Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
— Eugene V. Debs
Delightful Lower Class quotations
Racial, globalist free markets hasn't worked for everybody in America - hasn't worked for at least the white working, or lower middle class in America don't perceive that it has worked very well for them. It hasn't served everybody, and a bit of protectionism - for many American voters - seems like quite an attractive thing.
Socialism is nothing but the capitalism of the lower classes.
I was born in Montreal and came from a lower-middle-class family.
While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
A person like myself, born and raised in the inner city of Atlanta, Georgia, to lower-middle-class parents. But I had the opportunity to get an education, to go and earn a commission in the United States Army, to serve for 22 years, to lead men and women in combat.
Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.
The whole famous Reign of Terror [of the 1790s] in fifteen months guillotined 2,596 aristos. The Versaillists [the anti-Communards of 1871] executed 20,000 before their firing squads in one week. Do these figures represent the comparative efficiency of guillotine and modern rifle or the comparative cruelty of upper and lower class mobs?
Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes.
It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes.
There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.
Most American Jews came from the lower middle classes, and therefore they brought with them not a lot of Jewish culture. The American Jewish story starts with Ellis Island, and the candy store in the Bronx.
This awful concept of underclass is really horrifying.
You're not lower class, you are excluded - outside.
I can understand how people would despise my image and my father's persona.
My father's image amongst the poorest of people, those forgotten by the state, still remains a respected image. Whether we like it or not, my father was an important figure who filled a vacuum left by the state amongst the lower social classes.
The upper class desire to remain so, the middle class wish to overthrow the upper class, and the lower class want a classless system.
I never knew that the lower classes had such white skins.
War is rich old men protecting their property by sending middle class and lower class young men off to die. It always has been.
I think the ultimate challenge is to have some kind of style and grace, even though you haven't got money, or standing in society, or formal education. I had a very middle, lower-middle class sort of upbringing, but I identify with people who've had, at some point in their lives to struggle to survive. It adds another color to your character.
There will soon come an armed contest between capital and labor.
They will oppose each other, not with words and arguments, but with shot and shell, gun-powder and cannon. The better classes are tired of the insane howling of the lower strata and they mean to stop them.
Exemplary people concern themselves with virtue, small people concern themselves with territory. The ruling class thinks of punishment, the lower classes hope for benevolence.
Everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.
Left-leaning policies - I'm 52 years old, I've been to Cuba, I've been to dysfunctional state oriented places - left-leaning policies fail the lower and middle classes.
We owe to every businessperson and worker in America the best environment in the world to create a job. We owe that to American business. 35 percent corporate tax rate is the second highest in the world. We need to lower it so they don’t leave.
Many of the lower middle class are members of labor unions, churches, bowling clubs, fraternal, service, and nationality organizations. They are organizations and people that must be worked with as one would work with any other part of our populations - with respect, understanding, and sympathy.
Voting in particular is an embarrassment, being a public display of weak character and low intelligence. Let us face the truth: Democracy, like spitting in public or the Roman games, is the proper activity of the lower intellectual and moral classes. It amounts to collusion in one's own suckering.
Generosity toward the lower classes historically has never been an important part of upper-class awareness.
You know, without China there is no Wal-Mart and without Wal-Mart there is no middle class and lower class prosperity in the United States.
I think it's a scandal what has been happening in the school system so far as lower income classes. The dropout rates, the illiteracy rate, you know literacy in the United States was a lot higher in 1890 than it is now.
Realistically, I think we are not prepared to go home until we do get more teachers and lower class sizes.
There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.
The incognito of lower class employment is an effective cloak for any dagger one might wish to hide.
Grades are almost completely relative, in effect ranking students relative to others in their class. Thus extra achievement by one student not only raises his position, but in effect lowers the position of others.
Liberals force lower middle-class families, who love their children, to dispatch them to ghetto schools dominated by gangs of fatherless boys bearing knives.
I came from a lower-middle-class postwar family in a time of austerity and retrenchment, with no one in the family who was in any way artistic or a potential mentor to a budding writer, and yet this is what I became.
Kools and Newports were for black people and lower-class whites.
Camels were for procrastinators, those who wrote bad poetry, and those who put off writing bad poetry. Merits were for sex addicts, Salems were for alcoholics, and Mores were for people who considered themselves to be outrageous but really weren't.
In other countries they have histories with revolutions and class movements.
In America, people don't like to think of themselves like being in a lower class. They all like to think of themselves as potential millionaires.