Class Quotes

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  True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Funny, Running, Country

  Kurt Vonnegut (2013). “If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young”, p.88, RosettaBooks

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• The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern: every class is unfit to govern.

  Lord Acton

  Rights, Government, Political

  "Letters of Lord Acton to Mary Gladstone". Book by John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1913.

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• All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Motivational, Attitude, War

  38 Copy quote

• You have to be taught to be second class; you're not born that way.

  Lena Horne

  African American, Way, Taught

  Lena Horne, Richard Schickel (1966). “Lena”

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• Planning ahead is a measure of class. The rich and even the middle class plan for future generations, but the poor can plan ahead only a few weeks or days.

  Gloria Steinem

  Planning Ahead, Goal, Poor Planning

  Gloria Steinem (2012). “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions”, p.272, Open Road Media

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• I quit school in the sixth grade because of pneumonia. Not because I had it, but because I couldn't spell it.

  Rocky Graziano

  Funny, Sports, School

  68 Copy quote

• There is nothing to which men cling more tenaciously than the privileges of class.

  Leonard Woolf

  Men, Politics, Privilege

  Leonard Woolf (1939). “Barbarians Within and Without”

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• Self-praise is for losers. Be a winner. Stand for something. Always have class, and be humble.

  John Madden

  Self Esteem, Humble, Sunset

  81 Copy quote

• Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

  Frederick Douglass

  Peace, Patriotic, Ignorance

  Speech on the twenty-fourth anniversary of emancipation in the District of Columbia,Washington, D.C., Apr. 1886

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• Show class, have pride, and display character. If you do, winning takes care of itself.

  Bear Bryant

  Inspirational, Motivational, Success

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• If we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Loyalty, Mean, Race

  Martin Luther King (Jr.) (1968). “The trumpet of conscience”, Harpercollins

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• If a working class Englishman saw a bloke drive past in a Rolls-Royce, he'd say to himself "Come the social revolution and we'll take that away from you, mate". Whereas if his American counterpart saw a bloke drive past in a Cadillac he'd say "One day I'm going to own one of those". To my way of thinking the first attitude is wrong. The latter is right.

  Kerry Packer

  Encouragement, Attitude, Thinking

  26 Copy quote

• It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native criminal class except Congress.

  Mark Twain

  Criminals, Literature, Politics

  Following the Equator ch. 8, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar" (1897)

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• The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them in parliament.

  Vladimir Lenin

  Years, Politics, Communist Manifesto

  "The State and Revolution". Chapter 5, www.marxists.org. 1917.

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• The working-class is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman's heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes.

  Matthew Arnold

  Heaven, Likes, Privilege

  'Culture and Anarchy' (1869) ch. 3

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• We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.

  George Orwell

  Fear, Struggle, May

  The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) ch. 13

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• The Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepts blacks in the top ten percent of students, but at MIT this puts them in the bottom ten percent of the class.

  Thomas Sowell

  Technology, Massachusetts, Mit

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• Public education is the key civil rights issue of the 21st century. Our nation's knowledge-based economy demands that we provide young people from all backgrounds and circumstances with the education and skills necessary to become knowledge workers. If we don't, we run the risk of creating an even larger gap between the middle class and the poor. This gap threatens our democracy, our society and the economic future of America.

  Eli Broad

  Running, Work, Issues

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• The higher the social class of other students the higher any given student's achievement.

  James S. Coleman

  Achievement, Students, Social

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• The controversies between the proletariat and the middle class had to be smoothed out and bridged over by each getting to know and understand the other.

  Fritz Sauckel

  Middle, Proletariat, Controversy

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• I simply contend that the middle-class ideal which demands that people be affectionate, respectable, honest and content, that they avoid excitements and cultivate serenity is the ideal that appeals to me, it is in short the ideal of affectionate family life, of honorable business methods.

  Gertrude Stein

  People, Serenity, Demand

  Gertrude Stein (2016). “Three Lives”, p.250, Simon and Schuster

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• The most perfect political community must be amongst those who are in the middle rank, and those states are best instituted wherein these are a larger and more respectable part, if possible, than both the other; or, if that cannot be, at least than either of them separate.

  Aristotle

  Perfect, Community, Political

  Aristotle (1919). “A treatise on government: translated from the Greek of Aristotle”

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• 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

  Men, Thinking, Air

  Frantz Fanon (1967). “Black Skin, White Masks”, p.224, Pluto Press

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• The history of all countries shows that the working class exclusively by its own effort is able to develop only trade-union consciousness.

  Vladimir Lenin

  Country, History, Effort

  Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (2012). “Essential Works of Lenin: "What Is to Be Done?" and Other Writings”, p.74, Courier Corporation

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• The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.

  Karl Marx

  Philosophical, Struggle, History

  "Karl Marx as Activist" by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, www.counterpunch.org. May 7, 2018.

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