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Class System Quotes

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Class System Quotes

“Person 1: Do you know how America's class system works? Person 2: America has a class system? Person 1: Yes, that's how it works.”

WealthInequalityMinimum WageAffluenceClass StruggleClass WarfarePlutocracyClass SystemGilded AgeThe One Percent
Book:Limitarianism The Case Against Extreme Wealth, The Psychology of Management & Get Sh*t Done 3 Books Collection Set
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“The preposterous distinctions of rank, which render civilization a curse, by dividing the world between voluptuous tyrants, and cunning envious dependents, corrupt, almost equally, every class of people, because respectability is not attached to the discharge of the relative duties of life, but to the station, and when the duties are not fulfilled the affections cannot gain sufficient strength to fortify the virtue of which they are the natural reward. Still there are some loop-holes out of which a man may creep, and dare to think and act for himself; but for a woman it is an herculean task, because she has difficulties peculiar to her sex to overcome, which require almost super-human powers.”

ResponsibilityClassVirtueEnvyTyrannyBarriersDouble StandardsClass System
Book:A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
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“Suddenly I caught sight of myself in a glass and saw what a figure of fun I looked. Hitherto I had always taken my appearance for granted; now I saw how inelegant it was, compared with theirs; and at the same time, for the first time, I was acutely aware of social inferiority. I felt utterly out of place among these smart rich people, and a misfit everywhere.”

ClassComparisonInsecureSelf ConsciousClass SystemMisfitL P HartleyThe Go Between
Book:The go-between
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“Children know. They breathe it in early, for there's no unknowing the difference between nannies, cleaners, below stairs people and the family upstairs. Children are the go-betweens, one foot in each world, and yet they know very well from the earliest age where they belong, where their destiny lies or, to put it crudely, who pays whom. From a young age their loyalties are torn, betrayal of both inevitable, colluding in complaints with gossip passing each way, upstairs and down...love that nanny, au pair, housekeeper or any paid employee - but never forever. Never equally. Tiny hands steeped young in the essence of class and caste.”

ChildhoodClass System
Book:An Uneasy Inheritance: My Family and Other Radicals
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“What is key to America's understanding of class is the persistent belief - despite all evidence to the contrary - that anyone, with the proper discipline and drive, can move from a lower class to a higher class. We recognize the mobility may be difficult, but the key to our collective self-image is the assumption that mobility is always possible, so failure to move up reflects on one's character.”

American DreamClass SystemUpward MobilityThe American Dream
Book:The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
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“Society must show that blue-collar crime never pays. Insidious white-collar crime pays very well, and nothing is declared. It's the same reason why Financial Education, probably the most important subject of all, is absent from the general school curriculum - to keep the have-nots ignorant and the establishment's riches safe.”

CrimeClass StruggleBlue CollarKeeping SecretsClass SystemFinancial EducationWhite Collar CrimeWhite Collar CriminalCrime Does Not PayHaves Haves Not
Author:Stewart Stafford
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“When I looked around the neighborhood, I found out that kids wasn’t the only crooks. We was surrounded by crooks, and plenty of ’em was guys that were supposed to be legit, like the landlords and the storekeepers and the politicians and cops on the beat. All of ‘em was stealin’ from somebody. And we had the real pros, the old Dons from the old country, with their big black cars and mustaches to match. We used to make fun of them behind their backs, but our parents were scared to death of them. The only thing is, we knew they was rich, and rich was what counted, because the rich got away with anythin'.”

CorruptionClass System
Book:Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words
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“I hate this complete obsession with class, especially at this place, you can hardly say 'hello' to anyone before they are getting all prolier-than-thou and telling you about how their dad's a one eyed chimney-sweep with rickets, and how they've still got an outside loo, and have never been on a plane or whatever, all that dubious crap, most of which is usually lies anyway, and I'm thinking why are you telling me this? Am I meant to feel guilty? D'you think it's my fault or something, or are you just feeling pleased with yourself for escaping your pre-determined social role or some self congratulatory bullshit? I mean, what does it matter anyway? People are people, if you ask me, and they rise or fall by their own talents and merits, and their own labours, and blaming the fact they've got a settee rather than a sofa, or eat tea rather tan dinner, that's just an excuse, it's just whining self-pity and shoddy thinking.... I don;t make judgements about other people because of their background and I expect people to treat me with the same courtesy... It's my parent's moeny and its not as if they got it from nicking people's dole or running sweatshops in Johannesburg or something. They worked fucking hard for what they've got. It's a privilege and they treat it as such and they do their best to give something back. But if you ask me, theres no snob like an inverted snob... Im just so fucking bored of people trying to pass plain old envy off as some sort of virtue.”

LifeEnvyWealthyUpper ClassSnobberyPoshClass System
Book:Starter for Ten
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“Animals in pens have lots of time to develop theories", said the Cow, "I've heard more than one clever creature draw a connection between the rise of tiktokism and the erosion of traditional Animal labour. We weren't beasts of burden, but we were good reliable labourers. If we were made redundant in the workforce, it was only a matter of time before we'd be socially redundant too.”

PoliticalTechnologySocietyTheoryClass System
Book:Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
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“This war ends, then so do the taxpayer-funded contracts, the drumbeats in the media, the nice Combatant faces, and the patriotic cause to lull the civilians and shame the dissenters. The other thing that comes to an end is all the justification for why this country's run the way it is. People will wonder why their paychecks are still getting halved to pay off the men who own their utility companies, their roads, their national parks. They'll wonder why they've got to work eighty-hour weeks to support the folks who took their houses and destroyed the middle-class jobs. There's not going to be an enemy to point a finger at anymore. People will see the real problem.”

WarInjusticeDystopiaScapegoatClass SystemSocial Politics
Author:S. J. Kincaid
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“The great goal of the backlash is to nurture a cultural class war, and the first step in doing so, as we have seen, is to deny the economic basis of social class. After all, you can hardly deride liberals as society's "elite" or present the GOP as the party of the common man if you acknowledge the existence of the corporate world - the power that creates the nation's real elite, that dominates its real class system, and that wields the Republican Party as its personal political sidearm.”

IfsMenWorldFirstsWarRealPoliticalNationsSocialGoalPartyCommonExistenceStepsClassEconomicRepublicanBasesDenyCorporateAcknowledgeElitesFirst StepsNurtureRepublican PartyPolitical SystemsCommon ManGopSocial ClassBacklashCorporate WorldClass System
Author:Thomas Frank
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“The United States, which has been called the home of the persecuted and the dispossessed, has been since its founding an asylum for emotional orphans. For over three hundred years, refugees from political oppression, religious persecution, famine, poverty, and a rigid class system which limited educational and economic opportunities have been leaving their native villages and cities and coming to the United States in search of freedom and a better life.”

YearsHas BeensStatesHomePoliticalThreeOpportunityReligiousUnitedCitiesClassPovertyUnited StatesEconomicEmotionalHundredLeavingEducationalOppressionNativeVillagePersecutionFoundingRefugeeBetter LifeFamineOrphanAsylumsPersecutedClass SystemReligious PersecutionPolitical Oppression
Author:Eileen Simpson
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“I had a guy at the Groucho bar clawing at my arm nearly in tears saying that until he saw The Departed he thought Americans were the ones on TV. I didn't know you had accents. I didn't know you had a class system. I didn't know you were like us. To which the answer is, probably only where I grew up, but while we're at it don't watch television and think it's the United States of America.”

ThinkingKnowsStatesAmericaGuyAnswersUnitedClassWatchesUnited StatesSawsTelevisionTearsTvsArmsGrewGrew UpBarsAccentsUnited States Of AmericaDepartedClass System
Author:William Monahan
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“And it is clear that in the colonial countries the peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant, outside the class system is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms; colonization and decolonization a simply a question of relative strength.”

FirstsCountryTermLosesPayClassClearViolenceGainsCompromiseRevolutionaryRelativeStarvingPeasantsNothing To LoseColonizationNo CompromiseClass System
Book:Damnés de la terre
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“An old joke has an Oxford professor meeting an American former graduate student and asking him what he's working on these days. 'My thesis is on the survival of the class system in the United States.' 'Oh really, that's interesting: one didn't think there was a class system in the United States.' 'Nobody does. That's how it survives.”

ThinkingDoeStatesInterestingUnitedClassUnited StatesStudentsSurvivalJokesAskingMeetingsFormerThese DaysProfessorsGraduatesOxfordThesisGraduate StudentsClass SystemOld Jokes
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“Poverty is not something people impose on themselves for want of effort and community organisation. It is constructed by divisive and discriminatory laws, inflexible organisations, acquisitive ideologies of wealth, a deeply rooted class system and policies which serve privilege in the short term and destroy society in the long term.”

PeopleWantLongLawTermCommunityWealthEffortClassPovertySocietyPolicyPrivilegeIdeologyLong TermRootedShort TermOrganisationEnding PovertyClass System
Author:Pete Townshend
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