Classes Quotes

The true way to overcome the evil of class distinctions is not to denounce them as revolutionists denounce them, but to ignore them as children ignore them.

At the bottom, people tend to believe that class is defined by the amount of money you have. In the middle, people grant that money has something to do with it, but think education and the kind of work you do almost equally important. Nearer the top, people perceive that taste, values, ideas, style, and […]

Belonging to a rapidly changing rather than a traditional society, Americans find Knowing Where You Stand harder than do most Europeans. And a yet more pressing matter, Making It, assumes crucial importance here.

Through thick and thin, boom and bust, we tenaciously hold on to the belief that we are, fundamentally, a classless society. This self-image survives even though we have the most unequal distribution of wealth in the Western world. It survives even though 1 percent of us own 40 percent of the wealth. And even though […]

I was (in America) constantly being introduced to eminent person by people who were quite unmistakably superior to these notables, and most modestly unaware of it.

There once was an entomologist who found a bug he couldn’t classify – so he stepped on it.

When Adam dolve, and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?

It’s amazing to me that only populists are ever accused of class warfare. Talk about losing a grip on reality. I’ll tell you what class warfare is: When the Gingrich Republicans mandate that the IRS spend more of its resources auditing working-class people who get the Earned Income Tax Credit than it does auditing millionaires […]

The ignorant classes are the dangerous classes.

The first thing the intellect does with any object is too class it along with something else… Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. “I am no such thing,” it would […]