classes quotes

The General Strike has taught the working classes more in four days than years of talking could have done.

- ArthurJames Balfour, 1st Earl Balfour
  Speech in the House of Commons,7 May.

Comfort came in with the middle classes.

- (Arthur) Clive Howard Bell
  Civilization, ch.4.

In America there are two classes of travelfirst class, and with children.

- Robert Charles Benchley
  Pluck and Luck.

Society is composed of two large classes; those who have more dinners than appetites, and those with more appetites than dinners.

- Se  bastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort
Maximes et Pense  es (1795), ch.1.

The day must come when the nation's whole scale of living must be reduced. If that day comes,Parliament must lay the burden equally on all classes.

- Lord Randolph Henry Spencer Churchill
  Speech as Chancellor of the Exchequer, House of Commons,7  Aug.

BRAZILIFICATION:The widening gulf between the rich and the poor and the accompanying disappearance of the middle classes.

- Douglas Coupland
Generation X,'Our Parents Had More'.

The stately homes of England, How beautiful they stand, To prove the upper classes Have still the upper hand.

- Sir Noe«  l Peirce Coward
  'The Stately Homes of England' (song).

I never knew that the lower classes had such white skins.

- Lord George Nathaniel Curzon (of Kedleston)
c.1915  Remark made during a visit of front-line British troops in World War I, after observing some of them bathing in old beer barrels.

   Only two classes of books are of universal appeal. The very best and the very worst.

- Ford Madox originally Ford Hermann Hueffer Ford
  Joseph Conrad,  a Personal Remembrance, pt.1.

Likethemain-travelled road of life it istraversed by many classes of people, but the poor and the weary predominate.

- (Hannibal) Hamlin Garland
Main-Travelled Roads,'The Main-Travelled Road of the West'.

All the world over, I will back the masses against the classes.

-W(illiam) E(wart) Gladstone
  Speech, Liverpool, 28  Jun.

Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in nineteenth-century France and England, or twentieth-century Russia and America.

- Lillian Florence Hellman
   Journal entry, 30  Apr. Collected in  An Unfinished Woman (1969), ch.13.

Organised outdoor sports for the old ruling classes.

-John Atkinson Hobson
  On militarism and colonialism. Imperialism.

All classes of society are trade unionists at heart, and differ chiefly in the boldness, ability, and secrecy with which they pursue their respective interests.

-William Stanley Jevons
  The State in Relation to Labour, introduction.

   Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. they have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!

- Karl Heinrich Marx
  The Communist Manifesto (with Friedrich Engels, translated by Samuel Moore,1888), closing words. This translation was approved by Engels, but the phrase is also known as'Workers of the world, unite'. The literal translation of the German is'Proletarians of all lands, unite.'

What I did that was new was to prove that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular, historical phases in the development of production; that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; and that dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.

- Karl Heinrich Marx
In Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Correspondence (1934).

All books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.

-John Ruskin
  Sesame and Lilies,'Of Kings' Treasures'.

There are only two classes in good society in England: the equestrian classes and the neurotic classes.

- George Bernard Shaw
  Lady Utterword. Heartbreak House, act 3.

Who will dare deny that theThird Estate contains within itself all that is needed to constitute a nation?† What would theThird Estate be without theprivileged classes? It would be a whole in itself, and a prosperous one. Nothing can be done without it, and everything would be done far better without the others.

-Sie'  yes
  Qu'est-ce que le tiers-e  tat?

Let all the little poets be gathered together in classes And let prizes be given to them by the Prize Asses.

- Stevie (Florence Margaret) Smith
  Harold's Leap,'To School!'

She doesn't have anything to do with youth clubs. There are classes within classes in Peckham.

- Dame Muriel Sarah ne  e  Camberg Spark
  The Ballad of Peckham Rye, ch.3.

No writer before the middle of the19th century wrote about the working classes other thanasgrotesques oras pastoral decorations. Then when they were given the vote certain writers started to suck up to them.

- Evelyn Arthur StJohn Waugh
  'TheArt of Fiction XXX: EvelynWaugh', in The Paris Review, no.8, Summer/Fall.

Work is the curse of the drinking classes. 910

- Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills Wilde
Attributed.