Working Class Quotes - Page 8

• If you want to really sort of quantify the dereliction of the Republican establishment, those two facts are the most important two facts. One, that they didn`t even understand the base of their own party, white working class voters who you know what, don`t care about tax cuts for the rich, really aren`t interested in the things that the elite part of their party want, including immigration reform. And number two, they spent eight months avoiding finding opposition research to use against the guy who was becoming the front-runner in their party that they don`t want.

  Chris Hayes

  Party, Cutting, Numbers

  Source: www.msnbc.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• When Benjamin Disraeli spoke of the 'two nations' in Britain he was perfectly right, only the working classes were not exactly a nation. But the gap in behavioral standards and in outlook, and of course in standards of living, were enormous. And in course of time, at least in countries such as Britain, the working classes more or less adopted and have become assimilated to the standards of the so-called 'gentle' classes. That is assimilation.The working class has hardly been able to govern, but they are no longer outsiders in relation to the state as they were before.

  Norbert Elias

  Country, Outsiders, Relation

  Source: quod.lib.umich.edu

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Donald Trump is pulling off a world-class scam here. I mean, he's telling people he's all these things that he's never been his entire life. He says he's fighting for the little guy, the working class. He has spent his entire business career sticking it to working people.

  Marco Rubio

  Mean, Fighting, Class

  Source: www.cbsnews.com

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• The future of the Democratic Party, the future of this country is involving young people in the political process, getting them to stand up for their rights, dealing with student debt, which I got to tell you is just crushing people all over this country, making public colleges and universities tuition free, those are the ideas we are bringing out, demanding the wealthy and large corporations start paying their fair share of taxes. This is what younger people, working class people want. That is the future of the Democratic Party.

  Bernie Sanders

  Crush, Country, Party

  Source: www.cbsnews.com

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• On the policy front, I just believe that Barack Obama was misguided. That he somehow sees this country as being in need of a drastic overhaul. What he tried to do actually hurt the country rather than helped it and the best example is Obamacare. It's a good idea to insure people who can't or won't buy insurance but you can't punish the working class to make it happen, which he did. Now everybody's paying higher premiums and more deductibles that's coming out of working people's pockets and that's one of the reasons that his legacy has been refuted.

  Bill O'Reilly

  Country, Hurt, Believe

  Source: deadline.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• We know the legislation that passed the House. It was the worst piece of legislation frankly against working class people that I can remember in my political life in the Congress.

  Bernie Sanders

  People, House, Political

  Source: www.cbsnews.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Activism spawned by Sanders campaign is beginning to make inroads into electoral politics. Under Barack Obama, the Democratic Party pretty much collapsed at the crucial local and state levels, but it can be rebuilt and turned into a progressive force. That would mean reviving the New Deal legacy and moving well beyond, instead of abandoning, the working class and turning into Clintonite New Democrats, which more or less resemble what used to be called moderate Republicans, a category that has largely disappeared with the shift of both parties to the right during the neoliberal period.

  Noam Chomsky

  Party, Moving, Mean

  4 Copy quote

• There might be greater technology but really, we as human beings, we're the same as we ever were. There's always a ruling class that shits on a working class. There's always war over money. So we as humans aren't enlightened as a whole. So I think that you as an individual can progress under certain circumstances, so if you choose to be something and to try and learn and to try and progress then eventually it will happen but that is also who you are. You can make conscious decisions to try and do something positive or constructive but you are what you are.

  David W. Marsden

  War, Technology, Thinking

  Source: thequietus.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• People talk to me all the time about sexual harassment. This sort of behavior did not only happen in the past. And it's not in just the working class. It's in every industry. It's in the military. It's in politics.

  Niki Caro

  Military, Past, People

  Source: www.slate.com

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• I was a celebrity. This is not what I do for a living - politics. I play politicians, as well as working class or clergy or whatever, and you mustn't be confused by what you're seeing on television because that's not who I am. So I always ended it.

  Martin Sheen

  Confused, Politician

  Source: www.avclub.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think neoliberalism is vulnerable to protest. And it's under protest because people are beginning to realize that these austerity policies are really market-driven policies designed to punish the poor, the working classes, and the middle classes by simply distributing wealth upwards.

  Henry Giroux

  Thinking, People, Realizing

  4 Copy quote

• Only in my case, when my presidency ends, I will go back to my home industrial city town, 800 meters from my local trade union that projected me my political life. And if I fail, when I go back to my hometown, it's going to take another century for another worker, another member of the working class to reach the presidency, because people are going to say that the workers do not have the competency to run a country.

  Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva

  Running, Country, Home

  5 Copy quote

• There's just something about being a young, working class, working poor, person of color in New York City in the 80's that needs to be understood by people outside of that experience. The way I put it is that we created something really amazing, hip hop, when we weren't even supposed to survive.

  Sofia Quintero

  People, Hip Hop, Poor

  Source: www.nationalbook.org

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• For writers from working-class families, the making of art is cultural disenfranchisement, for we do not belong in literary circles and our writing rarely makes it back home.

  Valerie Miner

  Art, Home, Writing

  Valerie Miner (2014). “Rumors from the Cauldron: Selected Essays, Reviews, and Reportage”, p.30, Open Road Media

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I don't know a lot of writers, even writers who have been on the bestseller list for a few weeks, or writers who have gotten movie options, who can live on just their writing income. Once you break it down to the years it took to write the book, place it, promote it, and you pay the agent, pay the taxes, the annual income is not enough to live on comfortably. I do not have a starving artist inclination. I'm from the working class. I don't feel creative unless I feel like my house is going to be there and I'm going to be fed. I can't worry about money and write. Maybe some people can.

  Debra Monroe

  Book, Writing, Artist

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The acting I got into by doing what we call pantomime, when I was sixteen. And, there were loads of very pretty girls in the show. I realized; I found out very early on, that the lead comic gets the girl. So, that was cool. When I went to university, I studied Economic Social History. And drama. That kind of got me into it. My main passion was to make films. It was never to be an actor. At that time, there weren't many opportunities for a working class Scottish actor. It was kind of an English thing. And it required a certain mannered cerebral acting style that I couldn't relate to.

  Peter Mullan

  Girl, Drama, Passion

  "AGENT ORANGE: A talk with director Peter Mullan about The Magdalene Sisters!". Interview with B. Alan Orange, movieweb.com. August 9, 2003.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I'd love if people relearned the lessons of the 20th century all over again. Which is to say this country progressed economically and socially when we had a better balance between capital and labor. Neither capital or labor won every argument. The battle between the two created economic tension, and transformed the working class into the middle class, and grew the economy.

  David Simon

  Country, People, Balance

  Source: www.macleans.ca

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It`s not just Republicans. It`s Republicans and Democrats. It`s middle class, lower middle class, working class Americans who have felt the angst, who are frustrated, who are angry as a result of 1% growth which, in my view, has been really the issue that has propelled Donald Trump from day one.

  Bob Ehrlich

  Frustrated, Growth, Republican

  Source: www.msnbc.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• What I hear people talking about are things that anybody of any color or any religion or any sexual orientation can get with. They cannot earn a decent living if they`re working class folks. They`re worried about retirement if they`re in their 40s and 50s. They`re worried about sending their kids to college. If we focus on what really matters, we can get there.

  Keith Ellison

  Retirement, Kids, College

  Source: www.msnbc.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I did my BA in English lit, and hated the restriction - I'd always read more in translation than not; coming from a working-class background, what I knew of as British literature - the writers who made big prize lists and/or were stocked in WH Smith, Doncaster's only bookshop until I was 17 - seemed incredibly, alienatingly middle-class. Then in 2009, just after the financial crash, I graduated with no more specific skill than 'can analyse a bit of poetry'.

  Deborah Smith

  Class, Skills, Literature

  Source: thequietus.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Coming from a working-class background, where my father did manual labor, was a good grounding; I was obsessed with getting a job or getting out of the house at 15.

  Johnny Marr

  Jobs, Father, Class

  Source: pitchfork.com

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• What I do believe absolutely is that in the middle of a recession, the American middle class and working class needs a tax relief.

  Bernie Sanders

  Believe, Class, Relief

  Source: www.realclearpolitics.com

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Marx's own illusion was to think that the working class movement, which he devoted his life to creating and strengthening, would both be socially and politically successful in the industrial nations of Western Europe, and that it would develop an entirely new way of human social life that would retain and even enhance the productive benefits of capitalism while overcoming the inhumanity and exploitation of capitalist social relations. Marx himself had no solutions to these problems. His object of study was capitalism itself.

  Allen W. Wood

  Successful, Thinking, Europe

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Clearly no working class movement ever came about that was able to do what Marx was hoping for.

  Allen W. Wood

  Class, Movement, Able

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• What Franklin Roosevelt did, which really offended them, was he strengthened the labor unions - made it possible for them to strike. The oligarchs were furious because the working class was not supposed to have any power at all.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Class, Unions, Franklin

  4 Copy quote