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.
I have to live for others and not for myself: that's middle-class morality.
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.
The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.
For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.
Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.
It is to the middle-class we must look for the safety of England.
We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.
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.
A theory of the middle class: that it is not to be determined by its financial situation but rather by its relation to government. That is, one could shade down from an actual ruling or governing class to a class hopelessly out of relation to government, thinking of government as beyond its control, of itself as wholly controlled by government. Somewhere in between and In gradations is the group that has the sense that gov't exists for it, and shapes its consciousness accordingly.
Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.
The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes.
It was the labor movement that helped secure so much of what we take for granted today. The 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, family leave, health insurance, Social Security, Medicare, retirement plans. The cornerstones of the middle-class security all bear the union label.
Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.
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.
Most middle-class whites have no idea what it feels like to be subjected to police who are routinely suspicious, rude, belligerent, and brutal.
Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
The enemy of society is middle class and the enemy of life is middle age.
Don't be defeatist, dear, it's very middle class.
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.
or simply:
