Working Class Quotes

The more workers you have in your organization, the better you are implanted in the working class, the more likely you are to come up with the concrete problems of the class. ~ Ernest Mandel

The rich people are apparently leaving America. They're giving up their citizenship. These great lovers of America who made their money in this country-when you ask them to pay their fair share of taxes they run abroad. We have 19-year old kids who lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan defending this country. They went abroad. Not to escape taxes. They're working class kids who died in wars and now billionaires want to run abroad to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. What patriotism! What love of country! ~ Bernie Sanders

In England we only make films about the working class or the aristocracy. ~ Nigel Cole

Humans were still not only the cheapest robots around, but also, for many tasks, the only robots that could do the job. They were self-reproducing robots too. They showed up and worked generation after generation; give them 3000 calories a day and a few amenities, a little time off, and a strong jolt of fear, and you could work them at almost anything. Give them some ameliorative drugs and you had a working class, reified and coglike. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

The really successful work in England tends to be working-class writers telling working-class stories. The film industry has been slow to wake up to that, for a variety of reasons. It still shocks me how few films are written or made in England about working-class life, given that those are the people who go to movies. ~ Stephen Daldry

Eight Hours For What We Will is a major contribution to modern American working-class history and to the history of a changing American popular and mass culture. ~ Herbert Gutman

And what if Britain lost? There would be a financial crisis, unemployment, and destitution. Working-class men would take up Ethel's father's cry and say that they had never been allowed to vote for the war. The people's rage against their rulers would be boundless. ~ Ken Follett

Without a sharp turnaround toward democracy and equality in the United States, Europe will be virtually alone in its commitment to social democracy. The pressures of low-wage immigrant labor, cheap imports from Eastern Europe and Asia, and free-market practices of governments are already threatening once secure areas of employment and causing right-wing populism to pop up in various Western European countries. Surprising numbers of middle-class and working-class voters have supported ultranationalist, neofascist parties throughout Europe because, like white male workers in the United States, they see their status slipping. ~ Steve Brouwer

Apparently, there is no bad economic turn a conservative cannot do unto his buddy in the working class, as long as cultural solidarity has been cemented over a beer. ~ Thomas Frank

A working class hero is something to be. ~ John Lennon

To most middle-class feminists, as to most middle-class non-feminists, working-class women remain mysterious creatures to be "reached out to" in some abstract way. No connection. No solidarity. ~ Irena Klepfisz

Sharpe is my favorite role of all that I've played. He's a very complex character. He knows that he's a good soldier, but he will always have to fight the prejudice of aristocratic officers because of his rough working-class upbringing. On the battlefield, he's full of confidence - but off it, he is unsure, a bit shy and ill at ease. ~ Sean Bean

By May, 1st, 1937, there should not be one single church left within the borders of Soviet Russia, and the idea of God will have been banished from the Soviet Union as a remnant of the Middle Ages, which has been used for the purpose of oppressing the working classes. ~ Joseph Stalin

There's a lot of people talking about elitism and all of that.Yes, I went to Princeton and Harvard, but the lens through which I see the world is the lens that I grew up with. I am the product of a working class upbringing. ~ Barack Obama

The whole struggle of our Party (and of the working class movement in Europe generally) must be directed against opportunism. The latter is not a current of opinion, not a tendency; it (opportunism) has now become the organised tool of the bourgeoisie within the working class movement. ~ Vladimir Lenin

Needless to say, this fragile experiment began by taking for granted the ugly conquest of Amerindians and Mexicans, the exclusion of women, the subordination of European working-class men and the closeting of homosexuals. These realities made many of the words of the revolutionary Declaration of Independence ring a bit hollow. yet the enslavement of Africans -- over 20 percent of the population -- served as the linchpin of American democracy; that is, the much-heralded stability and continuity of American democracy was predicated upon black oppression and degradation. Without the presence of black people in America, European-Americans would not be "white -- they would be only Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh, and others engaged in class, ethnic, and gender struggles over resources and identity. ~ Cornel West

The colonization of the Southern economy by capitalists from the North gave lynching its most vigorous impulse. If Black people, by means of terror and violence, could remain the most brutally exploited group within the swelling ranks of the working class, the capitalists could enjoy a double advantage. Extra profits would result from the superexploitation of Black labor, and white workers' hostilities toward their employers would be defused. White workers who assented to lynching necessarily assumed a posture of racial solidarity with the white men who were really their oppressors. This was a critical moment in the popularization of racist ideology. ~ Angela Y. Davis

The displacement of class politics by identity politics has been very confusing to older Marxists, who for many years clung to the old industrial working class as their preferred category of the underprivileged. They tried to explain this shift in terms of what Ernest Gellner labeled the "Wrong Address Theory": "Just as extreme Shi'ite Muslims hold that Archangel Gabriel made a mistake, delivering the Message to Mohamed when it was intended for Ali, so Marxists basically like to think that the spirit of history or human consciousness made a terrible boob. The awakening message was intended for classes, but by some terrible postal error was delivered to nations. ~ Francis Fukuyama

The best thanks we could offer those who went before and raised the Irish working class from their knees was to press forward with determination and enthusiasm towards the ultimate goal of their efforts, a Co-operative Commonwealth for Ireland. ~ James Larkin

The road to the new society had lengthened and become overgrown sadly since 1904. The working class in many thousands had been shown its errors in thinking, but persisted in them. Very well: the working class must have the rigours of capitalism, and if the rigours were harsh - it serves them right for not accepting socialism. ~ Robert Barltrop

At such times a young couple found it difficult to believe that in a few hours the whistle would call them, two slaves amongst a multitude of slaves, when they felt that each other was the most important person in the world! They walked on air, and saw the stars shine , and even poverty could not numb their hearts, but let them stray for a short time in that fairy garden whose gate opens but once , and , once closing, nevermore! Miss Nobody- Ethel Carnie ~ Ethel Carnie Holdsworth

There are only two roads, victory for the working class, freedom, or victory for the fascists which means tyranny. Both combatants know what's in store for the loser. ~ Buenaventura Durruti

From the year of his birth in 1914 until the outbreak of war in 1941, my father lived in a mostly white, mostly working-class, mostly Irish Catholic neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. ~ Tim O'Brien

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

Basically as a working class boy I understand when there's not enough money to put food on the table and not knowing where the next dollar comes in from. When you've been in that environment as a child, you never lose it. ~ Lindsay Fox

I spent the 1960s and 1970s seeking myself - the working-class tradition of self-education. ~ Ken Livingstone

And of course these days I feel like there is a nation of us - displaced southerners and children of the working class. We listen to Steve Earle, Mary J. Blige, and k.d. lang. We devour paperback novels and tell evil mean stories, value stubbornness above patience and a sense of humor more than a college education. We claim our heritage with a full appreciation of how often it has been disdained.
And let me promise you, you do not want to make us angry. ~ Dorothy Allison

When I was a kid, I was watching the movies my parents wanted to watch. I came from a working class family, not specifically educated, so we were watching popular movies. My dad liked cowboy movies, so we were watching cowboy movies. Some of them were amazing. It's a genre of movie I like very much. ~ Olivier Martinez

My dad didn't have a formal education, but he had a wonderful vocabulary. So in 'Harvest,' I wanted my main character to be an innately intelligent man who would have the vocabulary to say whatever he wanted in the same way as lots of working-class people can. ~ Jim Crace

I am from the working class. I am now what I was then. No amount of balsamic vinegar and Prada handbags could make me forget what it was like to be poor. ~ Sue Townsend

We did phenomenally well with young people. I think we did well with working class people. ~ Bernie Sanders

Then all at once he´d hear his own voice enunciating clearly and firmly, feel its reverberance along the walls and ceiling, feel ears growing tense, men and women leaning forward in their chairs, see the rows of faces quite clearly, the groups of people who couldn´t find seats crowding at the doors. Phrases like `protest, massaction, united working-class of this country and the world, revolution´, would light up the eyes and faces under him like the glare of a bonfire. ~ John Dos Passos

I think the reason working-class people don't write books is because they are encouraged to believe that only certain people are permitted to write books. ~ Len Deighton

I have that working-class show-business blood coursing through my veins. ~ Jenny Lewis

John Delany had slowly evolved into a working class hero from days of wallowing in the primordial ooze of petty crime ~ Candice Fox

The nation, and the working class, are only abstract generalizations, dogmatic concepts, nebulous
entities which can be apprehended only by a verbal manoeuvre. Both concepts are real only as verbal constructions. Their existence is rooted in language, in its internal world, but not in the external world of men. The only reality is the concretely real human being, our neighbour, whom God puts in our path and to whose actions we are directly exposed. ~ Gustav Janouch

The labourer seeks to maintain the total of his wages for a given time by performing more labour, either by working a greater number of hours, or by accomplishing more in the same number of hours. Thus, urged on by want, he himself multiplies the disastrous effects of division of labour. The result is: the more he works, the less wages he receives. And for this simple reason: the more he works, the more he competes against his fellow workmen, the more he compels them to compete against him, and to offer themselves on the same wretched conditions as he does so that, in the last analysis, he competes against himself as a member of the working class. ~ Karl Marx

Every time the media brings up the tea party, it's painted as racist and extremists
but there's never a backlash, no outrage to those comparisons ... Working-class people are hurting
and it doesn't seem like anybody cares. When both sides are high-fiving it on the ninth hole when everybody else is without a job
it makes a whole lot of us angry. Something has to change. The policies have to change. ~ Hank Williams, Jr.

Alcohol decimated the working class and so many people. ~ Martin Scorsese

When we started off, we wanted the girls, the cocaine, the fur coats. It wasn't like it was an act; it was almost like working-class people winning the pools. We went bananas. ~ Noel Gallagher

The terrible thing in England is if you interview a thousand people, five hundred of them will talk like they're going into a Guy Ritchie movie and the other five hundred will be Mr. Darcy. So we had to find cool, working class kids with no profile who could be John Travolta and James Dean and people like that. ~ Ricky Gervais

I have that working class fear of having nothing. I've always got one eye on what's in the bank. ~ Jasper Carrott

What you don't see on television is people dying today because they can't get to a doctor and they can't afford prescription drugs. That's why they are also dying. They are dying in Iraq because they are poor and they have gone into the military because they can't afford to go to college. They're dying because they're living in communities where asthma rates are extremely high because the air is filthy. The suffering of the poor and working class people is a virtual nonissue for the media. But that is the reality. ~ Bernie Sanders

Animals, children, and the working class comprise the company in which I'll feel most at ease. ~ Russell Brand

When dealing with the excessively rich and privileged, you've got your two basic approaches. One is to go in hard and deliberately working class. A regional accent is always a plus in this. Seawoll has been known to deploy a Mancunian dialect so impenetrable that members of Oasis would have needed subtitles, and graduate entries with double firsts from Oxford practise a credible Estuary in the mirror and drop their glottals with gay abandon when necessary.

That approach only works if the subject suffers from residual middle-class guilt – unfortunately the properly posh, the nouveau riche and senior legal professionals are rarely prey to such weaknesses. For them you have to go in obliquely and with maximum Downton Abbey.

Fortunately for us we have just the man. ~ Ben Aaronovitch

There's something retro about your persona. It's like the pre-World War II generation of reporters - those unpretentious, working-class guys who hung around saloons and used rough language. Now they've all been replaced with these effete Ivy League elitists who swarm over the current media. Nerds - utterly dull and insipid. ~ Camille Paglia

I project that this next election - the 2016 election - if it is about anything thematically, it is going to be about that sense of rage and displacement among white working-class voters. ~ Joy-Ann Reid

We don't use the term 'working class' here because it's a taboo term. You're supposed to say 'middle class,' because it helps diminish the understanding that there's a class war going on. ~ Noam Chomsky

We come from a tough, working class background, so we're very tight. ~ Tony Scott

Upper-class parents enable their kids to form weak ties by exposing them more often to organized activities, professionals, and other adults. Working-class children, on the other hand, are more likely to interact regularly only with kin and neighborhood children, which limits their formation of valuable weak ties. ~ Robert D. Putnam

The colors black and white are my uniform, to honor the working class. People like my parents, who were janitors and had to wear a uniform every day. It keeps me grounded. ~ Janelle Monae

Limousines used to be reserved for the ruling class, or, on special occasions, for the working class. Today, limousines are like taxicabs with the door handles still intact. ~ Erma Bombeck

Paradise, the capitalists promise, is right around the corner. True, mistakes have been made such as the Atlantic slave trade and the exploitation of the European working class, but we have learned our lesson and if we just wait a little longer and allow the pie to grow a little bigger, everybody will receive a fatter slice. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

I come from a working-class family. They're the people I know and the people I love, I guess. I do not write about them for political reasons, but because, as I see it, most interesting things - social, political, emotional - take place there. It's a bottomless well for an author like me. ~ Per Petterson

Make no mistake: The organization of the working class must be both economic and political. The capitalist is organized upon both lines. You must attack him on both. ~ Daniel De Leon

In the various stages of development which the struggle of working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole. ~ Karl Marx

Or as my dad always says: it only becomes a social problem when the working man joins in. ~ Ben Aaronovitch

Ultimately, imperialism made even the British working classes suffer. This is a point which the British working classes found quite difficult to swallow, but they did, actually. ~ Amartya Sen

The areas in which I teach are working-class history and African-American Studies and at its best the critical study of whiteness often grows out of those areas. The critical examination of whiteness, academic and not, simply involves the effort to break through the illusion that whiteness is natural, biological, normal, and not crying out for explanation. ~ David Roediger

How lame an anti-climax! If the working-class has remained "poor," only "less poor" in proportion as it produces for the wealthy class "an intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power," then it has remained relatively just as poor. ~ Karl Marx

After the countrywide victory of the Chinese revolution and the solution of the land problem, two basic contradictions will still exist in China. The first is internal, that is, the contradiction between the working class and the bourgeoisie. The second is external, which is the contradiction between China and the imperialist countries. Consequently, after the victory of the people's democratic revolution, the state power of the people's republic under the leadership of the working class must not be weakened but must be strengthened. ~ Mao Zedong

The transition from capitalism to Socialism and the liberation of the working class from the yoke of capitalism cannot be effected by slow changes, by reforms, but only by a qualitative change of the capitalist system, by revolution. Hence, in order not to err in policy, one must be a revolutionary, not a reformist. ~ J. Stalin

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

The French need a thrashing. If the Prussians win, the centralisation of the state power will be useful for the centralisation of the German working class. German predominance would also transfer the centre of gravity of the workers' movement in Western Europe from France to Germany, and one has only to compare the movement in the two countries from 1866 till now to see that the German working class is superior to the French both theoretically and organisationally. Their predominance over the French on the world stage would also mean the predominance of our theory over Proudhon's, etc. ~ Karl Marx

America's indispensable working class existed as property beyond the realm of politics, leaving white Americans free to trumpet their love of freedom and democratic values. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

The fundamental issue was the class struggle...its prosecution remained the vital principle...and even the scurviest expedient was seen in terms of possible gain by the working class from the masters. ~ Robert Barltrop

In working class districts, you had several families living together in the one house, and it was very difficult to get a house, because the politicians who controlled housing were doing so in a very discriminatory fashion. ~ John Hume

She wipes her forehead with her wrist
She's just back from a double shift
Esther's a carer
doing nights

Behind her
on the kitchen wall
is a black and white picture
of swallows in flight

Her eyes are sore
her muscles ache
she cracks a beer
and swigs it

She holds it
to her thirsty lips
and necks it
till it's finished.

It's 4:18 a.m. again.
Her brain is full
of all she's done that day
She knows
that she won't sleep a wink
before the sun
is on it's way.

She's worried about the world tonight.

She's worried all the time.
She don't know how
she's supposed
to put it

from her mind . . .

- Europe is Lost ~ Kae Tempest

I once said, 'We will bury you,' and I got into trouble with it. Of course we will not bury you with a shovel. Your own working class will bury you. ~ Nikita Khrushchev

The distinction between "paid labor" and "housework" implied in working-class men's yearning for the domestic ideal persisted in later-nineteenth-century analyses of women's unpaid labor and was eventually replicated in Capital. Because wives' work was laregely unpaid, and because husbands came to the marketplace as the "possessors" of their wives' labor, Marx did not address the role of housework in the labor exchange that led to surplus value. Neither did he attend to the dynamics that permitted the husband to lay claim, in the price of his own labor, to the value of his wife's work. ~ Jeanne Boydston

Being working class wasn't about words, it could only be expressed through the body. ~ Christos Tsiolkas

This led me to understand that trade unionism, the instrument of working-class liberation and of social change could, and indeed should, be also an instrument of industrial progress. ~ Leon Jouhaux

Work - especially the sort of work that gets your hands dirty and that brands you as a member of the working class - no longer seems germane to our novelists' apprenticeships and, not coincidentally, is no longer easy to find in the fiction they produce. Whether one finds this scarcity something to worry about or simply a fact to be noted probably says a lot about one's class origins and prejudices. ~ Gerald Howard

There is a process of social and of political differentiation going on in the real working class all the time. ~ Ernest Mandel

People often say that football and boxing are the ways out of the working class and they are your ticket out of that kind of life, if you happen to want to leave it. But, for me, the library is the key. That is where the escape tunnel is. All of the knowledge in the world is there. The great brains of the world are at your fingertips. ~ Billy Connolly

The conclusion you can draw from these characteristics is that you have an uneven development of class activity and an uneven development of class consciousness in the working class. ~ Ernest Mandel

But those misgivings come less from the resulting loss of familial memories than because it gave Lorelai the working-class skills to escape inherited class obligations and to make her own way in the world. That's one reason why Lorelai is powerful and fearless in ways Mrs. Kim and Mrs. Gilmore are not. She's self-confident enough to accept those things she can't control and to rely upon the kindness of strangers. ~ Jennifer Crusie

My parents grew up working class, but in that way that working class families do, they spent a fortune on education to better me. ~ Graham Norton

Talking about success in society, no one can complain, because today everyone can choose what he or she wants. They don't just have to choose between being proletarian or middle-class. Those kinds of things do not exist anymore. Today working class boys can play football and become multimillionaires. On football! There are no longer classes, who say that we are poor, we are suppressed by you etc. ~ Odd Nerdrum

My working-class Italian-American parents didn't go to school, there were no books in the house. ~ Martin Scorsese

Marriage equality is a very middle-class issue and voting rights is a very working-class issue. If you do not vote, who are you speaking for? Who will be the next Fannie Lou Hamer? If not you or someone you know, then who? ~ Darryl Pinckney

we're a pessimistic bunch. What is more surprising is that, as surveys have found, working-class whites are the most pessimistic group in America. More pessimistic than Latino immigrants, many of whom suffer unthinkable poverty. More pessimistic than black Americans, whose material prospects continue to lag behind those of whites. While reality permits some degree of cynicism, the fact that hillbillies like me are more down about the future than many other groups - some ~ J.D. Vance

After World War I the resentment of the working class against all that it had to suffer was directed more against Morgan, Wall Street and private capital than the government. ~ C.L.R. James

The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making. ~ E.P. Thompson

I was a working class Jewish girl. In my girlhood, anti-Semitism was a daily fact of life in Detroit. I did not come from people who had many options in their lives or many choices open to them. I was a girl in a family in which women were, as in society at large, very much second-class citizens. I did not see why I should accept these forced limitations without a fight. Being free to make my own choices thus became very important to me at an early age. ~ Marge Piercy

People like me who grew up in a working-class town, who don't have a college education, you don't usually hear from us. ~ Michael Moore

The best real-estate investments with the highest yields are in working-class neighborhoods, because fancy properties are overpriced. ~ Jane Bryant Quinn

My dad's family were pretty working class, actually. ~ Dan Stevens

social mobility isn't just about money and economics, it's about a lifestyle change. The wealthy and the powerful aren't just wealthy and powerful; they follow a different set of norms and mores. When you go from working-class to professional-class, almost everything about your old life becomes unfashionable at best or unhealthy at worst. ~ J.D. Vance

So, as middle-class families have been tumbling downhill, working-class families have been tumbling into poverty. And ~ Amy Goldstein

I have been thinking for some time of writing a piece called: In Pursuit of the Working-Class. My life has been spent in pursuit. So has everyone's, of course. I chase love and fame all the time. I have chased, off and on, and with much greater deviousness of approach, the working-class and the English. The pursuit of the working-class is shared by everyone with the faintest tint of social responsibility: some of the most indefatigable pursuers are working-class people. That is because the phrase does n ~ Doris Lessing

The whole history of my life, and in essence the whole history of the working class consists of this: that we have lived and fought under the leadership of Lenin and Stalin. ~ Mikhail Kalinin

I'm a Conservative, but I talk for the ordinary working classes. I get on with the boys at the pub, but I can also mix with Prince Andrew. I understand both levels. The toffs haven't lived in council estates; they've just known big mansions. How can they understand how the postman feels? I would never say no to becoming an MP. ~ Vinnie Jones

My mother was a teacher, my father was a community organizer. I come from a working class background. ~ Chris Hayes

I was a working-class kid from Boston. But I never lost my accent because I felt like that was what I was doing. I didn't have to perform Woody Guthrie like Bob Dylan did in the '60s, I just had to make myself be Eileen Myles and let that be my shield. ~ Eileen Myles

Baltimore's often called the most northern Southern town. It has a distinct essence. It's definitely post-industrial, definitely Rust Belt, very working-class. I grew up outside of Washington, and I felt I was moving to a completely different place when I moved 30 miles north out of college. ~ David Simon

There is a certain pride in work and in your body throbbing beyond any boundaries you imagined you could endure. You identify with those who come home with pieces of pork fat wedged into their boots, with gashes on their arms and legs from their tools and machines, and with black grime etched into the folds of their dark skin.
Too often this country has turned its back on the working class and the working poor, not to mention the undocumented workers who harvest the food for American tables and build our houses. ~ Sergio Troncoso

At the time, Jean-Claude [Juncker] was already an important man in Brussels. I was a young representative in the European Parliament. We talked for a long time and from that point on, our connection became increasingly deep. But our working-class origins are at least as important to our bond. ~ Martin Schulz

My mother was a housewife. Both from - well, my father was from a farming family, agricultural family in the north of England. And my mother came from a very working class. ~ David Bowie

I went to a middle-class school, but my background is working class. I got the best of both worlds, I saw both classes, so I have a pretty fair idea of how people live and why they do it. ~ David Bowie