Social Classes Quotes

Sport must be the heritage of all men and of all social classes. ~ Pierre De Coubertin

If dominating and destructive relations to the earth are interrelated with gender, class, and racial domination, then a healed relation to the earth cannot come about simply through technological 'fixes'. It demands a social reordering to bring about just and loving interrelationship between men and women, between races and nations, between groups presently stratified into social classes, manifest in great disparities of access to the means of life. In short, it demands that we must speak of eco-justice, and not simply of domination of the earth as though that happened unrelated to social domination. ~ Rosemary Radford Ruether

Thus, for an adequate interpretation of the differences found between the classes or within the same class as regards their relation to the various legitimate arts, painting, music, theatre, literature etc., one would have to analyse fully the social uses, legitimate or illegitimate, to which each of the arts, genres, works or institutions considered lends itself. For example, nothing more clearly affirms one's 'class', nothing more infallibly classifies, than tastes in music. ~ Pierre Bourdieu

There is simply nothing so important to a people and its government as how many of them there are, whether their number is growing or declining, how they are distributed as between different ages, sexes, and different social classes and racial and ethnic groups, and again, which way these numbers are moving. ~ Daniel Patrick Moynihan

There are two social classes in Pakistan," Professor Superb said to his unsuspecting audience, gripping the podium with both hands as he spoke. "The first group, large and sweaty, contains those referred to as the masses. The second group is much smaller, but its members exercise vastly greater control over their immediate environment and are collectively termed the elite. The distinction between members of these two groups is made on the basis of control of an important resource:air-conditioning. You see, the elite have managed to re-create for themselves the living standards of say, Sweden without leaving the dusty plains of the subcontinent. They're a mixed lot - Punjabi and Pathans, Sindhis and Baluchis, smugglers , mullahs, soldiers, industrialists - united by their residence in an artificially cooled world. They wake up in air-conditioned houses, drive air-conditioned cars to air-conditioned offices, grab lunch in air-conditioned restaurants (rights of admission reserved), and at the end of the day go home to an air-conditioned lounges to relax in front of their wide-screen TVs. And if they should think about the rest of the people, the great uncooled, and become uneasy as they lie under their blankets in the middle of the summer, there is always prayer, five times a day, which they hope will gain them admittance to an air-conditioned heaven, or at the very least, a long, cool drink during a fiery day in hell. ~ Mohsin Hamid

It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Liberty is an affair of laws and institutions which bring rights and duties into equilibrium. It is not at all an affair of selecting the proper class to rule. ~ William Graham Sumner

...fascism is more plausibly linked to a set of "mobilizing passions" that shape fascist action than to a consistent and fully articulated philosophy. At the bottom is a passionate nationalism. Allied to it is a conspiratorial and Manichean view of history as a battle between the good and evil camps, between the pure and the corrupt, in which one's own community or nation has been the victim. In this Darwinian narrative, the chosen people have been weakened by political parties, social classes, unassimilable minorities, spoiled rentiers, and rationalist thinkers who lack the necessary sense of community. These "mobilizing passions," mostly taken for granted and not always overtly argued as intellectual propositions, form the emotional lava that set fascism's foundations:

-a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;

-the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it;

-the belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;

-dread of the group's decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;

-the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;

-the ~ Robert O. Paxton

Hip-hop in a lot of ways is like sports; when you go to a sports game, you see people from all ages, all ethnicities, all social classes, they're all there enjoying the game. Hip-hop has been one of the only forms of music that has provided that kind of atmosphere. ~ LeCrae

Be proud of your people when you don't have to be ashamed of any of its social classes. ~ Adolf Hitler

For their holidays: the rich go see the world; the poor go see their parents. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The roots of the discontent are internal, and each person must untangle them personally, with his or her own power. The shields that have worked in the past - the order that religion, patriotism, ethnic traditions, and habits instilled by social classes used to provide - are no longer effective for increasing numbers of people who feel exposed to the harsh winds of chaos. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

HAMLET [ ... ] we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table; that's the end.
CLAUDIUS Alas, alas.
HAMLET A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.
CLAUDIUS What dost thou mean by this?
HAMLET Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar. ~ William Shakespeare

It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and not of others. This is as natural to him as to the mapmaker, who, in order to produce a usable drawing for practical purposes, must first flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the bewildering mass of geographic information those things needed for the purpose of this or that particular map.

My argument cannot be against selection, simplification, emphasis, which are inevitable for both cartographers and historians. But the map-maker's distortion is a technical necessity for a common purpose shared by all people who need maps. The historian's distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual.

Furthermore, this ideological interest is not openly expressed in the way a mapmaker's technical interest is obvious ("This is a Mercator projection for long-range navigation-for short-range, you'd better use a different projection"). No, it is presented as if all readers of history had a common interest which historians serve to the best of their ability. This is not intentional deception; the historian has been trained in a society in which education and knowledge are put forward as technical problems of excellence and not as tools for contending social classes, r ~ Howard Zinn

Class analysis can thus function not simply as part of scientific theory of interests and conflicts, but of an emancipatory theory of alternatives and social justice as well. Even if socialism is off the historical agenda, the idea of countering the exploitative logic of capitalism is not. ~ Erik Olin Wright

The most impoverished peasant can be delighted by the opening of the first spring flower, and the most wealthy aristocrat can curse the day he was born because of some petty offense to his sensibilities. She is a very wise woman. To achieve serenity we have to view life not as it is measured by the world around us but as we ourselves measure it. We must accept that the scales are not at all equal. ~ Emma Wildes

At a certain point in their historical lives, social classes become detached from their traditional parties. In other words, the traditional parties in that particular organisational form, with the particular men who constitute, represent and lead them, are no longer recognised by their class (or fraction of a class) as its expression. When such crises occur, the immediate situation becomes delicate and dangerous, because the field is open for violent solutions, for the activities of unknown forces, represented by charismatic "men of destiny". ~ Antonio Gramsci

Wherever autocratic power vanished at an early date - as in the Netherlands and later in England - and the protective interest receded into the background, they swiftly discovered that trade must be free - free to the nethermost recesses of hell. ~ Joseph Alois Schumpeter

Bipartisan democracy presupposes the individual, whose welfare is identical with that of the community in which he lives, the absence of coherent social classes, a basic uniformity of interest throughout. ~ Learned Hand

If he was less motivated by compassion than anger at what he saw as the arrogance of capital,he chafed,nonetheless,to regulate it. ~ Edmund Morris

In the earlier centuries the upper and lower social classes engaged in homicide at comparable rates. But as the homicide rate fell, it dropped far more precipitously among the upper classes than among the lower ones, an important social change ~ Steven Pinker

Redistribution divided society into two social classes: the beneficiaries of transfer, who are calling for ever more; and the victims, who submit unwillingly. It could hardly fail to injure social peace and harmony. ~ Hans F. Sennholz

The law is not abstract, impartially arbitrating between conflicting social classes; it is a tool in the hands of those who govern. ~ Josephine Herbst

'The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movement in Iraq,' by Hanna Batatu. Few may wish to take on this massive, obscure work, but it changed my life, and I love it. ~ Adam Davidson

British physician Cyril Donnison in 1938 in Civilization and Disease, hypertension was already among the best-documented examples of a disease that seemed specific to Western societies and the more affluent social classes elsewhere. ~ Gary Taubes

Immature citizens in several sizes were massed before a large factorylike structure where advanced techniques transformed them into true-thinking right-acting members of the three social classes, lower, middle, and upper middle. ~ Donald Barthelme

Pig owes her much more than she could ever pay back. It had felt much less burdensome to feel like she would always be the one to so generously give. ~ Pitchaya Sudbanthad

the welfare states of western Europe were not politically divisive. They were socially re-distributive in general intent (some more than others) but not at all revolutionary - they did not 'soak the rich'. On the contrary: although the greatest immediate advantage was felt by the poor, the real long-term beneficiaries were the professional and commercial middle class. In many cases they had not previously been eligible for work-related health, unemployment or retirement benefits and had been obliged, before the war, to purchase such services and benefits from the private sector. Now they had full access to them, either free or at low cost. Taken with the state provision of free or subsidized secondary and higher education for their children, this left the salaried professional and white-collar classes with both a better quality of life and more disposable income. Far from dividing the social classes against each other, the European welfare state bound them closer together than ever before, with a common interest in its preservation and defense. ~ Tony Judt

We are like a woman with a difficult pregnancy. We have to rebuild the social classes in Egypt, and we must change the way things were. ~ Naguib Mahfouz

The conventional way of understanding taste, according to Distinction, is to view it as a capacity for aesthetic judgments in areas such as music, art, and literature. Though rarely made explicit, it is well understood that taste can be found only among the elite, and that the lower classes lack it. Bourdieu argues that it is imperative to break with this concept of taste and replace it with one that is sociological in nature. In order to do so, Bourdieu expands the concept of taste from including only "aesthetic consumption" to including "ordinary consumption," that is, the consumption of clothing, furniture, and food ([1979] 1986:100). He also extends the concept of taste to all social classes, and shows that what constitutes "good taste" is very much part of the struggle for domination in society. ~ Richard Swedberg

I believe writers need to be chameleons, or like Meryl Streep, who can play all sorts of characters. A good writer should be able to cross gender lines and people of all social classes. So for me, writing from a male point of view would be a great challenge, that I would look forward to taking on. ~ Marisha Pessl

This movie came as a reaction to reality. I realized that I do not know that 80 of the population that lives poor in my city. I wanted to make a social experiment putting in the same car several people from different social classes, just to see what would happen. ~ Jonathan Jakubowicz

I wish we had met away from all these battles. I wish we had met in a land of peace without social classes and with no conflicts. I wish we had met in prehistoric times wearing cranberry leaves. I wish we had met when there were no disagreements about our bodies and no doctrinal differences. I wish we had met when the veil was not an issue and when there were no shaving blades, no hair colors and no perfumes to hide your natural smell. I wish we have met when there were no shoes to coerce our steps, no fashion and socks brands to put each of us in a certain social class. I wish we have met when there were no cars and no traffic. I wish we have met when there were no battles to be forced to see you as an unarmed knight with the heresy of currencies. ~ Jihad Eltabey

One thing's sure and nothing surer. The rich get richer and the poor get- children ~ Ron Rash

In all social classes except the most privileged, abnegation and hard work are considered the supreme female virtues; a spirit of sacrifice is a question of honor: the more one suffers for family, the prouder one feels. Women are used to thinking of their mate as a foolish child whose every serious fault, from drunkenness to domestic violence, they forgive . . . because he's a man. ~ Isabel Allende

The rich spend their life living; the poor spend their life making a living. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Because I'm made up of body parts of people from diverse backgrounds - ethnicities, tribes, races and social classes - I represent the impossible mix that never was achieved in the past. I'm the first true Iraqi citizen, he (the Whatsitsname) thinks. ~ Ahmed Saadawi

Game-free intimacy is or should be the most perfect form of human living.

Because there is so little opportunity for intimacy in daily life, and because some forms of intimacy (especially if intense) are psychologically impossible for most people, the bulk of time in serious social life is taken up with playing games. Hence games are both necessary and desirable, and the only problem at issue is whether the games played by an individual offer the best yield for him. In this connexion it should be remembered that the essential feature of a game is its culmination, or payoff. The principal function of the preliminary moves is to set up the situation for this payoff, but they are always designed to harvest the maximum permissible satisfaction at each step as a secondary product.

Games are passed on from generation to generation. The favoured game of any individual can be traced back to his parents and grandparents, and forward to his children.

Raising children is primarily a matter of teaching them what games to play. Different cultures and different social classes favour different types of games.

Many games are played most intensely by disturbed people, generally speaking, the more disturbed they are, the harder they play.

The attainment of autonomy is manifested by the release or recovery of three capacities: awareness, spontaneity and intimacy.

Parents, deliberately or unaware, teach their children from birth h ~ Eric Berne

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

When we speak for the poor, please note that we do not take sides with one social class. What we do is invite all social classes, rich and poor, without distinction, saying to everyone let us take seriously the cause of the poor as though it were our own. ~ Oscar Romero

All new money is made through the shifting of social classes and the dispossession of old classes. ~ Christina Stead

Poor people do not go on holiday; they go home. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I am a Beacon of Light. I attract so many different kinds of people from all walks of life. Like a moth to a flame. Different ages,different races, different genders,different social classes,the homeless,the mentally disabled and addicts. So you have to excuse me when I turn off my porch light. Cause that is the time I find peace in the darkness. ~ Ricky Star

Man is divided into two categories; men and supermen. Men are taught that all men are equal. Supermen think that they are the only men. ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Her voice had suddenly jumped a couple of social classes to underline her ownership status. ~ Joe Cawley

We, who were reduced to eating on the sidewalk , were suddenly elevated in status by this man's misery. We were the aristocrats and he the beggar. It flattered us. We were superbly above him and the comedy gave us a delusion of high self-respect. In a while, the magnanimity of the rich would complete the picture. We would feed our scraps to the poor. ~ John Howard Griffin

We cannot have a just society that applies the principle of accountability to the powerless in the principle of forgiveness to the powerful. ~ Christopher Hayes

Peanut butter is a poor man's marmalade. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

My social status in the last year has gone from zero to hero. ~ Nell Zink

My commitment to the Olympics is not a political commitment. It's not a commitment to any particular social system or cultural idea. It is a commitment to sport. ~ Herbert Hainer

It's true that while instructors and schools offer courses in everything from cooking and how to wear a kimono to yoga and Zen meditation, you'll be hard-pressed to find classes on how to tidy. The general assumption, in Japan at least, is that tidying doesn't need to be taught but rather is picked up naturally. Cooking skills and recipes are passed down as family traditions from grandmother to mother to daughter, yet one never hears of anyone passing on the family secrets of tidying, even within the same household. ~ Marie Kondo

Was this really my life right now? How did I get to this point? A few months ago I was a single mother with no social life or romantic prospects anywhere in my future, and I was stuck at a dead-end job at a bar. Now, I was opening a business, doing what I loved every single day, and found the love of my life who was the best father in the world to our son.

Oh, and my va**na was getting regular work-outs on an almost-daily basis. Couldn't forget that tidbit since it was probably the most important. I thought if my va**na had to wait any longer for some action, she would have just got up and walked out of my underwear to find another pair of legs to sit between. ~ Tara Sivec

I don't want any civil rights marches in our city - they are not good for our image."
"Neither is an officer-involved shooting of an innocent black man who was pulled over for no apparent reason. ~ Mark M. Bello

Virtue signaling' is a phrase the dim and bigoted use when they want to discount other people expressing the idea that it would be nice if we could all be essentially and fundamentally decent to each other. ~ John Scalzi

My eldest brother Atticus just won an Oscar some years ago, as he wrote the music for 'The Social Network.' ~ Liberty Ross

The huge modern heresy is to alter the human soul to fit modern social conditions, instead of altering modern social conditions to fit the human soul. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Through my fiction, I seek to highlight the social and cultural rules that we accept without question. Sometimes, without even noticing. Fiction offers a unique platform to do this, with dystopia at the fore. By exaggerating these ingrained rules, or by reversing them entirely, we can start to examine them. And question them. And challenge those that are harmful. ~ Angeline Trevena

Christianity enhanced the notion of political and social accountability by providing a new model: that of servant leadership. In ancient Greece and Rome no one would have dreamed of considering political leaders anyone's servants. The job of the leader was to lead. But Christ invented the notion that the way to lead is by serving the needs of others, especially those who are the most needy. ~ Dinesh D'Souza

Political correctness is neither political nor is it correct. It amounts to social censorship, and the sooner we spit it out, the better. ~ Jeff Cooper

After all, the ideal of bourgeois politics is the absence of politics, since capital is nothing other than the consistent displacement of social decision-making into the marketplace ~ Nick Land

Our foremost priority is the removal of poverty, hunger and malnutrition, disease and illiteracy. All social welfare programmes must be implemented efficiently. Agencies involved in the delivery of services should have a strong sense of duty and work in a transparent, corruption-free, time-bound and accountable manner. ~ Pratibha Patil

Facebook succeeded because it was about real people having a presence on the Internet. There were all these other social networking sites people had, but they were all about fictional people. ~ Peter Thiel

Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of our age is the subsiding of all other concerns to the predominance of politics. And thus, we have succumbed to a Lyndon Johnson-like dependence upon the power of the state.

The tragic result has been that all of life has been politicized, and if the new social engineers have their way, politics will increase in power - especially in its power to penetrate into our everyday lives and rule our destinies. For in fact politics has become, for many of the political elite, a kind of state religion. ~ George Grant

To be an enthusiast had become her social vocation and, sometimes even when she did not feel like it, she became enthusiastic in order not to disappoint the expectations of those who knew her. ~ Leo Tolstoy

If we think we have ours and don't owe any time or money or effort to help those left behind, then we are a part of the problem rather than the solution to the fraying social fabric that threatens all Americans. ~ Marian Wright Edelman

I think humor is the social use. You can put anything in it. I think - yes, I speak heavily in analogies - it is like putting the medicine in apple sauce or a block of cheese for a dog. Not that anyone in this room is a dog in this scenario. ~ Sloane Crosley

As much as we complain about other people, there is nothing worse for mental health than a social desert. ~ Charles Montgomery

People who represent social organization in a country are a force in that country ~ Sunday Adelaja

I didn't invent satire. I didn't come up with it. And it will continue to be a very powerful tool to disrupt political taboos and social taboos and religious taboos, because those taboos are always used to control and to curb people's way of creativity and thinking, by making them feel guilty because they want to make a change. ~ Bassem Youssef

But I absolutely believe that architecture is a social activity that has to do with some sort of communication or places of interaction, and that to change the environment is to change behaviour. ~ Thom Mayne

The relationship between nurturance and moral self-interest can be seen most clearly in nurturant forms of business practice. It involves the humane treatment of employees, the creation of a safe and humane workplace, social and ecological responsibility, fairness in hiring and promotion, the building of a work community, the development of excellent communication between employees and management and between the company and its customers, opportunities for employee self-development, a positive role in the larger community, scrupulous honesty, a regard for one's customers and for the public, and excellent customer service. Policies such as these have increased the productivity and success of many businesses. They are models of how Nurturant Parent morality can function to help businesses be successful and to allow owners, investors, and employees to seek their self-interest within this moral system. Moral ~ George Lakoff

While I was pregnant, I had dozens of checkups. They covered everything from blood tests to ultrasounds, and I even had the option of attending birthing classes with my husband. ~ Liya Kebede

It be urged that the wild and uncultivated tree, hitherto yielding sour and bitter fruit only, can never be made to yield better; yet we know that the grafting art implants a new tree on the savage stock, producing what is most estimable in kind and degree. Education, in like manner, engrafts a new man on the native stock, and improves what in his nature was vicious and perverse into qualities of virtue and social worth. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other - bourgeoisie and proletariat. ~ Karl Marx

Everyone has taste, yet it is more of a taboo subject than sex or money. The reason for this is simple: claims about your attitudes to or achievements in the carnal and financial arenas can be disputed only by your lover and your financial advisers, whereas by making statements about your taste you expose body and soul to terrible scrutiny. Taste is a merciless betrayer of social and cultural attitudes. Thus, while anybody will tell you as much (and perhaps more than) you want to know about their triumphs in bed and at the bank, it is taste that gets people's nerves tingling. ~ Stephen Bayley

A considerable amount of American consumption spending is not for the enjoyment of consumption per se, but to show off wealth, status, or sexual allure. In the famous phrase of the economist and social critic Thorstein Veblen, this is "conspicuous consumption," that is, consumption whose main purpose is to impress others rather than to be enjoyed by oneself.2 ~ Jeffrey D. Sachs

'Up the Junction' went on to inform my love of British social realism. It was the first film I saw of this ilk, a very stark, visceral reflection of England, an England I didn't necessarily feel a part of but that I knew was out there. You could almost smell the bread and butter and cabbage. ~ Gurinder Chadha

The Pages of Gup, now that they had talked through everything so fully, fought hard, remained united, support each other when required to do so, and in general looked like a force with a common purpose. All those arguments and debates, all that openness, had created powerful bonds of friendship between them. ~ Salman Rushdie

I am not a very social person and have a few friends who have been with me since school and college. I hate going to parties and events and would rather sit at home and watch TV. Parties are the place where controversies happen. ~ Sonakshi Sinha