam Kher

I was born in Montreal and came from a lower-middle-class family. ~ Maureen Forrester

I refuse to accept any approach that isn't balanced. I'm not going to ask students and seniors and middle-class families to pay down the entire deficit, while people like me, making over $250,000, aren't asked to pay a dime more in taxes. ~ Barack Obama

I was raised in a solidly upper-middle class family who had really strong values and excess was not one of the things that my family put up with. And there's something wildy decadent about the young-star lifestyle, and I just don't really see the point. ~ Anne Hathaway

I grew up in an average middle-class family. I don't think I even knew any friends who were fostered or adopted. ~ Sherri Saum

Probably because I'm from a middle class family, I have that nature in me that I don't get too excited with big things. ~ Virat Kohli

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

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

I'm a girl from South Carolina. I was raised in a middle class family and decided to major in broadcast journalism and now I'm at the national level and that doesn't happen to most people and I realize that. I know that I'm very fortunate but this great country allowed that to work in my favor. ~ Ainsley Earhardt

I was always an avid reader of books. My vocabulary, my English are all thanks to that reading habit. Reading keeps me grounded. I came from a very middle class family - poor, in fact. ~ Madhur Bhandarkar

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

I come from an everyday middle class family in India. The film industry reached us only through our television sets and cinema halls. ~ Lavrenti Lopes

Being born into a prosperous middle-class family typically endows you with a safety net for life. If you are not naturally very bright, you are still likely to go far and, at the very least, will never experience poverty as an adult. A good education compounded by your parents' 'cultural capital', financial support and networks will always see you through. If you are a bright child born into a working-class family, you do not have any of these things. The odds are that you will not be better off than your parents. ~ Owen Jones

I grew up in a very loving middle class family. My parents were educators. I'm not even the first PhD in my family. They tried to shield me, just as other parents in my neighborhood tried to shield their children. But you knew there was a reason that you couldn't go to that theme park or to a movie theater or to a hamburger stand. They couldn't shield you completely. What they did though was they never let it be an excuse for not achieving, and they always said racism is somebody else's problem, not yours. They tried in that way not to make us bitter about Birmingham. ~ Condoleezza Rice

I grew up in a middle-class family in the middle of America in the middle of the last century. ~ Hillary Clinton

wir konnen warten. wissen macht frei [we can wait. knowledge liberates]. in these confident words the stalwart Ritter von Schmerling expressed the rationalistic expectations of the political process at the beginning of the liberal era in 1861.

at the end of that era, the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, scion of a cultivated middle-class family, offered a different formula for political success: politics is magic. he who knows how to summon the forces from the deep, him will they follow. ~ Carl E. Schorske

Do we really want to condemn as excessive the use of safety helmets, car seats, playgrounds designed so kids will be less likely to crack their skulls, childproof medicine bottles, and baby gates at the top of stairs? One writer criticizes "the inappropriateness of excessive concern in low-risk environments," but of course reasonable people disagree about what constitutes both "excessive" and "low risk." Even if, as this writer asserts, "a young person growing up in a Western middle-class family is safer today than at any time in modern history," the relevance of that relative definition of safety isn't clear. Just because fewer people die of disease today than in medieval times doesn't mean it's silly to be immunized. And perhaps young people are safer today because of the precautions that some critics ridicule. ~ Alfie Kohn

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

In the richest country in the history of the world, this Obama economy has crushed the middle class. Family income has fallen by $4,000, but health insurance premiums are higher, food prices are higher, utility bills are higher, and gasoline prices have doubled. Today more Americans wake up in poverty than ever before. ~ Mitt Romney

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

I was not from a middle-class family at all. I did not have middle-class possessions and what have you. But I had middle-class parents who gave me what was needed to survive in society. ~ Sugar Ray Leonard

When you have a comfortable and loving middle-class family, sometimes you yearn for a dance on the edge. This can lead to an overactive imagination, but it is also the reason why kids in Montana do meth. ~ Amy Poehler

I came from a middle-class family in Mexico, from a household full of women, in a country that is very machista. ~ Thalia

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

I'm from a middle class family but my father squandered all the money, so I didn't really run around with rich people. I was very judgmental towards a lot of them. ~ Benjamin Clementine

You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family, it's not as if it was happening up and down the street. It made me ashamed, I felt dirty. ~ John Le Carre

I quit my job and for almost two years I didn't tell anyone, not even my family or friends. And for those two years I enrolled in acting classes. I acted in some capacity every single day. ~ Jay Ellis

The most important obstacle to speed and ease of assimilation, however, is race. In the nineteenth century, swarthy Jews, "black" Irish, and Italian "guineas" - a not so subtle euphemism borrowed from the African country of Guinea - were all seen as what we today call "people of color." These immigrants terrified lighter-skinned native-born Americans, who accepted the newcomers as "white" only when they - actually, their descendants - began to earn middle-class incomes. Of course, skin color does not affect an immigrant's ability to absorb American culture. But color can play a large part in hindering economic and social assimilation: today's black newcomers, from the Caribbean and elsewhere, are often treated as part of the African-American population, with all the associated disadvantages. ~ Tamar Jacoby

Contemplation is a luxury of the middle class, the very rich. ~ F. Sionil Jose

As a woman of color who is interested in these issues of democracy and who wants to enact social change, Pilaf sees the Internet as a tool that perpetuates the corporate, white, middle-class hegemony of American consumer culture rather than a tool for revolution. Instead of viewing the Internet as a new outlet for activism and that opens up a world of communication, Pilaf sees the online communication and activism as an escape valve, a way to remove oneself from interactions with people. Although I disagree with her on this point, I'm very much aware that my ability to see the Internet as revolutionary comes from a place of privilege, in which I can think of the Internet as a sexual, political, and intellectual arena because I'm in a place (geographically and economically) where these are the very things that are my primary focus and concern. Although some of Pilaf's criticisms overlap with those technophobes who view the Internet as the devil's playground, her observations come from a very real, intense place of political and personal discomfort with forging ahead of digital culture and the casualties this 'progress' may leave. ~ Audacia Ray

I've decided to run for the U.S. Senate because I believe Wisconsin families need a senator who will work hard to deliver results for the middle class - a leader with the courage to do what's right, no matter how tough the odds or how powerful the special interests we have to fight. ~ Tammy Baldwin

Maintaining connections with family and community across class boundaries demands more than just summary recall of where one's roots are, where one comes from. It requires knowing, naming, and being ever-mindful of those aspects of one's past that have enabled and do enable one's self-development in the present, that sustain and support, that enrich. One must also honestly confront barriers that do exist, aspects of that past that do diminish. ~ Bell Hooks

I'm still very bullish on emerging markets. There's an emerging middle class. They're a growing group of customers. And frankly, they want Walmart. They want everyday low price. And that's why we are continuing to grow in the emerging markets around the world, too. ~ Mike Duke

I want people to know that movie stars live a normal, middle-class life. ~ Shah Rukh Khan

How remote we were too from the crazy musicians who arrived on a blustery fall day with the idea that, since this was a financial center, there would be a rain of coins from the tall buildings in response to their trumpet, guitar, and bass fiddle. The wind swirled their jazz among the canyons. I saw that no one was paying them the slightest attention. Feeling guilty, I threw them a quarter, but they didn't see it. They danced and made jazz in the cold, while upstairs we went on with our work, and they didn't exist, and it was nobody's fault. ~ Alan Harrington

Increasingly, staying in the middle class - let alone aspiring to become middle class - is becoming a game of chance. ~ Arianna Huffington

I became one of those anonymous Americans who tries to keep his mind sharp and inquisitive while performing all the humiliating rituals of the middle class ~ Pat Conroy

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

No middle class revolution can defend the barricades without a shower and a large cappuccino. You might as well fight them in yesterday's underwear. ~ J.G. Ballard

Hunger justifies the middle classes. ~ Julien Torma

Before, it was always, 'Oh, no, here comes Clancy, that insurance agent.' Now it's, 'Oh, here comes Tom Clancy, bestselling author.' But I'm still the same basic middle-class slob. ~ Tom Clancy

It can only benefit the city to have endless waves of exceptionally capable, even brilliant, folk unfettered by class and family connections. They change the world once a generation. That is certainly worth something. ~ Catherynne M Valente

Poverty is when a quarter is a fucking miracle. Poor is when a dollar is a miracle. Broke is when five dollars is a miracle. Working class is being broke, but doing so in a place that might not be so worn down. Middle class is is being able to own some toys and to live in a nice place... And rich is anything above that. ~ Linda Tirado

We weren't poor growing up on Long Island, but it wasn't lavish - just a regular middle-class house. ~ Criss Angel

What fragmented individualism really meant was what happened to a black man who tried to make it in this society: in order to succeed, he had to become an imitation white man - dress white, talk white, think white, express the values of middle-class white culture (at least when he was in the presence of white men). Implied in all this was the hiding, the denial, of his selfhood, his negritude, his culture, as though they were somehow shameful. If he succeeded, he was an alienated marginal man - alienated from the strength of his culture and from fellow black men, and never able, of course, to become that imitation white man because he bore the pigment that made the white man view him as intrinsically other. ~ John Howard Griffin

That's one of the problems with doing anything for a long time. Staying home, for instance. The longer you stay, the more you believe your identity is wrapped up in the people and things around you. You become trapped. It seems as if you fear change because you can't let go of this illusion of yourself as being what? The good granddaughter? The girlfriend who can't choose between her boyfriend and her family? Seems as if your fear of change is really just the same fear of death you mention in your first class. ~ Suzanne Morrison

IQ tests are routinely used as weapons against Black people in particular and minority groups and poor people generally. The tests are based on white middle-class standards, and when we score low on them, the results are used to justify the prejudice that we are inferior and unintelligent. Since we are taught to believe that the tests are infallible, they have become a self-fulfilling prophecy that cuts off our initiative and brainwashes us. ~ Huey Newton

They are the kind of people who are embarrassed by money, a dead middle-class giveaway. Poor people are not embarrassed by money and are contemptuous of those who are. ~ Rosellen Brown

I'm compared to Kerouac, I suppose, because he traveled and rejected middle-class values, but the similarities end there. ~ Poe Ballantine

This is the whistle-stop memoir of how a lower-middle-class girl from the north of England one day changed the way she lived her life and set off on a bumpy path that ultimately led her to her own slice of the happily-ever-after pie. ~ Tillie Cole

This advice comes as a surprise: job searching is not joblessness; it is a job in itself and should be structured to resemble one, right down to the more regrettable features of employment, like having to follow orders
orders which are in this case self-generated. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

One side of me is very busy paying attention to the details of life, the humanity of people, catching the street voices, the middle-class, upper-middle-class secret lives of Turks. The other side is interested in history and class and gender, trying to get all of society in a very realistic way. ~ Orhan Pamuk

How skillful to tax the middle class to pay for the relief of the poor, building resentment on top of humiliation! How adroit to bus poor black youngsters into poor white neighborhoods, in a violent exchange of impoverished schools, while the schools of the rich remain untouched and the wealth of the nation, doled out carefully where children need free milk, is drained for billion-dollar aircraft carriers. How ingenious to meet the demands of blacks and women for equality by giving them small special benefits, and setting them in competition with everyone else for jobs made scares by an irrational, wasteful system. How wise to turn the fear and anger of the majority toward a class of criminals bred - by economic inequity - faster than they can be put away, deflecting attention from the huge thefts of national resources carried out within the law by men in executive offices. ~ Howard Zinn

Not only the brothers on the street but the middle class brothers are also identifying with the gangster rappers because of the extent to which this music circulates. It becomes possible for the - not only the young middle class men, but it becomes possible for young middle class white men and young men of other racial communities to identify with the misogyny of gangster rap. ~ Angela Davis

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

Each civilization, each nation, each family, each profession, each sex and each class has its own history. Humans have so far been interested mainly in their own private roots, and have therefore never claimed the whole of the inheritance into which they were born, the legacy of everybody's past experience. Each generation searches only for what it thinks it lacks, and recognizes only what it knows already. ~ Theodore Zeldin

In every conversation I've had - with housewives in Mumbai, with middle-class people, upper-class, in the slums - everyone says there is an underlying consciousness of karma. That people believe in karma - that what you're putting out is going to come back. If I do something to you, the energy of it is going to come back to me in the future. ~ Deepak Chopra

The people in their overwhelming majority are so feminine by nature and attitude that sober reasoning determines their thoughts and actions far less than emotion and feeling.

And this sentiment is not complicated, but very simple and all of a piece. It does not have multiple shadings; it has a positive and a negative; love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie, never half this way and half that way, never partially, or that kind of thing. ~ Adolf Hitler

Look, there is a sort of old view about class which is a very simplistic view that we have got the working class, the middle class and the upper class, I think it is more complicated than that. ~ Ed Miliband

Loving comfort, risking little, terrified by the thought of change, (the middle class') aim is to establish a materialistic civilization which will banish threats to its complacency. It has conventions, not ideals; it is washed rather than clean. Thus the final degradation of the Baconian philosophy is that knowledge becomes power in the service of appetite. ~ Richard M. Weaver

A thriving middle class is the source of growth in a technological, capitalist economy. Investing in the middle class is the most pro-business thing you can do. ~ Nick Hanauer

A winner-takes-all economy that offers only limited access to the middle class is a recipe for democratic malaise and dereliction. ~ Klaus Schwab

It has been the strange fate of Tibet, once one of the most isolated places on earth, to function as a laboratory for the most ambitious and ruthless human experiments of the modern era: the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and now a state-imposed capitalism. After having suffered totalitarian communism, Tibetans now confront a dissolute capitalism, one that seeks arrogantly, and often violently, to turn all of the world's diverse humanity into middle-class consumers. But it seems wrong to think of Tibetans, as many outsiders do, as helpless victims of large, impersonal forces.
It is no accident that the Tibetans seem to have survived the large-scale Communist attempt at social engineering rather better than most people in China itself. This is at least partly due to their Buddhist belief in the primacy of empathy and compassion. And faced with an aggressively secular materialism, they may still prove, almost alone in the world, how religion, usually dismissed, and not just by Mao, as "poison," can be a source of cultural identity and moral values; how it can become a means of political protest without blinding the devout with hatred and prejudice; how it can help not only heal the shocks and pain of history- the pain that has led people elsewhere in the world into nihilistic rage- but also create a rational and ethical national culture, what may make a freer Tibet, whenever it comes about, better prepared for its state of freedom than most societies. ~ Pankaj Mishra

Among those who have everything, I have never seen a family go to the seashore just to celebrate a political decision, because for them politics changes almost nothing. This is something I realized when I went to live in Paris, far away from you: the ruling class may complain about a left-wing government, they may complain about a right-wing government, but no government ever ruins their digestion, no government ever breaks their backs, no government ever inspires a trip to the beach. Politics never changes their lives, at least not much. What's strange, too, is that they're the ones who engage in politics, though it has almost no effect on their lives. For the ruling class, in general, politics is a question of aesthetics: a way of seeing themselves, of seeing the world, of constructing a personality. For us it was life or death. ~ Édouard Louis

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

I'm hardly the first to point out that middle-class America has a parenting problem. In hundreds of books and articles this problem has been painstakingly diagnosed, critiqued, and named: overparenting, hyperparenting, helicopter parenting, and, my personal favorite, the kindergarchy. ~ Pamela Druckerman

You got to miss class to do it. Like, many periods of school. And then they took us to an elementary or middle school, and we told kids that they could be cool when they grew up even if they didn't do drugs. ~ Ilana Glazer

When it comes to America's economy, the truth is that Mitt Romney believes that the key to our country's economic future lies in the failed policies of the past, the same ones that put banks before people, Wall Street before Main Street, plunging us into recession and devastating the middle class. ~ Charlie Gonzalez

Unlike film and TV, theater is a luxury object, but one that ordinary middle-class people can still afford. Above all, it isn't a mass medium: Live theater is a small-scale, handmade art form. Intimacy is what makes it special. ~ Terry Teachout

That we could live in a country with no rules for the rich, no rights for the poor, and no middle class to speak of, is wrong; it's a crime against the next generation and we've got to do something about it. ~ Van Jones

Martha Ridgley had been a single, working-class woman with no children or close family. Her killer had never been caught, and her case was eventually forgotten.

But not by everyone - not by whoever had been paying the rent on Apartment #37 for over two decades until, for one reason or another, the lease was finally up.

The Woman in Apartment #37
by
John Mead
from
Book of the Dead ~ John Mead