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“They had never struggled, and only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“He wondered about the people in houses like those. They would be, for example, small clerks, shop-assistants, commercial travellers, insurance touts, tram conductors. Did they know that they were only puppets dancing when money pulled the strings? You bet they didn’t. And if they did, what would they care? They were too busy being born, being married, begetting, working, dying. It mightn’t be a bad thing, if you could manage it, to feel yourself one of them, one of the ruck of men. Our civilization is founded on greed and fear, but in the lives of common men the greed and fear are mysteriously transmuted into something nobler. The lower-middle-class people in there, behind their lace curtains, with their children and their scraps of furniture and their aspidistras â€� they lived by the money-code, sure enough, and yet they contrived to keep their decency. The money-code as they interpreted it was not merely cynical and hoggish. They had their standards, their inviolable points of honour. They ‘kept themselves respectable’â€� kept the aspidistra flying. Besides, they were alive. They were bound up in the bundle of life. They begot children, which is what the saints and the soul-savers never by any chance do.

The aspidistra is the tree of life, he thought suddenly.”
― George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying

“This advice comes as a surprise: job searching is not joblessness; it is a job in itself and should be structured to resemble one, right down to the more regrettable features of employment, like having to follow orders--orders which are in this case self-generated.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“Watching middle-class conservatives vote for politicians who've proudly pledged to screw them and their children over fills me with the same exasperated contempt I feel for rabbits who zigzag wildly back and forth in front of my tires instead of just getting off the goddamn road.”
― Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

“Silence descended on the house. [....] Amma must have sensed that this was the sort of silence that, left unchallenged, could consume the family from within.”
― Vivek Shanbhag, Ghachar Ghochar

“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

“If facts are inconvenient, well, damn those who live and work with facts.”
― David Brin

“In this connection, I should like to say something that I have found in many other writers: Intellectual alienation is a creation of middle-class society. What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary.”
― Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

“Tax work less. Tax wealth more.”
― Gary Stevenson

“There must always be a fringe of the experimental in literature--poems bizarre in form and curious in content, stories that overreach for what has not hitherto been put in story form, criticism that mingles a search for new truth with bravado. We should neither scoff at this trial margin nor take it too seriously. Without it, literature becomes inert and complacent. But the everyday person's reading is not, ought not to be, in the margin. He asks for a less experimental diet, and his choice is sound. If authors and publishers would give him more heed they would do wisely. They are afraid of the swarming populace who clamor for vulgar sensation (and will pay only what it is worth), and they are afraid of petulant literati who insist upon sophisticated sensation (and desire complimentary copies). The stout middle class, as in politics and industry, has far less influence than its good sense and its good taste and its ready purse deserve.”
― Henry Seidel Canby, Saturday Papers: Essays on Literature from The Literary Review

“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

“The relatively privileged Negro will never be what he ought to be until the underprivileged Negro is what he ought to be. The salvation of the Negro middle class is ultimately dependent upon the salvation of the Negro masses.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

“the bourgeoisie must become revolutionaries and stop being the saboteurs”
― Seun Ayilara

“I traded in my life for a sliver of middle-class comfort. For a future.”
― Natasha Brown, Assembly

“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

“This is the fate which awaits many of the middle class and the wage-class. What are you going to do about it? Are you going to serve notice on these thieves, and highway robbers, sitting in high places of “honorâ€� and “trust,â€� that by the eternal god of justice, and by the manhood in you, that you will not, in this land of plenty, allow your children to become the mere hirelings and dependents upon the sweet will of their children?”
― Lucy Parsons

“Piri Thomas' book Down These Mean Streets followed me around for years, in the corner of my eye on bus terminal bookracks. Finally, in a gritted teeth desperation I faced the damn thing and said "OK, tell me." I sweated my way through it in two nights: Gang fights, knifings, robberies, smack, prison. It's the standard Puerto Rican street story, except he lived. The junkies could be my younger brothers. The prisoners could be them. I could be the prostitute, the welfare mother, the sister and lover of junkies, the child of alcoholics. There is nothing but circumstance and good English, nothing but my mother marrying into the middle class, between me and that life.”
― Aurora Levins Morales

“I'm retired, not tired!”
― James Hauenstein, No Return Address

“Had he worn a sweater tied around his neck he could have served as the undeniable unintentional intimidating model poster boy for all the ever disappearing middle-class parents who saw the brochure for any ivy league school and were dreading money they had to shell out.”
― J.S. Mason, Whisky Hernandez

“Life in squats with my mother hadn't really prepared me for what to expect from the aristocracy. On balance, I'd have to say people were a lot better behaved in the squats.”
― Robert Galbraith, The Ink Black Heart

“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

“He was born in a middle class family with struggles in life. He had adverse surroundings and many difficulties in his life. Some moments haunted him - he would remember a few things that did not happen in his life as he thought they would, and he would feel a deep pain of past regrets shatter his calmness. One day he realized that he desperately needed someone to whom he could share everything and someone who could guide him in life.

He found me. And I became his Guru.”
― Avijeet Das

“...and it just pisses me off more. Like yeah, I cry when I watch those sad puppy videos too, but Gabriel's not actually a puppy abandoned by his owner. He's an upper middle-class Vermont kid who's parents business beats ours like ten months out of twelve. It's not my fault that emotionally, his about as stable as a cheap styrofoam cup.”
― Emery Lee

“I have been back among fairy tales,â€� she says. “I do not quite understand, Alesha. Those gallant little boys! They are youth, and youth is always full of strangeness. Mr. Heritage! He is youth, too, and poetry, perhaps, and a soldier’s tradition. I think I know him... But what about Dickson? He is the petit bourgeois, the épicier, the class which the world ridicules. He is unbelievable.

“No,â€� is the answer. “You will not find him in Russia. He is what they call the middle-class, which we who were foolish used to laugh at. But he is the stuff which aboveall others makes a great people. He will endure when aristocracies crack and proletariats crumble. In our own land we have never known him, but till we create him our land will not be a nation.”
― John Buchan, Huntingtower

“She made a decent salary, but most of that went to paying interest on her debts. Still, she was lucky to have a job at all. She had to keep reminding herself of that. She didn’t feel lucky.”
― Cliff Jones Jr., Dreck

“Laila could picture the flow of traffic all around her. From above, she watched the cars move along in streams like all those ants on her kitchen floor. What had they been looking for anyway? A crumb here, a speck of sugar there? The vast stockpiles of food in the pantry and fridge remained untouched. For that matter, what kept all these cars returning to the city day after day? A little money, a little entertainment? Surface operations like Livetrac kept the ants fighting over crumbs while the obscene fortunes of a shadowy elite were counted not in dollars but in lives.”
― Cliff Jones Jr., Dreck

“What the poor as well as the rich require is not to be indoctrinated, is not to be taught other people’s opinions, but to be induced and enabled to think for themselves. It is not physical science that will do this, even if they could learn it much more thoroughly than they are able to do. After reading, writing, and arithmetic (the last a most important discipline in habits of accuracy and precision, in which they are extremely deficient), the desirable thing for them seems to be the most miscellaneous information, and the most varied exercise of their faculties. They cannot read too much. Quantity is of more importance than quality, especially all reading which relates to human life and the ways of mankind; geography, voyages and travels, manners and customs, and romances, which must tend to awaken their imagination and give them some of the meaning of self-devotion and heroism, in short, to unbrutalise them.”
― John Stuart Mill, The Letters of John Stuart Mill, Vol 1

“You want to be a middle peon, neither rich nor poor, and there's no such thing.”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“A society beset by terrifying social problems was threatened by realism... exacerbated by the deep-seated evils of poverty and overcrowding generated by Scotland's pell-mell industrialisation. To expose these would be revolutionary; it would also break the discipline of puritanism by mentioning the unmentionable... The Kirk enforced silence out of conviction, the middle class out of fear. The bogus community of the Kailyard was an alternative to the horror of the real thing.”
― Christopher Harvie, Scotland and Nationalism: Scottish Society and Politics 1707 to the Present

“Now, my new goal is to earn enough to bring us from lower middle class to the middle class. That is enough for me for this lifetime.”
― Srivani Bairi, Freshly Laidoff