Upper Middle Class 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

Poor communities, frequently communities of color but not exclusively, suffer disproportionately. If you look at where our industrialized facilities tend to be located, they're not in the upper middle class neighborhoods. ~ Carol Browner

If anything, taxes for the lower and middle class and maybe even the upper middle class should even probably be cut further. But I think that people at the high end - people like myself - should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we've ever had it. ~ Warren Buffett

For students today, only 10 percent of children from working-class families graduate from college by the age of 24 as compared to 58 percent of upper-middle-class and wealthy families. ~ Patrick J. Kennedy

To attain, and to keep, a professional-managerial job requires class-specific human capital. Developing and displaying that capital is a central preoccupation of upper-middle class life. ~ Susan T. Fiske

There remains a degree of anti-black intellectualism in entertainment. Middle and upper-middle class blacks have often been portrayed as buffoons in popular culture; witness the characters of Carlton Banks on 'The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air' and Braxton P. Hartnabrig on 'The Jamie Foxx Show.' ~ John Ridley

Shorn of unattractive language about "robots" who will be producing taxes and not burglarizing homes, the general idea that schools in ghettoized communities must settle for a different set of goals than schools that serve the children of the middle class and upper middle class has been accepted widely. And much of the rhetoric of "rigor" and "high standards" that we hear so frequently, no matter how egalitarian in spirit it may sound to some, is fatally belied by practices that vulgarize the intellects of children and take from their education far too many of the opportunities for cultural and critical reflectiveness without which citizens become receptacles for other people's ideologies and ways of looking at the world but lack the independent spirits to create their own. ~ Jonathan Kozol

There is quite a lot of mutual misunderstanding between the upper middle class and the working class. Reviewing what's been said about the white working class and the Democrats, I realized that there's even a lot of disagreement about who the working class IS. ~ Timothy Noah

I've got a fierce passion for politics but I can't stand the smarmy, hypocritical upper-middle-class dictator nation that prevails and has always prevailed in this country. I'm up for petrol bombers, mate, and fighting in the streets. ~ Pete Doherty

Q: Why write about slavery? Haven't we had enough stories about slavery? Why do we need another one?

A: I could have written about upper middle class white people who feel sad sometimes, but there's a lot of competition. ~ Colson Whitehead

Sloanes aren't cafe society or NYLON hedge-funders with million-pound bonuses, or London Eurotrash wearing upgraded style anglais. Ann Barr's and my original picture of them in 'The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook,' published in 1982, was of an upper-middle-class world, conservative and fairly homogeneous, united by old attitudes and institutions. ~ Peter York

A quantified family would be upper middle class. Likely working in big tech," said Theodore. "Their employers would have required it." Piece by piece, the projectors filled in the available data on the house, including on the kitchen wall, a large screen of blurred graphs, smudged letters and numbers, all in motion. "This is the hearth," he said. "The data flickering at the heart of the family. Location, activity, well-being." He squinted at the screen. "Can you bring this into resolution? ~ Matthew De Abaitua

The end of something, that specific mid-century American upper-middle-class WASP East Coast thing, the mercantile remnant of the Puritans, the ruling class tossed up by the Civil War and westward expansion, a whole litany of crimes now lost within the comforts of civilization, harmless as a lullaby... I felt nothing but regret. I do not suffer loss well... Their dark and unfortunate masterpiece, the Vietnam War...dislodged, then replaced...powerful now only in the heads of their children, the children of Little America... When we die, they'll vanish forever. ~ Henry Bromell

I think the working-class part of me comes out. Sometimes the people who have the loudest mouths are upper-class, upper-middle-class. The quietest are often working-class people, people who are broke. There is a fear of losing whatever it is that you have. I come from that background. ~ Billie Joe Armstrong

As public schools deteriorate, the upper-middle class and wealthy send their kids to private ones. As public pools and playgrounds decay, the better-off buy memberships in private tennis and swimming clubs. As public hospitals decline, the well-off pay premium rates for private care. ~ Robert Reich

I wanted to look at the upper-middle-class scene since the war, and in particular my generation's part in it. We had spent our early years as privileged members of a privileged class. How were we faring in the Age of the Common Man? How ought we to be faring? ~ Simon Raven

I guess I'm also obligated to note that the experience of sex workers who are not upper/middle class/white probably have much worse conditions than anything that's portrayed commonly in media/what I experienced. ~ Marie Calloway

According to our textbook rhetoric, Americans abhor the notion of a social order in which economic privilege and political power are determined by hereditary class. Officially, we have a more enlightened goal in sight: namely, a society in which a family's wealth has no relation to the probability of future educational attainment and the wealth and station it affords. By this standard, education offered to poor children should be at least as good as that which is provided to the children of the upper-middle class. ~ Jonathan Kozol

I grew up in a working class neighborhood in Sweden, which, during my teens, gentrified and is now completely middle class and even upper middle class. ~ Joel Kinnaman

The upper middle class and the economic right, who had favored the coup, were euphoric. At first they were a little shocked when they saw the consequences of their action; they had never lived in a dictatorship and did not know what it was like. They thought the loss of democratic freedoms would be temporary and that it was possible to go without individual or collective rights for a while so long as the regime respected the tenets of free enterprise. ~ Isabel Allende

Now students all seem to be converging on the same self, the successful upper-middle-class professional, impersonating the adult they've already decided they want to become. ~ William Deresiewicz

Stuff Happens.' That's the G-rated version. That's a bumper sticker that
only a straight white upper middle class male could have made. Because anyone who
isn't straight, anyone who isn't male, anyone who isn't white, anyone who isn't upper middle class knows that stuff doesn't just happen. Stuff gets done by people to people. Nothing is a coincidence. Nothing is random. This isn't osmosis. And so we act as if it's this passive thing, but yet that's not the case. ~ Tim Wise

I grew up in an upper-middle-class town with a population around 12,000. My high school held around a thousand kids. All smart. We had a strict dress code. If you wore blue jeans to school, they sent you home. ~ Jeffrey Gitomer

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

With a few notable exceptions, literary fiction in the U.K. is dominated by an upper and upper middle-class clique who usually have a tin ear for the demotic and who portray working-class characters with, at best, a benevolent condescension. ~ Adrian McKinty

But disruption as disruption isn't enough. In order to actually effect deep and lasting change, those opposed to the current social order must locate another base of power that can credibly challenge the power of incumbent interests. I think the answer lies in a newly radicalized upper middle class. One ~ Christopher L. Hayes

Excellent Sheep is likely to makea lasting mark for three reasons. One, Mr. Deresiewicz spent twenty-four years in the Ivy League, graduating from Columbia and teaching for a decade at Yale.He brings the gory details. Two, the author is a striker, to put it in soccer terms. He's a vivid writer, a literary critic whose headers tend to land in the back corner of the net. Three, his indictment arrives on wheels: He takes aim at just about the entirety of upper-middle-class life in America.Mr. Deresiewicz's book is packed full of what he wants more of in American life: passionate weirdness. ~ Dwight Garner

When well-qualified, upper middle-class blacks or Latinos or Asians move to predominantly white neighborhoods, there's what's called the tipping point. That tipping point is generally 15 percent; at 15 percent you begin to see white flight. ~ Richard Benjamin

Occur. A rampage shooting has never happened in an urban ghetto, for example; in fact, indiscriminate attacks at schools almost always occur in otherwise safe, predominantly white towns. Around half of rampage killings happen in affluent or upper-middle-class communities, and the rest tend to happen in rural towns that are majority-white, Christian, and low-crime. ~ Sebastian Junger

We have a new joke on the reservation: 'What is cultural deprivation?' Answer: 'Being an upper-middle class white kid living in a split-level suburban home with a color TV.' ~ John Fire Lame Deer

When I was growing up, my parents had created for my brother and me the perfect upper middle-class lifestyle. We had everything we needed, and most things we wanted. We took piano lessons. We went to summer camp. We swam at the local country club. We had college funds. And while what I should have learned from living a relatively privileged childhood was the value of hard work and frugality, what I learned instead was that money was not something with which I needed to be overly concerned. If and when I needed it, it would magically appear. Like a genie. ~ Jennifer McGaha

I know this kind of girl," Grace was saying. "It's the worst kind of combination of abuse and privilege, and growing up in this, like, greenhorn southern-Californian Asian upper-middle-class ghetto, where everyone is so shallow and money-craven. ~ Gary Shteyngart

I am precisely the kind of nice upper-middle-class white girl whose relationship to substances has been treated as benign or pitiable - a cause for concern, or a shrug, rather than punishment. No one has ever called me a leper or a psychopath. No doctor has ever pointed a gun at me. No cop has ever shot me at an intersection while I was reaching for my wallet, for that matter, or even pulled me over for drunk driving, something I've done more times than I could count. My skin is the right color to permit my intoxication. When it comes to addiction, the abstraction of privilege is ultimately a question of what type of story gets told about your body: Do you need to be shielded from harm, or prevented from causing it? My body has been understood as something to be protected, rather than something to be protected from. ~ Leslie Jamison

Miriam will never know what kind of dog attacked her, will imagine a Doberman or a German shepherd with snarling, angry teeth despite the fact she bears neither bite marks nor broken skin. It will never cross her mind that the dog was a beagle and that she was knocked over from a surprise more than force. The children of the house she fled will use the incident to convince their parents to keep the dog, which had been on the verge of being given away for its propensity to shit at the slightest hint of thunder it having been sequestered in the garage that night because of a stormy forecast. The family will never know what manner of burglar their fog deflected, will imagine a scruffy, heavy-set man with scars and a limp groping the family jewelery. It will never cross their minds that their intruder was am upper middle-class wife and mother of two who would have had eyes only for their Chinese teakettle. ~ Myla Goldberg

For the better part of my life, I was always trying to manufacture somehow what I would consider 'living.' Because I grew up sort of upper-middle class and I didn't relate so much to that as a life, and I wanted to really find 'living.' ~ Alex Ebert

At the same time that middle- and upper-middle-class mothers were urged to pipe Mozart into their wombs when they're pregnant so their kids would come out perfectly tuned, the government told poor mothers to get the hell out of the house and get to work--no more children's aid for them. Mothers like us--with health care, laptops, and Cuisinarts--are supposed to replicate the immaculate bedrooms we see in Pottery Barn Kids catalogs, with their designer sheets and quilts, one toy and one stuffed animal atop a gleaming white dresser, and a white rug on the floor that has never been exposed to the shavings from hamster cages, Magic Markers accidentally dropped with their caps off, or Welche's grape juice.... we've been encouraged to turn our backs on other mothers who pick their kids' clothes out of other people's trash and sometimes can't buy a can of beans to feed them. How has it come to seem perfectly reasonable--even justified-- that one class of mother is suppoed to sew her baby's diapers out of Egyptian cotton from that portion of the Nile blessed by the god Osiris while another class of mother can't afford a single baby aspirin? ~ Susan J. Douglas

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

To me, women's lib was mainly a white, upper-middle class affair of little use to a reservation Indian woman. ~ Mary Brave Bird

I talked to lots of people who are vaccine-hesitant, and I actually was one myself until I got further into this project, and most of them actually are in my demographic: so well-educated people with advanced degrees who are upper middle-class and have read quite a bit on the subject. ~ Eula Biss

Viveca's clients were mostly upper-middle class and lower-upper class.Being of these classes , they're easily offended. ~ Gillian Flynn

On a recent HBO special, Roseanne Arnold, who, incidentally, collects Barbies, excoriated what she considered to be Barbie's middle-class-ness. Why didn't Mattel make, say, "trailer-park Barbie"? But to many upper-middle-class women, all post-1977 Barbies are Trailer Park Barbie. Ironically, given the knee-jerk antagonism to Barbie's body, it is one of her few attributes that doesn't scream "prole." Her thinness - indicative of an expensive gym membership and possibly a personal trainer - definitely codes her as middle- or upper-middle-class. In Distinction, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu notes that "working class women . . . are less aware of the 'market' value of beauty and less inclined to invest . . . sacrifices and money in cultivating their bodies." Likewise, Barbie's swanlike neck elevates her status. A stumpy neck is a lower-class attribute, Fussell says. ~ M.G. Lord

The American middle class, it seems to me, is looking to politicians now to satisfy a pretty basic - and urgent - level of need. Yet people in the upper middle class - with their excellent health benefits, schools, salaries, retirement plans, nannies and private afterschool programs - have journeyed so far from that level of need that, it often seems to me, they literally cannot hear what resonates with the middle class. That creates a problematic blind spot for those who write, edit or produce what comes to be known about our politicians and their policies. ~ Judith Warner

Madeline began hearing people saying "Derrida". She heard them saying "Lyotard" and "Foucault" and "Deleuze" and "Baudrillard". That most of these people were those she instinctually disapproved of- upper-middle-class kids who wore Doc Martens and anarchist symbols- made Madeline dubious about the value of their enthusiasm. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

It's a ridiculous profession and it's getting worse. It's becoming almost like palm reading or phrenology. It's been relegated to pop best sellers and talk shows. The only people that take it seriously are upper middle class people who are lonely and can afford to pay someone to listen to them. ~ Ian Shoales

There were no examples of girls like myself becoming successful actresses. To be an actress in England was a serious, upper-middle class girl's profession. I just thought I would never be accepted unless I pretended to become somebody I wasn't. ~ Tracey Ullman

I was taught that candles are like house cats - domesticated versions of something wild and dangerous. There's no way to know how much of that killer instinct lurks in the darkness. I used to think the house-burning paranoia was the result of some upper-middle-class fear regarding the potential destruction of a half-million-dollar Westchester house the size of a matchbox. But then I realized the fear stemmed from something far less complex: we're not used to fire. Candles are a staple of the Judaic existence and, like many suburban residents before us, we're pretty bad Jews. ~ Sloane Crosley

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

I myself am consummately middle class. We grew up in upper-middle-class suburbs in Oklahoma City, and that's very much the same ethos as what Richard Yates and John Cheever wrote about. ~ Blake Bailey

The authors pointed out that nearly all research in psychology is conducted on a very small subset of the human population: people from cultures that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (forming the acronym WEIRD). They then reviewed dozens of studies showing that WEIRD people are statistical outliers; they are the least typical, least representative people you could study if you want to make generalizations about human nature. Even within the West, Americans are more extreme outliers than Europeans, and within the United States, the educated upper middle class (like my Penn sample) is the most unusual of all. ~ Jonathan Haidt

The middle class and upper middle class are highly attached to the institution of school explicitly as a sorting mechanism, as a way of justifying privileges of which middle-class members are already central beneficiaries. These critics suggest that the entire notion of schools as meritocracies actually reifies and reinforces class privilege--making those whom school rewards (those who already have a lot of benefits) feel they deserve the privileges they have. ~ Kirsten Olson

Margaret Thatcher has one great advantage - she is a daughter of the people and looks trim, as the daughter of the people desire to be. Shirley Williams has such an advantage over her because she's a member of the upper-middle class and can achieve the kitchen-sink revolutionary look that one cannot get unless one has been to a really good school. ~ Rebecca West

My childhood is completely ... when I look back, it was '50s in New York, upper-middle class, it was completely idyllic and golden and wonderful - sweet in every way. ~ Peter Jurasik

White middle- and upper-class men have a longer journey to go than many people. ~ Holly Near

I am opposed to Naperville. It's all cute, trendy and expensive, and filled with cookie-cutter Borg houses that assimilate you into upper-middle-class America. ~ Robyn Bachar

The Restoration did not so much restore as replace. In restoring the monarchy with King Charles II, it replaced Cromwell's Commonwealth and its Puritan ethos with an almost powerless monarch whose tastes had been formed in France.

It replaced the power of the monarchy with the power of a parliamentary system - which was to develop into the two parties, Whigs and Tories - with most of the executive power in the hands of the Prime Minister. Both parties benefited from a system which encouraged social stability rather than opposition.
Above all, in systems of thought, the Restoration replaced the probing, exploring, risk-taking intellectual values of the Renaissance. It relied on reason and on facts rather than on speculation. So, in the decades between 1660 and 1700, the basis was set for the growth of a new kind of society. This society was Protestant (apart from the brief reign of the Catholic King James II, 1685-88), middle class, and unthreatened by any repetition of the huge and traumatic upheavals of the first part of the seventeenth century. It is symptomatic that the overthrow of James II in 1688 was called The 'Glorious' or 'Bloodless' Revolution. The 'fever in the blood' which the Renaissance had allowed was now to be contained, subject to reason, and kept under control. With only the brief outburst of Jacobin revolutionary sentiment at the time of the Romantic poets, this was to be the political context in the United Kingdom for two centuries or more. ~ Ronald Carter

They cannot divide us by saying that you're middle class or you're lower class. ~ H. Rap Brown

They made it to the middle class, my dad working as a bartender and my mother as a cashier and a maid. I didn't inherit any money from them. But I inherited something far better - the real opportunity to accomplish my dreams. ~ Marco Rubio

Consider a white ninth-grade student taking American history in a predominantly middle-class town in Vermont. Her father tapes Sheetrock, earning an income that in slow construction seasons leaves the family quite poor. Her mother helps out by driving a school bus part-time, in addition to taking care of her two younger siblings. The girl lives with her family in a small house, a winterized former summer cabin, while most of her classmates live in large suburban homes. How is this girl to understand her poverty? Since history textbooks present the American past as four hundred years of progress and portray our society as a land of opportunity in which folks get what they deserve and deserve what they get, the failures of working-class Americans to transcend their class origin inevitably get laid at their own doorsteps. ~ James W. Loewen

Let me tell you one story to illustrate what I mean. I remember a woman who was a spiritist, and even a medium, a paid medium employed by a spiritist society. She used to go every Sunday evening to a spiritist meeting and was paid three guineas for acting as a medium. This was during the thirties, and that was quite a large sum of money for a lower middle-class woman. She was ill one Sunday and could not go to keep her appointment. She was sitting in her house and she saw people passing by on their way to the church where I happened to be ministering in South Wales. Something made her feel a desire to know what those people had, and so she decided to go to the service, and did. She came ever afterwards until she died, and became a very fine Christian. One day I asked her what she had felt on that first visit, and this is what she said to me; and this is the point I am illustrating. She said, 'The moment I entered your chapel and sat down on a seat amongst the people I was conscious of a power. I was conscious of the same sort of power as I was accustomed to in our spiritist meetings, but there was one big difference; I had a feeling that the power in your chapel was a clean power.' The point I am making is simply this, that she was aware of a power. This is this mysterious element. It is the presence of the Spirit in the heart of God's children, God's people, and an outsider becomes aware of this. This is something you can never get if you just sit and read a book on your own ~ D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

We can move America forward with a strong middle class. We can move America forward with a strong Democratic majority in the Senate. And together we can move America forward with Barack Obama in the White House. ~ Harry Reid

I had been nervous about not doing well in college. During my first class, I looked at the notes the boy next to me was taking. His supply and demand curves seemed more neatly drawn than mine. Nearly everyone appeared to have gone to preparatory schools and already knew such odd things as the fact that there was no inflation during the Middle Ages. Very few, however, were willing to work the way I did.

When I would come out of Firestone Library at two in the morning, walk past the strange statues scattered around campus, and then sit at my desk in my room till the trees in the yard appeared out of the darkness, I felt that I was achieving something, that every hour I worked was generating almost physical value, as if I could touch the knowledge I was gaining through my work. One weekend, I came home to my parents and worked all Saturday night. In the morning, my mother saw me at my desk and brought me a glass of milk. Later, in Birju's room, she said to him, "Your brother can eat pain. He can sit all day at his desk and eat pain. ~ Akhil Sharma

I'm a nice middle-class girl in real life, and I'm a mom and a grandma, and I usually play sweet characters. ~ Jacki Weaver

I was fed up with the situation I found myself in in the 1960s. I didn't like being a barrister's wife and going out to dinner with other professional people and dealing with middle class life. It seemed claustrophobic. ~ Caryl Churchill

What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was which came to an end in August 1914! The greater part of the population, it is true, worked hard and lived at a low standard of comfort, yet were, to all appearances, reasonably contented with this lot. But escape was possible, for any man of capacity or character at all exceeding the average, into the middle and upper classes, for whom life offered, at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages.

The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages; or he could decide to couple the security of his fortunes with the good faith of the townspeople of any substantial municipality in any continent that fancy or information might recommend. He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality, could despatch his servant to the neighbouring office of a bank for such supply of the precious metals as might ~ John Maynard Keynes

If the public can't see justice being done, or afford the costs of justice, then the entire system becomes little more than a cozy club solely for the benefit of judges, lawyers and their lackeys, a sort of care in the community for the upper middle classes. ~ Heather Brooke

As an economic historian, I appreciate what manufacturing has contributed to the United States. It was the engine of growth that allowed us to win two world wars and provided millions of families with a ticket to the middle class. But public policy needs to go beyond sentiment and history. ~ Christina Romer

I was born in 1923 into a middle class Jewish family in Vienna, a few years after the end of World War I, which was disastrous from the Austrian point of view. ~ Walter Kohn

The concept of a troubled, lonely, middle-class, gay fifty-eight-year-old living alone in dusty squalor in a chocolate-box cottage in the heart of the Cotswolds was a hard one to grasp in the context of his sweaty, noisy, hectic, foreign, red-light existence. ~ Lisa Jewell

Posted 7/17/18

The Breath – Let the Breath be the Boss

When we begin sitting, it's good to begin with several big breaths, filling up the abdominal area,, the middle chest, and the upper chest until we're full of air, and then just letting it out and holding the exhalation for a moment. Do this three or four times. In a sense, it's artificial, but it helps to create a certain balance and forms a good basis for sitting.

Once we've done this, the next step is to forget it: forget controlling our breath. We won't entirely forget, of course, but it's useless to control the breath. Instead, just experience it, which is very different. We're not trying to make the breath long, slow, and even, as many books suggest. Instead, what we want is to let the breath be the boss, so that the breath is breathing us.

If the breath is shallow, let it be that. As we become our breathing, the breath of its own accord starts to slow down. The breath stays shallow because we want to think rather than experience our lives. When we do this everything becomes more shallow and controlled.

Charlotte Joko Beck, Nothing Special, pg. 249 ~ Charlotte Joko Beck

I'm a middle-class intellectual. I'd never call myself any such a damn silly thing, but since you Reds coined it, I'll have to accept it. That's my class, and that's what I'm interested in. The proletarians are probably noble fellows, but I certainly do not think that the interests of the middle-class intellectuals and the proletarians are the same. They want bread. We want - well, all right, say it, we want cake! ~ Sinclair Lewis

The average Negro has largely lost faith in middle-class whites. In his hour of need he seeks not "talk" but dynamic action. He looks upon the middle-class idea of long-term educational and cultural changes with fear and mistrust. He is interested only in what can be achieved immediately by political pressure to get jobs, decent housing, and education for his children. He describes with disgust the efforts in his behalf by most middle-class Negro and white intellectuals as "pink tea methods--some times well-meanin' but gettin' us nowhere. ~ Bayard Rustin

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

In passing, we should here recognize the difficulties presented by the idea of 'fit' and 'unfit.' Who is to decide this question? The grosser, the more obvious, the undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind. But among the writings of the representative Eugenists [sic], one cannot ignore the distinct middle-class bias that prevails. ~ Margaret Sanger

There are more differences between poor people than between middle-class people. ~ Rita Mae Brown

In the final analysis, that state of abstraction turns out to be a very specific set of conditions: white middle-class women suffering and responding to the sexist attitudes and conduct of white middle-class men and calling for equality with those particular men. This approach leaves the existing socioeconomic system with its fundamental reliance on racism and class bias unchallenged. It ~ Angela Y. Davis

The vast majority of Americans, at all coordinates of the economic spectrum, consider themselves middle class; this is a deeply ingrained, distinctly American cognitive dissonance. ~ Ellen Cushing

The ideological fantasies of this movement [New Left of the 1960s] … were no more than a nonsensical expression of the whims of spoilt middle-class children, and while the extremists among them were virtually indistinguishable from Fascist thugs, the movement did without doubt express a profound crisis of faith in the values that had inspired democratic societies for many decades.… The New Left explosion of academic youth was an aggressive movement born of frustration, which easily created a vocabulary for itself out of Marxist slogans … : liberation, revolution, alienation, etc. Apart from this, its ideology really has little in common with Marxism. It consists of "revolution" without the working class; hatred of modern technology as such; …the cult of primitive societies … as the source of progress; hatred of education and specialized knowledge. ~ Leszek Kołakowski

Russian love of justice is far less vigorous than Russian respect for brute force, and that in practice, what passes for love of justice is simply a kind of equalitarianism which says that no one should live better than the next person. This idea of justice is motivated by hatred of everything outstanding which we (Russians) make no effort to imitate, but, on the contrary, try to bring down to our level, by hatred of any sense of initiative, of any higher or more dynamic way of life than the life we live ourselves. This psychology is, of course, most typical of the peasantry and least typical of the "middle class." However, peasants and those of peasant origin constitute the overwhelming majority of our country. ~ Donald G. Boudreau

As a child I used to watch clouds, and in them, see faces, castles, animals, dragons, and giants. It was a world of escape
fantasy; something to inject wonder and adventure into the mundane, regulated life of a middle-class boy leading a middle-class life. ~ Barry B. Longyear

The fault, in their view, lay with no single person, but with the middle class composition of the colony, which, feeling itself imperiled, had acted instinctively, as an organism, to extrude the riffraff from its midst. ~ Mary McCarthy

And we did. A study of middle-class families in Los Angeles found that just one in four families could fit a car in its garage. (It also found that mothers' stress levels rose as they described their household mess.) Americans who struggled to afford health insurance and college could nevertheless buy lots of stuff, sometimes on credit. ~ Anonymous

Jesus is not a white, middle-class Republican. Jesus is not a Democrat, a Libertarian, a Marxist, or a Socialist. Jesus is not a Baptist, a Catholic, a Lutheran, or a Buddhist. Jesus isn't even a Christian. Jesus Christ is Lord. ~ Ronnie McBrayer

In America today, a young person needs more education after high school just to have a chance to make it in the middle class. Not a guarantee, just a chance to make it. ~ Elizabeth Warren

In a house, as in a garden, there is a point when over-mingling can occur. At first, when the new plants are dug in, there is too much space between them. They seem artificial, temporary. Then, as they grow, the bed finds a point of balance, the taller trees occupying the upper layers, the sprawling shrubs - the hydrangeas, buddleia, pittosporum - filling out the middle, and the smaller bulbs and ground covers punctuating the under-spaces. Then, without warning, equilibrium is lost. A rampant jasmine covers an adolescent tree; a hydrangea thrives, forcing out a lilly pilly that struggles for light beneath a spreading magnolia. The spaces are subsumed. In the house, there was a period when everyone thrived. Even Heloise had been noticed by Jerome, who was sitting down with her on most days and doing sums and geography, and reading poetry. 'She has real talent,' he said to Helena, over the kitchen bench. She raised an eyebrow ambiguously but didn't comment. Then, slowly, the balance began to slip. ~ Emily Bitto

I came to New York because I was fleeing from the double-wide baby stroller, from the culture of respectability of the bourgeois suburban middle class. And my dream is that the elements of New York that are vital - the elements that are artistic, that are alternative, that resist capital, that are humane - not only endure but thrive, and maybe they do some sort of aikido reversal. They take [diversity-killing trends] and fucking slam them on their heads. ~ Junot Diaz

I was brought up in a very naval, military, and conservative background. My father and his friends had very typical opinions of the British middle class - lower-middle class actually - after the war. My father broke into the middle class by joining the navy. I was the first member of my family ever to go to private school or even to university. So, the armed forces had been upward mobility for him. ~ Christopher Hitchens

The good news is that we can sometimes control the "circles" around us, moving toward smaller circles that boost our relative happiness. If we are at our class reunion, and there's a "big circle" in the middle of the room with a drink in his hand, boasting of his big salary, we can consciously take several steps away and talk with someone else. If we are thinking of buying a new house, we can be selective about the open houses we go to, skipping the houses that are above our means. If we are thinking about buying a new car, we can focus on the models that we can afford, and so on. We ~ Dan Ariely

We in the West are accustomed to thinking that humans are all basically the same underneath our different cultural clothing, that the concerns the middle class struggles with in contemporary society are at bottom the same concerns with which all other classes societies and cultures struggle. To glimpse the possibility that that is not so comes as an unwelcome surprise. ~ Philip Cushman

Let's not forget we created that ideal middle class by destroying all of our industrial competitors during World War II. ~ Jeff Greene

I realized that all my life, my values were based upon typical middle-class American values: hard work, doing good, living well, owning things, following the rules & being the best I can be ... but God clearly says, those are not MY values. I value justice, mercy & humility. ~ John Green

Just as his sentimentalism is profoundly middle-class and plebeian, but his irrationalism reactionary, so his moral philosophy also contains an inner contradiction: on the one hand, it is saturated with strongly plebeian characteristics, but on the other, it contains the germ of a new aristocratism. The concept of the 'beautiful soul' presupposes the complete dissolution of kalo-kagathia and implies the perfect spiritualization of all human values, but it also implies an application of aesthetic criteria to morality and is bound up with the view that moral values are the gift of nature. It means the recognition of a nobility of soul to which everyone has a right by nature, but in which the place of irrational birthrights is taken by an equally irrational quality of moral genius. The way of Rousseau's 'spiritual beauty' leads, on the one hand, to characters like Dostoevsky's Myshkin, who is a saint in the guise of an epilectic and an idiot, on the other, to the ideal of individual moral perfection which knows no social responsibility and does not aspire to be socially useful. Goethe, the Olympian, who thinks of nothing but his own spiritual perfection, is a disciple of Rousseau just as much as the young freethinker who wrote Werther. ~ Arnold Hauser

It advances Democracy": As it was throughout the Cold War, the response here should be "Democracy for whom?" "Democracy" has never been a univocal concept; and as a word, it has surely by now been degraded by so many reactionary projects, such as U.S. imperialism itself and the various middle class comprador movements that have furthered its purposes through coups and color revolutions. It is not the nominal political form aspired to, but the social goods that are being sought, that should weigh our evaluations of those who use such rhetoric. ~ Anonymous