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Middle Quotes

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Middle Quotes

“A stronger middle class is not the consequence of economic growth. A stronger middle class is the cause of economic growth.”

Causes Growth Class Economic Middle Consequence Stronger Middle Class Economic Growth

Author:Martin O'Malley

“Cutting taxes is not bad. But if you cut taxes on the wealthy, which is what they wanted to do, you're not helping people who need better schools and better infrastructure and healthcare. You're basically robbing the middle class and the poor to provide tax cuts to the rich.”

People Ifs Needs Helping Wanted School Poor Class Rich Cutting Middle Taxes Middle Class Wealthy Healthcare Infrastructure Helping People Tax Cuts Robbing

Author:Robert Reich

“This is one way that wealthy Americans could really contribute. They could put hundreds of millions of dollars into the infrastructure bank, be a good investment for them, for their children, for their grandchildren, and they would directly contribute to revitalizing a big sector of middle-class wages in America and making our country more productive, so that we could create more opportunity. But I think that we could get a lot of grassroots support from, like, local chambers of commerce and other things if they understood exactly how this infrastructure bank would work.”

“Canada was settled, in the main, by people with a lower middle-class outlook, and a respect, rather than an affectionate familiarity, for the things of the mind.”

People Mind Class Middle Canada Middle Class Outlook Familiarity Affectionate

Author:Robertson Davies

“For me the Koenigsberg longshoremen had beauty; the Polish jimkes on their grain ships had beauty; the broad freedom of movement in the gestures of the common people had beauty. Middle-class people held no appeal for me at all.”

People Common Beauty Class Middle Movement Ships Appeals Middle Class Broads Gestures Grain Polish

Book:The diary and letters of Kaethe Kollwitz

Source: The diary and letters of Kaethe Kollwitz

“Obviously, our most pressing need is subsistence for the most vulnerable victims of Katrina, but we should not overlook the fact that the victims of Katrina also include middle-class Americans who have saved and invested, but now face an economic crisis, .. They should be able to tap into their savings and meet this crisis without facing an unfair penalty.”

Needs Should Facts Able Faces Class Economic Middle Crisis Victim Saved Vulnerable Saving Middle Class Unfair Penalties Savings Katrina Economic Crisis Subsistence

Author:Artur Davis

“In the hierarchy of colors, green represents the social middle class, self-satisfied, immovable, narrow.”

Self Social Class Middle Color Green Satisfied Middle Class Hierarchy

Book:Concerning the Spiritual in Art: And Painting in Particular

Source: Concerning the Spiritual in Art: And Painting in Particular

“Wes Clark put forward a middle-class tax plan, but it only helps a quarter of middle-class families, none without minor children at home. And mine helps 98 percent of the middle class.”

Children Helping Home Class Plans Middle Mines Taxes Percent Middle Class Quarters Minors Middle Class Family

Author:Joe Lieberman

“Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.”

Wealth Class Middle Inequality Middle Class Consumerism Overconsumption Upper Class Lower Class Upper Middle Class

Book:Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold (Illustrated)

Source: Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold (Illustrated)

“Inequality has the natural and necessary effect, under the present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.”

Culture Natural Justice Class Middle Effects Circumstances Diversity Social Justice Inequality Middle Class Upper Class Lower Class

Book:Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold (Illustrated)

Source: Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold (Illustrated)

“In our English popular religion the common conception of a future state of bliss is that of ... a kind of perfected middle-class home, with labour ended, the table spread, goodness all around, the lost ones restored, hymnody incessant.”

Kind States Home Lost Common Class Middle Goodness England Tables Spread Bliss Middle Class Labour Conception Insulting Incessant Lost Ones

Book:Literature & Dogma: An Essay Towards a Better Apprehension of the Bible

Source: Literature & Dogma: An Essay Towards a Better Apprehension of the Bible

“One wants recovery to start from the bottom, and the other wants it to start from the top. I don't know which is right. I've never heard of anybody suggesting that they might start it in the middle, so I hereby make that suggestion. To start recovery halfway between the two, because it's the middle class that does everything anyhow. But I don't know anything about it.”

Knows Want Doe Two Might Politics Class Heard Middle Bottom Recovery Middle Class Suggestions Halfway Suggesting

Book:Radio broadcasts of Will Rogers

Source: Radio broadcasts of Will Rogers

“Like most lazy upper-middle-class kids, American Studies seemed like a fun way to use your knowledge of TV to get an A.”

Way Use Kids Fun Class Study Middle Tvs Lazy Middle Class Upper Middle Class

Author:Nick Kroll

“I put forward a budget of what I called "middle-class economics" that continues to be fiscally prudent but makes necessary investments for us to continue the economic momentum and job growth.”

Jobs Growth Class Economic Middle Economics Investment Budgets Middle Class Momentum Prudent Job Growth

Author:Barack Obama

“What can I do to make sure that middle-class families are feeling more secure, that more young people are able to access opportunity, that we are safe, that we are working with our international partners to try to create more order at a time when there's a lot of chaos? How do we deal with terrorism in a way that's consistent with our values? As long as I stay focused on those north stars, then I tend not to get too rattled.”

“I myself have not met a self‐confessed liberal since the late fifties (and even then it was a tacky thing to admit, like coming from the middle class or the Middle West, those two gloomy seedbeds of talent), yet hardly a day passes that I don't read another attack on the “typical liberal” — as it might be announcing a pest of dinosaurs or a plague of unicorns.”

Two Self Might Class Middle Talent Mets Late West Middle Class Typical Plague Dinosaurs Gloomy Unicorn Announcing Pests Tacky

Author:Wilfrid Sheed

“Marx's Kapital is not a treatise on socialism; it is a gerrymand against the bourgeoisie. It was supposed to be written for the working class, but the working man respects the bourgeoisie and wants to be a bourgeoisie. Marx never got a hold of him for a moment. It was the revolting sons of the bourgeoisie itself, like myself, that painted the flag red. The middle and upper classes are the revolutionary element in society. The proletariat is the conservative element.”

“If literary fiction is reduced to only middle-class families dealing only with middle-class angst, then it’s really finished as a force for grappling with the world.”

Ifs World Force Fiction Class Middle Finished Middle Class Angst Grappling Middle Class Family

Author:J. M. Ledgard

“My mom was a pretty hard worker. She worked her ass off, but I'd say we were middle class. I had a car in high school, so I loved the idea that I could mimic this lifestyle.”

Ideas Hard School Class Middle Car Hard Work Mom High School Workers My Mom Lifestyle Ass Middle Class Hard Worker

Author:Reggie Watts

“I was born and raised in the University of Chicago area and had an uneventful middle-class Catholic childhood. I had a heavy Catholic upbringing and Catholicism is terrible - it's the reason there were slaves. Mass every morning at seven o'clock during Lent. It's a totally negative, man-made religion.”

“In China, you've got six people buying for one child. But the thing is, you've got the largest rising upper-middle class in the world.”

People World Children Class Middle Six China Rising Buying Middle Class Upper Middle Class

Author:Angela Ahrendts

“Look, there is a sort of old view about class which is a very simplistic view that we have got the working class, the middle class and the upper class, I think it is more complicated than that.”

Thinking Looks Views Class Middle Complicated Middle Class Working Class Upper Class Upper Middle Class

Author:Ed Miliband

“Every style seems completely appropriate to its epoch. We cannot imagine Madame de Pompadour, or the Empress Josephine, or the early Victorian lady in anything but the clothes she actually wore. Each represents completely the ideals of her time: elegant artificiality or post-Revolutionary morals, or the prudery of the rising middle class.”

Seems Moral Class Imagine Middle Fashion Style Clothes Ideals Posts Revolutionary Rising Appropriate Middle Class Elegant Victorian Epoch Artificiality Empresses

Author:James Laver

“That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation.”

America Nations Class Middle England Middle Class

Author:Matthew Arnold

“I grew up in a middle-class family in the middle of America in the middle of the last century.”

Lasts America Class Middle Century Grew Grew Up Middle Class Middle Class Family

Author:Hillary Clinton

“We don`t have a manufacturing base. We don`t have a middle-class jobs growing at all. All we have is a few rich people and a service industry to service them.”

People Jobs Class Rich Growing Middle Industry Middle Class Rich People Manufacturing Service Industry

Author:Chris Hayes

“In real life I'm not the character I play in my films. I'm reasonably competent, I work very hard, I'm disciplined, I lead a very middle class life. I work in the mornings, I have lunch, I practise my clarinet, I go to the movies, I eat out in restaurants or watch ball games on television or at the ball games.”

Real Hard Play Character Film Games Class Watches Morning Middle Television Balls Real Life Restaurants Middle Class Lunch Competent Practise Ball Games Clarinet Middle Class Life

Author:Woody Allen

“I get upset when so many people say there are all sorts of problems in Africa and India where they have these big families. They don't realize that 10 children in rural Tanzania will use less natural resources in a year than one middle class American child. People don't think like that.”

People Thinking Years Children Use Problem Bigs Realizing Natural Class Middle Resources India Upset Middle Class Natural Resources Big Families Tanzania

Author:Jane Goodall

“Making information free is survivable so long as only limited numbers of people are disenfranchised. As much as it pains me to say so, we can survive if we only destroy the middle classes of musicians, journalists, and photographers. What is not survivable is the additional destruction of the middle classes in transportation, manufacturing, energy, office work, education, and health care. And all that destruction will come surely enough if the dominant idea of an information economy isn't improved.”

Source: Who Owns the Future?

“Americans ... do not naturally apply the term "bourgeois" to themselves, or to anyone else for that matter. They do like to call themselves middle class, but that does not carry with it any determinate spiritual content. ... The term "middle class" does not have any of the many opposites that bourgeois has, such as aristocrat, saint, hero, or artist - all good.”

Doe Matter Spiritual Artist Term Class Middle Hero Opposites Saint Middle Class Bourgeois

Author:Allan Bloom

“The Marxist critique is only a critique of capital, a critique coming from the heart of the middle and petit bourgeois classes, for which Marxism has served for a century as a latent ideology.... The Marxist seeks a good use of economy. Marxism is therefore only a limited petit bourgeois critique, one more step in the banalization of life toward the "good use" of the social!”

Heart Use Social Steps Class Economy Middle Century Ideology Marxism Critique Bourgeois Marxist Latent

Author:Jean Baudrillard

“Nothing could moderate, in the bosom of the great English middle class, their passionate, absorbing, almost blood-thirsty clinging to life.”

Class Blood Middle Passionate Middle Class Moderates Bosoms Clinging Thirsty Absorbing

Author:Matthew Arnold

“I am struck again by the fact that as soon as a working man gets an official post in the Trade Union or goes into Labour politics, he becomes middle-class whether he will or no. ie. by fighting against the bourgeoisie he becomes a bourgeois. The fact is that you cannot help living in the manner appropriate and developing the ideology appropriate to your income.”

Men Facts Helping Fighting Class Middle He Man Trade Unions Income Ideology Developing Posts Officials Appropriate Middle Class Labour Bourgeois Bourgeoisie Working Man Trade Unions

Author:George Orwell

“Those who are to follow the arts should have a training in what is called poverty. Given a comfortable middle-class start in life, the artist is almost sure to end up by becoming a bellyacher, constantly complaining because the public does not rush forward at once to proclaim him.”

Should Doe Art Ends Artist Given Class Poverty Middle Becoming Comfortable Training Should Have Complaining Middle Class

Book:A Story Teller's Story: The Tale of an American Writer's Journey Through His Own Imaginative World and Through the World of Facts, with Many of His Experiences and Impressions Among Other Writers--told in Many Notes--in Four Books--and an Epilogue

Source: A Story Teller's Story: The Tale of an American Writer's Journey Through His Own Imaginative World and Through the World of Facts, with Many of His Experiences and Impressions Among Other Writers--told in Many Notes--in Four Books--and an Epilogue

“Ambitious young women today are taught to ignore or suppress every natural instinct, if it conflicts with the feminist agenda posed on them. All literary and artistic works, no matter how great, that document the ambivalence of female sexuality they are trained to dismiss as "misogynous." In other words, their minds are being programmed to secede from their bodies ... there is a huge gap between feminist rhetoric and women's actual sex lives, where feminism is of little help except with a certain stratum of deferential, malleable, white middle-class men.”

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

Poor Class Rich Middle Middle Class Disappearance

Author:Douglas Coupland

“Some popular quotations smell of airless closets. They exhale the stale imagination of the intellectual lower middle class. "Suspension of disbelief" has become one of them. Dressed up as a scintillating double negation, it serves the pedestrian notion of art as illusion.”

Art Imagination Class Middle Intellectual Illusion Notion Smell Middle Class Quotations Closets Disbelief Dressed Up Stale Negation Suspension Pedestrians Suspension Of Disbelief

Book:Parables of Sun Light: Observations on Psychology, the Arts, and the Rest

Source: Parables of Sun Light: Observations on Psychology, the Arts, and the Rest

“The taste of the more recent accessions to the leisure class proper and of the middle and lower classes still requires a pecuniary beauty to supplement the aesthetic beauty, even in those objects which are primarily admired for the beauty that belongs to them as natural growths.”

Stills Growth Natural Class Middle Objects Taste Aesthetic Leisure Supplements Lower Class Aesthetic Beauty

Book:The Theory of the Leisure Class

Source: The Theory of the Leisure Class

“Daily life is a comprimised blend of posturing for the sake of role-playing and of varying degrees of self-revelation. Under stressful conditions even the "true" self cannot be precisely defined, as Erving Goffman observes. ...Little wonder that the identity crisis is a major source of modern neuroticism, and that the urban middle class aches for a return to a simpler existence.”

“While some multimillionaires started in poverty, most did not. A study of the origins of 303 textile, railroad and steel executives of the 1870s showed that 90 percent came from middle- or upper-class families. The Horatio Alger stories of "rags to riches" were true for a few men, but mostly a myth, and a useful myth for control.”

Men Stories Wealth Class Poverty Study Middle Percent Myth Riches Executives Steel Rags Railroads Upper Class Horatio Textiles Rags To Riches

Book:A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present

Source: A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present

“If there are indeed any iron laws of history, one of them is surely that in any major crisis of the capitalist system, a sector of the liberal middle class will shift to the left, and then shift smartly back again once the crisis has blown over.”

Ifs Law Left Class Middle Majors Crisis Middle Class Iron Capitalist Back Again

Author:Terry Eagleton

“It would be hard to find a single example in history in which a group that cast more than 50 percent of the vote got away with calling itself the victim... Women are the only 'oppressed' group to share the same parents as the 'oppressor'; to be born into the middle class and upper class as frequently as the 'oppressor'; to own more of the culture's luxury items than the 'oppressor'.”

Source: The Myth of Male Power: Why Men Are the Disposable Sex

“A high proportion of the population enjoys many of the 'luxuries' which until recently were considered the prerogative of the rich; and the ordinary worker lives at what even two decades ago would have been considered in Britain a middle-class standard of life.”

Has Beens Two Enjoy Class Rich Middle Standards Ordinary Workers Population Decades Luxury Proportion Britain Middle Class Prerogative

Author:Anthony Crosland

“There isn't much I find interesting to write about in middle-class life.”

Writing Interesting Class Middle Middle Class Middle Class Life

Author:Jarvis Cocker

“I believe that the free enterprise system is the greatest engine of prosperity the world's ever known. I believe in self-reliance and individual initiative and risk-takers being rewarded. But I also believe that everybody should have a fair shot and everybody should do their fair share and everybody should play by the same rules, because that's how our economy's grown. That's how we built the world's greatest middle class.”

“The black middle-class in America is a prosperous community that is now larger in absolute terms than the black underclass. Does its existence not suggest that economic adversity is the result of failures of individual character rather than the lingering after-effects of racial discrimination and a slave system that ceased to exist well over a century ago?”

“It is also very important to observe, that menial servants are absolutely necessary to make the resources of the higher and middle classes of society efficient in the demand for material products.”

Important Class Middle Materials Products Higher Demand Resources Servant Middle Class Efficient Classes Of Society

Author:Thomas Malthus

“I can tell you I'm pretty middle-class.”

I Can Class Middle Middle Class

Author:John Prescott

“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.”

“In one of my latest conversations with Darwin he expressed himself very gloomily on the future of humanity, on the ground that in our modern civilization natural selection had no play, and the fittest did not survive. Those who succeed in the race for wealth are by no means the best or the most intelligent, and it is notorious that our population is more largely renewed in each generation from the lower than from the middle and upper classes.”

Source: Alfred Russel Wallace: An Anthology of His Shorter Writings