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“Why, godamit, why did they insist upon confusing the class struggle with the ass struggle, debasing both us and them—all human motives?”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Sometimes we also find a tendency to view everything that's indigenous as good and anything "European"-such as Spain-as evil. That view overlooks such historical realities as the Aztec empire's oppressive domination of other indigenous societies and its class system, which privileged priests and the military. That view also forgets Spain was not a typically European nation after 600 years of rule by the Moors, an Arab/Berber people from Africa.”
― Elizabeth Martínez, De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views for a Multi-Colored Century

“in a classless society, I am not sure that we would still use this notion of justice”
― Michel Foucault, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature

“How much money would I have to take from you so I don’t lose your respect?â€�
Crocker Fenway chuckled without mirth. “A bit late for that, Mr. Sportello. People like you lose all claim to respect the first time they pay anybody rent.�
“And when the first landlord decided to stiff the first renter for his security deposit, your whole fucking class lost everybody’s respect.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice

“For everyday purposes, we know and can say, e.g., whether an animal is alive or not. But, upon closer inquiry, we find that this is, in many cases, a very complex question, as the jurists know very well. They have cudgelled their brains in vain to discover a rational limit beyond which the killing of the child in its mother's womb is murder. It is just as impossible to determine absolutely the moment of death, for physiology proves that death is not an instantaneous, momentary phenomenon, but a very protracted process.

In like manner, every organized being is every moment the same and not the same; every moment, it assimilates matter supplied from without, and gets rid of other matter; every moment, some cells of its body die and others build themselves anew; in a longer or shorter time, the matter of its body is completely renewed, and is replaced by other molecules of matter, so that every organized being is always itself, and yet something other than itself.”
― Frederick Engels

“Generally we think of white supremacist views as having their origins with the unlettered, underprivileged, poorer-class whites. But the social obstetricians who presided at the birth of racist views in our country were from the aristocracy: rich merchants, influential clergymen, men of medical science, historians and political scientists from some of the leading universities of the nation. With such a distinguished company of the elite working so assiduously to disseminate racist views, what was there to inspire poor, illiterate, unskilled white farmers to think otherwise?

Soon the doctrine of white supremacy was imbedded in every textbook and preached in practically every pulpit. It became a structural part of the culture. And men then embraced this philosophy, not as the rationalization of a lie, but as the expression of a final truth.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

“I don't know - I suppose because, on the very face on it, I see two classes dependent on each other in every possible way, yet each evidently regarding the interests of the other as opposed to their own.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

“Our cities have constructed elaborate expressways and elevated skyways, and white Americans speed from suburb to inner city through vast pockets of black deprivation without ever getting a glimpse of the suffering and misery in their midst.

But while so many white Americans are unaware of conditions inside the ghetto, there are very few ghetto dwellers who are unaware of the life outside. Their television sets bombard them day by day with the opulence of the larger society. From behind the ghetto walls they see glistening towers of glass and steel springing up almost overnight. They hear jet liners speeding over their heads at six hundred miles an hour. They hear of satellites streaking through outer space and revealing details of the moon.

Then they begin to think of their own conditions. They know that they are always given the hardest, ugliest, most menial work to do. They look at these impressive buildings under construction and realize that almost certainly they cannot get those well-paying construction jobs, because building trade unions reserve them for whites only. They know that people who built the bridges, the mansions and docks of the South could build modern buildings if they were only given a chance for apprenticeship training. They realize that it is hard, raw discrimination that shuts them out. It is not only poverty that torments the Negro; it is the fact of poverty amid plenty. It is a misery generated by the gulf between the affluence he sees in the mass media and the deprivation he experiences in his everyday life.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“While the poor are offered addiction as a way to escape thinking too much, working people are encouraged to shop.”
― bell hooks, Where We Stand: Class Matters

“Almost everyone, as almost always at such concerts, was white. It is something I can't help noticing; I notice it each time, and try to see past it. Part of that is a quick, complex series of negotiations: chiding myself for even seeing it, lamenting the reminders of how divided our life still remains, being annoyed that these thoughts can be counted on to pass through my mind at some point in the evening. Most of the people around me yesterday were middle-aged or old. I am used to it, but it never ceases to surprise me how easy it is to leave the hybridity of the city, and enter into all-white spaces, the homogeneity of which, as far as I can tell, causes no discomfort to the whites in them. The only thing odd, to some of them, is seeing me, young and black, in my seat or at the concession stand. At times, standing in line for the bathroom during intermission, I get looks that make me feel like Ota Benga, the Mbuti man who was put on display in the Monkey House at the Bronx Zoo in 1906. I weary of such thoughts, but I am habituated to them. But Mahler's music is not white, or black, not old or young, and whether it is even specifically human, rather than in accord with more universal vibrations, is open to question.”
― Teju Cole, Open City

“While bilingual is understood as a valuable asset or goal for middle-class and upper-class students, for working-class and poor students it is framed as a disability that must be overcome”
― Jonathan Rosa, Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad

“I get angry with those in the women's movement and out of it who deal with class & color as if they defined politics and people.”
― Rosario Morales, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“Conversations about class are resisted in part because there is a tendency to imagine that one's class reflects upon one's character. What is key to America's understanding of class is the persistent belief - despite all evidence to the contrary - that anyone, with the proper discipline and drive, can move from a lower class to a higher class. We recognize that mobility may be difficult, but the key to our collective self-image is the assumption that mobility is always possible, so failure to move up reflects on one's character.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“The fact that acute differences exist between social and cultural classes seems to be acknowledged in most of the world, but in the United States, where democracy is often confounded with egalitarianism, even the idea that social classes exist has long been taboo. It is, however, a writer’s specialty to deal with taboos, to speak the unspoken, to reveal, to uncover, to show in the interaction of people the difference between what we profess and how we act. Moreover, because touchy subjects arouse emotion, they are especially useful for the writer who knows that arousing the emotions of his audience is the test of his skill.”
― Sol Stein, Stein on Writing

“We are almost all, my good General, of a nature so pitifully plastic, that we act from circumstance, and are fashioned by situation.”
― Frances Burney, Camilla

“Ava is drawn to wealthy partners as a means of quieting her class anxieties. In practice, having sex with rich people only heightens her awareness that she herself is not rich, and yet she keeps on doing it.”
― Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times

“We judge the street corner hustler or working-class criminal - from East Glasgow to East London - but we see a job as an investment banker, even in firms that launder the profits of drug cartels, fund terrorism, aid the global flow of arms, fuel war, oil spills, land grabs and generally fuck up the planet, as a perfectly legitimate, even aspirational occupation.”
― Akala, Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

“From the philosopher-kings of Plato to the enlightened oligarchies of Aristotle, some of the world's greatest thinkers have strived to categorise society.”
― Greg Hadfield, Class: where do you stand?

“Traveling is a classroom where the world teaches what one didn't learn at school.”
― Dr. Lucas D. Shallua

“But the underlying capability of the computer era is actually programming—which almost none of us knows how to do. We simply use the programs that have been made for us, and enter our text in the appropriate box on the screen. We teach kids how to use software to write, but not how to write software. This means they have access to the capabilities given to them by others, but not the power to determine the value-creating capabilities of these technologies for themselves.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age

“Exactly! Ever heard of King Arthur’s circular table? A circular table was selected to symbolize that all the people sitting on it were equal and their opinions mattered equally. We are sitting on a circular table, but is there equal freedom of speech and expression right now? There is no ‘headâ€� to this table, and yet we INSURGENTS---- why do we have to be called INSURGENTS for our voices----yeah, we INSURGENTS are put under you ALLIES just for mentioning our concerns! Isn’t that unconstitutional?”
― Lucy Carter, The Reformation

“He could put up with his meaningless office-life, because he never for an instant thought of it as permanent. God knew how or when, he was going to break free of it. After all, there was always his “writing.â€� Some day, perhaps, he might be able to make a living of sorts by “writing;â€� and you’d feel you were free of the money-stink if you were a “writer,â€� would you not? The types he saw all around him, especially the older men, made him squirm. That is what it meant to worship the money-god! To settle down, to Make Good, to sell your soul for a villa and an aspidistra! To turn into the typical bowler-hatted sneak â€� Strube’s “little manâ€� â€� the little docile cit who slips home by the six-fifteen to a supper of cottage pie and stewed tinned pears, half an hour’s listening-in to the BBC Symphony Concert, and then perhaps a spot of licit sexual intercourse if his wife “feels in the mood!â€� What a fate! No, it isn’t like that that one was meant to live. One’s got to get right out of it, out of the money stink.”
― George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying

“Most of the employees were the hard-boiled, Americanised, go-getting type â€� the type to whom nothing in the world is sacred, except money. They had their cynical code worked out. The public are swine; advertising is the rattling of a stick inside of a swill-bucket.”
― George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying

“Every ideology is a mental murder, a reduction of dynamic living processes to static classifications, and every classification is a Damnation, just as every inclusion is an exclusion. In a busy, buzzing universe where no two snow flakes are identical, and no two trees are identical, and no two people are identical- and, indeed, the smallest sub-atomic particle, we are assured, is not even identical with itself from one microsecond to the next- every card-index system is a delusion. “Or, to put it more charitably,â€� as Nietzsche says, “we are all better artists than we realize.â€� It is easy to see that label “Jewâ€� was a Damnation in Nazi Germany, but actually the label “Jewâ€� is a Damnation anywhere, even where anti-Semitism does not exist. “He is a Jew,â€� “He is a doctor,â€� and “He is a poetâ€� mean, to the card indexing centre of the cortex, that my experience with him will be like my experience with other Jews, other doctors, and other poets. Thus, individuality is ignored when identity is asserted. At a party or any place where strangers meet, watch this mechanism in action. Behind the friendly overtures there is wariness as each person fishes for the label that will identify and Damn the other. Finally, it is revealed: “Oh, he’s an advertising copywriter,â€� “Oh, he’s an engine-lathe operator.â€� Both parties relax, for now they know how to behave, what roles to play in the game. Ninety-nine percent of each has been Damned; the other is reacting to the 1 percent that has been labeled by the card-index machine.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminatus! Trilogy

“A final memory. A few months ago, in the garden of a teahouse where I’d suggested we meet, she told me how she had once been called to the school by my teacher when I was six years old. The teacher wanted to tell her—at least this is what she claimed—that she, the teacher, found my behavior different from that of the other children, that I spoke of dreams and desires that were too grandiose, ambitions that were abnormal for children my age. She said that the others wanted to become firemen or policemen, but I spoke of becoming the king or the president of the republic; that I swore that as soon as I grew up, I’d take my mother far away from my father and that I’d buy her a château. I would like for this book—this story of her—to be, in some way, the home in which she might take refuge.”
― Édouard Louis, Combats et métamorphoses d'une femme

“They were buffoons with barricaded eyes, their shoulders held in positions of immovable defense. Each position upon the great floor could be seen as an atrophic collision from which dead flesh might slough away to reveal skeletons. Their bodies, their clothes, and their faces described individual hells-the insucked breast of concealed terrors, the glittering hook of a jewel became substitute armor; the mouths were judgments full of frightened absolutes, cathedral prisms of eyebrows showing lofty and religious sentiments which their loins denied.”
― Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

“EJ knew she was solidly middle class, and she liked to think she was pretty sophisticated: she played piano, spoke French, and even embroidered a little—like accomplished ladies in old novels. But every so often someone or something at Longbourn would make her feel like the poor country cousin.”
― Eden Appiah-Kubi, The Bennet Women

“Oftentimes the poor are more addicted to excess because they are the most vulnerable to all the powerful messages in media and in our lives in general which suggest that the only way out of class shame is conspicuous consumption”
― bell hooks, Where We Stand: Class Matters

“These children, like their adult peers, do not link their longing for wealth with uncritical acceptance and support of transnational white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. They simply believe they are longing for the “good lifeâ€� and that this life has to be bought.”
― bell hooks, Where We Stand: Class Matters

“The idea that we, our fathers and mothers, might be proud, hard-working and intelligent people doing something worthwhile, or even admirable, seemed to be beyond her. For a woman who saw success as being demonstrated through education, ambition, adventure and conspicuous professional achievement, we must have seemed a poor sample. I don't think anyone ever mentioned "university" in this school; no one wanted to go anyway - people that went away ceased to belong; they changed and could never really come back, we knew that in our bones. Schooling was a "way out", but we didn't want it, and we'd made our choice. Later I would understand that modern industrial communities are obsessed with the importance of "going somewhere" and "doing something with your life". The implication is an idea I have come to hate, that staying local and doing physical work doesn't count for much.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District