Novala Takemoto Quotes

Money doesn't buy class.

Farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing élite set itself above the disease-ridden masses.

Socially, I never belonged to any class, rich or poor. To the rich I was poor, and to the poor I was poor pretending to be like the rich.

The real beggar is indeed the true and only king.

Old maids like the houseless and unemployed poor, should not ask for a place and an occupation in the world: the demand disturbs the happy and the rich.

If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life.

Class isn't something you buy. Look at you. You have a $500 suit on and you're still a lowlife.

I've got to be high class... Which is sad, because I like bars.

Class is more than money. Class is also about knowledge.

Nowadays nothing but money counts: a fortune brings honors, friendships; the poor man everywhere lies low.

No real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist.

In all my novels, a sense of place - not just geographic but social - is a critical element. I have always been drawn to the novels of Edith Wharton, among others, where social dynamics are crucial. Wharton's class consciousness fascinates me, and some of the tension in my books stems from that.

Aristocracy is naturally abhorrent to me, and adored equality is my idol.

Sociometric status is a powerful determinant of health.

Poor men's words have little weight.

The higher classes constitute the mind of the single large whole of humanity; the lower classes constitute its limbs;

Mankind is divided into rich and poor, into property owners and exploited; and to abstract oneself from this fundamental division, and from the antagonism between poor and rich, means abstracting oneself from fundamental facts.

Chivalry only worked with men of the same class.

We deny your internationalism, because it is a luxury which only the upper classes can afford.

If we were second class citizens we'd be driving old Cadillacs and living good. If we were first class we'd be driving a Rolls Royce.

Abstraction and luxury are the guard dogs of the upper class.

In verity we are the poor. This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands and thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of a stable upper class that is responsible for much of the vulgarity of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this deficiency?

There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.

I feel so out of place here. No matter how much money the Republic throws at me, I will forever be the boy from the streets.

There’s no snobbery like that of the poor toward one another.