Middle Class Quotes - Page 36

• In a sense the quest for the emancipation of black people in the U.S. has always been a quest for economic liberation which means to a certain extent that the rise of black middle class would be inevitable.

  Angela Davis

  Mean, Class, People

  "Frontline", www.pbs.org. 1997.

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• What I think is different today is the lack of political connection between the black middle class and the increasing numbers of black people who are more impoverished than ever before.

  Angela Davis

  Thinking, Class, Numbers

  Interview, www.pbs.org. 1998.

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• I've had people ask me in interviews what it's like to have money, but that's not how it is. I have a middle-class life. I have a room in London but not a house, nor a BMW.

  Beth Ditto

  Bmw, Class, People

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• Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Thinking, Class, America

  "Tomdispatch Interview: Ehrenreich, The Prey and the Predators". Interview with Tom Engelhardt, www.tomdispatch.com. June 4, 2006.

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• By making college more affordable for all and more accessible for minority students, the first new higher education authorizing legislation in a decade will help strengthen our nation and America's middle class, and spur a new age of innovation and ingenuity in our country.

  Nancy Pelosi

  Country, College, Class

  "Pelosi: Higher Education Bill is Bipartisan Investment in College Affordability and in America's Middle Class". Press release, July 31, 2008.

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• The image the Republicans have of themselves needs the image they have of the Democrats to bring it into sharp focus. The Democrats are plainly a disreputable crowd; the Republicans, by contrast, are men of standing and sobriety. Many a middle-class American in many a small town has had to explain painfully why he chose to be a Democrat. No middle-class American need feel uneasy as a Republican. Even when he is a minority--for example, among the heathen on a college campus--he can, like any white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant, warm himself before his little fire of self-esteem.

  Clinton Rossiter

  Self Esteem, College, Men

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• First impressions of mediaeval life are usually coloured by the courtly romances of Malory and his later refiners. Chaucer brings us down to reality, but his people belong to a prosperous middle-class world, on holiday and in holiday mood. Piers Plowman stands alone as a revelation of the ignorance and misery of the lower classes, whose multiplied grievances came to a head in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.

  William Langland

  Holiday, Ignorance, Reality

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• As a child I used to watch clouds, and in them, see faces, castles, animals, dragons, and giants. It was a world of escape--fantasy; something to inject wonder and adventure into the mundane, regulated life of a middle-class boy leading a middle-class life.

  Barry B. Longyear

  Children, Adventure, Animal

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• By laying the groundwork for a system centered on home ownership rather than the public housing popular in Europe, the New Deal made possible the great postwar housing boom that populated the Sun Belt and boosted millions of Americans into the middle class, where, ironically, they often became Republicans.

  Jonathan Alter

  Home, Europe, Class

  Jonathan Alter (2007). “The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope”, p.284, Simon and Schuster

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• Most people are middle class. Most people do wish their lives were better than they are. And I think by making my main characters ordinary, average guys, it helps readers identify with their problems. It also helps ground the supernatural events that follow in a recognizable reality and perhaps gives some of my wilder scenarios a little verisimilitude.

  Bentley Little

  Character, Reality, Thinking

  "Bentley Little: The Elusive Dark Scribe Speaks". Interview with Vince A. Liaguno, www.darkscribemagazine.com. September 24, 2007.

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• The Democratic power elite on some level feels delegitimized by its working-class, black and female constituencies. What it wants are the "legitimate" votes of suburban, white, middle-class, affluent males. Even liberal voters and organizations tend on some tacit level to accept the idea that they are not the "real" Americans the Democrats must pursue.

  Ellen Willis

  Real, Class, Organization

  "The Democrats and Left Masochism". "New Politics", Vol. 8, No. 3, issue #31, Summer 2001.

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• I quite like the transitions of being an actor, because you get to explore these little pockets of life. So if you're playing a builder you get to know about building, if you're playing a scientist or a physician or something you get to know about physics. And similarly with this world I like exploring their culture, that very sort of upper middle class, addictive... that's part of the reason I love it.

  Matt Smith

  Class, Pockets, Physicians

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• To me, women's lib was mainly a white, upper-middle class affair of little use to a reservation Indian woman.

  Mary Brave Bird

  White, Class, Use

  "Lakota Woman". Book by Mary Brave Bird edited by Richard Erdoes (p. 244), 1990.

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• The church of Jesus needs to wake up from the exile of passivity and embrace liminality and adventure or continue to remain a religious ghetto for culturally co-opted, fearful, middle-class folk.

  Alan Hirsch

  Religious, Jesus, Adventure

  Michael Frost, Alan Hirsch (2011). “The Faith of Leap (Shapevine): Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage”, p.92, Baker Books

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• By default, we have created a "system" of nursing-home care for the aged in which middle-class people pay exorbitant rates to for-profit nursing-home entrepreneurs - and then when private resources are consumed and the patient qualifies as a pauper, the nursing home begins billing Medicaid. This is precisely the antithesis of social citizenship; instead of the poor being accorded the dignity associated with the middle class, equality of treatment is achieved by making the middle class undergo pauperization.

  Robert Kuttner

  Home, Nursing, Class

  "The Economic Illusion". Book by Robert Kuttner, 1984.

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• One of the most insidious consequences of the present burden of personal income tax is that it strips many middle class families of financial reserves & seems to lend support to campaigns for socialized medicine, socialized housing, socialized food, socialized every thing. The personal income tax has made the individual vastly more dependent on the State & more avid for state hand-outs. It has shifted the balance in America from an individual-centered to a State-centered economic & social system.

  William Henry Chamberlin

  America, Avid, Hands

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• I don't want to know about the constitution of the rapist--I want to kill him! I don't care if he is white or black, if he is middle-class or poor, if his mother hung him from the clothesline by his balls: I only want to kill him! Any woman who has been raped will agree.

  Diamanda Galas

  Mother, Class, White

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• The Miss America contest isthe most perfectly rendered theater in our culture, for it so perfectly captures what we yearn for: a low-class ritual, a polished restatement of vulgarity, that wants to open the door to high-class respectability by way of plain middle-class anxiety and ambition.

  Gerald Early

  Ambition, Class, America

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• Bill Clinton says the middle-class folks in Topeka who contribute to The 700 Club or Focus on the Family are radicals whose beliefs pose a mortal danger to this nation!

  Don Feder

  Christian, Religious, Class

  Don Feder (1996). “Who's Afraid of the Religious Right?”, p.12, Regnery Publishing

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• We all accuse Vladimir Putin of Cold War nostalgia, but Washington's elites - politicians and intellectuals - miss the old days as well. They wish for the world in which the United States was utterly dominant over its friends, its foes were to be shunned entirely, and the challenges were stark, moral, and vital. Today's world is messy and complicated. China is one of our biggest trading partners and our looming geopolitical rival. Russia is a surly spoiler, but it has a globalized middle class and has created ties in Europe.

  Fareed Zakaria

  Leadership, Money, War

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• And, oh God, in my misspent youth as a housewife, I, too, used to bake bread, in those hectic and desolating days just prior to the woman's movement, when middle-class women were supposed to be wonderful wives and mothers, gracious hostesses.... I used to feel so womanly when I was baking my filthy bread.

  Angela Carter

  Mother, Class, Wife

  Angela Carter (1993). “Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings”, Vintage Books

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• That's how the Germans are.... The aristocrats at the top hard as glass, cold as ice, servants of the King, the working masses willing, pliable, sentimental, susceptible to brutality, the middle class educated and cowardly to the point of servility.

  Alfred Doblin

  Kings, Glasses, Ice

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• Had middle class black women begun a movement in which they had labeled themselves "oppressed," no one would have taken them seriously.

  Bell Hooks

  Taken, Class, African American

  bell hooks (2014). “Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center”, p.7, Routledge

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• For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish ora German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making "ladies" dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.

  Stephanie Coontz

  Girl, Daughter, Mother

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• Until the Second World War, it was unthinkable for a married woman of the working or middle class to disgrace her husband by working after marriage, because her employment indicated that he was a poor provider

  Sandra Scarr

  Husband, War, Work

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