56 Underclass Quotes
Following is our list of the most famous underclass quotations and slogans. We've compiled this selection of inspirational underclass quotes. Hopefully, these underclass quotes will keep you motivated not only during hard times but to expand your underclass knowledge!
Famous Underclass Quotes
This awful concept of underclass is really horrifying. You're not lower class, you are excluded - outside. — Zygmunt Bauman
A downtrodden class... will never be able to make an effective protest until it achieves solidarity. — H. G. Wells
Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class. — Matthew Arnold
There is a working class - strong and happy - among both rich and poor: there is an idle class - weak, wicked, and miserable - among both rich and poor. — John Ruskin
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. — Eugene V. Debs
The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang. — Anthony Burgess
There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher. — Victor Hugo
Middle-class societies don't emerge automatically as an economy matures, they have to be CREATED through political action. — Paul Krugman
When people lack jobs, opportunity, and ownership of property they have little or no stake in their communities. — Jack Kemp
I believe in the necessity for struggle by people at the bottom of any society. — Frances Fox Piven
The poor in our countries have been shut out of our minds and driven from the mainstream of our societies, because we have allowed them to become invisible. — Martin Luther King, Jr.
The poor prey on one another because their lives offer no hope and communicate the tragic message to these human beings that they have no possibility to attain a decent standard of living. — Thabo Mbeki
The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. — Barbara Ehrenreich
Poverty is the mother of crime. — Marcus Aurelius
To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships. — W. E. B. Du Bois
Short Underclass Quotes
- There are laws that only apply to people with HIV - we're becoming a viral underclass. — Sean Strub
- Why are women still this underclass? If we all banded together... — Rose McGowan
- If you belong to the underclass, you are already guilty. — Mason Cooley
- The taxpayer is the new permanent underclass. — Andrew Wilkow
People Writing About Underclass
| Name | Quotes | Likes |
|---|---|---|
 Zygmunt Bauman |
139 | 760 |
 H. G. Wells |
334 | 2439 |
 Matthew Arnold |
236 | 917 |
 John Ruskin |
601 | 5637 |
 Eugene V. Debs |
68 | 1886 |
 Anthony Burgess |
154 | 732 |
More Underclass Quotes
They feel entitled, and when the food stamps stop, when the free services end, when the heating bills aren't paid and the heating doesn't come through in many of these large cities — Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Washington, Baltimore, St. Louis, Detroit, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles — this underclass that resides in these places, I think could become very violent. — Douglas Macgregor
In the current world, with the skills needed, dropouts [like no secondary education] are condemned to being members of the underclass. In my view, this is a fault of the American school system, which is a government monopoly. — Milton Friedman
The Republican base is now made up of religious and neoconservative ideologues, and the uneducated white underclass with a token person of color or two up front on TV to obscure the all-white, all reactionary all backward — there-is-no-global-warming — rube reality. Actual conservatives, let alone the educated classes, have long since fled. — Frank Schaeffer
Christopher Columbus introduced two phenomena that revolutionized race relations and transformed the modern world: the taking of land, wealth, and labor from indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere, leading to their near extermination, and the transatlantic slave trade, which created a racial underclass. — James W. Loewen
We are developing in the United States a huge underclass of unwanted people, many of them the descendants of the exploitation of the South American and Latin American countries by American piratical capitalism. Not all capitalism is piratical, but some of it certainly is. And we have a fantastic gap beginning to exist between rich and poor. — Benedict Groeschel
What is economics? A science invented by the upper class in order to acquire the fruits of the labor of the underclass — August Strindberg
When have handouts ever worked? In the United States, we learned that welfare for our own citizens not only turned into a debilitating crutch, it created a more or less permanent underclass. — Linda Chavez
We have a large underclass in Britain, and a fairly low standard of education. Our best universities are extremely good, but a very significant proportion of the British population that comes out of compulsory schooling with very low standards of education. — Nigel Short
Perhaps nothing is so depressing an index of the inhumanity of the male-supremacist mentality as the fact that the more genial human traits are assigned to the underclass: affection, response to sympathy, kindness, cheerfulness. — Kate Millett
Throughout this country's history there have of course been systematic efforts to create an official underclass. — Eric Liu
Perhaps nothing is so depressing an index of the inhumanity of the male-supremacist mentality as the fact that the more genial human traits are assigned to the underclass: affection, response to sympathy, kindness, cheerfulness. — Kate Millet
I went to England in the '70s, and I was in my early 20s. There was still a residue of that era of being an underclass or colonial. I assume it must have been a more aggressive and prominent attitude 40 years before that, because Australia internationally wasn't regarded as having much cultural value. We were a country full of sheep and convicts. — Geoffrey Rush
Weirdly enough, the best thing that ever happened to black people in the last twenty or thirty years was the O.J. Simpson verdict because it shut down the white guilt bank. And white guilt has never led to anything good. It's brought us spiraling crime rates, mostly with black victims, and a permanent underclass living in public housing projects. For years, liberals cried that "law and order" and "welfare reform" were racist code words. — Ann Coulter
The degree to which the people of America are being dumbed down on purpose every day is striking. And all for the express purpose of maintaining in power a political party [the Democrats] which seeks a permanent underclass and as many dependent people on government as possible. As many uninformed, misinformed, know-nothings as they can get. — Rush Limbaugh
The rage building up, generation after generation, among what has become a permanent underclass in many parts of the world cannot continue. We are desperately undereducating our children. In the United States, we are turning prison-building into the single largest urban industry. These are like toxic chemical factors any one of which could cause a raging fire. God help us if they begin to interact. — Marianne Williamson
If we remain fearful, then we will be further stripped of power as we barrel towards this neofeudalistic state where there is a world of masters and serfs, a kind of permanent underclass. That's what's happening; that's what's being created. Rapacious corporate business interests have shattered all kinds of regulations and controls. They have carried out a coup d'etat in slow motion. And it's over; they've won. — Chris Hedges
Corporate welfare, I think, is a disaster for this country. It's crippling our economy. It is contributing to a permanent underclass and corrupting the business community. — Charles Koch
I do not think an enormous permanent underclass is a very good thing to have if you're attempting to operate something that at least pretends sometimes to be a democracy. — William Gibson
Shopping and buying and getting and having comprise the Great American Addiction. No one is immune. When the underclass riots in this country they don't kill policemen and politicians, they steal merchandise. How embarrassing. — George Carlin
The welfare state corrupts family life. Even Democrats have acknowledged the destructive consequences of the welfare state on the underclass. It has rendered vast numbers of male unnecessary to females, who have looked to the state to support them and their children (and the more children, the more state support) rather than to husbands. In effect, these women took the state as their husband. — Dennis Prager
If you don't educate people well, then you're going to have a lot of violent, angry young men and women. You can go around saying they're all so violent, just throw them in jail, this is an underclass, what can you do? You can create fear. The issue of violence is very suitable for a repressive society. Then you can have more legislation, more police, more laws to fight crime, when all you need to do is to encourage people in a different way. — Jeanette Winterson
A sort of moral blackmail is exerted from both poles. The underclass, one gathers, should be dulled with charity and welfare provision lest it turn nasty. The upper class must likewise be conciliated by vast handouts, lest it lose the "incentive" to go on generating wealth. — Christopher Hitchens
There's no question that the black middle class has benefited greatly by the civil rights movement. But there is a large black underclass that does not have access to jobs. If there's no clear road to income and status except crime, we should expect social problems. You can't solve this problem without addressing the economic issues, and the same is true with gender. — Betty Friedan
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? — David Horowitz
I want to build a bridge to the 21st century that ends the permanent underclass, that lifts up the poor and ends their isolation, their exile, and they are not forgotten anymore. — William J. Clinton
Where fashion in clothes, bodily adornment, and music are concerned, it is the underclass that increasingly sets the pace. Never before has there been so much downward cultural aspiration. — Anthony Daniels
Zionists believe they are entitled by God to the land, groves and homes of the non-Jewish underclass. They quote the Bible as the reference that 'God gave them the land.' The size of the alleged God-given land has never been determined and Israel's borders still remain fuzzy. — Lee Whitnum
The tax that was supposed to soak the rich has instead soaked America. The beneficiary of the income tax has not been the poor, but big government. The income tax has given us a government bureaucracy that outnumbers the manufacturing work force. It has created welfare dependencies that have entrapped millions of Americans in an underclass that is forced to live a sordid existence of trading votes for government handouts. — Paul Craig Roberts
The working class of England take their deracination completely for granted. Disenchantment is the happy code that informs every byway of the underclass: service jobs, celebrity dreams, Lotto wins, leisured poverty on pre-crunch credit cards, it's all there, part of the story of an English people whose grandparents never had it so good. — Andrew O'Hagan
Do Libertarians care about the poor? Well, we're not ladening them down with debt, we're not sending them off to God damned wars, we're not creating a permanent underclass, we're not trapping them in shitty schools where they graduate unable to read, WE DO CARE ABOUT THE POOR, and that's why we want the State out of their way!! — Stefan Molyneux
Partial legalization, as some are suggesting, is a dangerous path, and we need only look at France and Germany to see how unwise it is to create a permanent underclass. — Zoe Lofgren
It’s been a tough couple of years for condescending nerds. And if bookstores fall, Jon, America will be inundated with a wandering, snarky underclass of unemployable purveyors of useless and arcane esoterica. — John Hodgman
In Conclusion
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