Kinky Friedman Quotes

People assume I'm posh because I'm one of the acting dames. I grew up in Tottenham and didn't used to speak like I do now.

There's no such thing as losing touch. You can take me out of the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto out of me.

This is the defining issue of our time. This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class and for all those who are fighting to get into the middle class.

The middle has not enough class that I think about the middle class.

When I went back home, I was constantly being reminded, I'm an African woman, and so there are certain things I shouldn't do, certain ambitions that I should not entertain. That was a problem for me because I had never thought of myself as an African woman, never thought of myself as a woman to begin with. For me the limit was my capacity, my capability.

Social class means a hell of a lot and upper class people - no matter how well [Franklin ] Roosevelt did - it was stylish to hate him.

My parents both came from very poor working-class families.

I was born into no true class and it was my decision early in life to insinuate myself into the middle class like a spy so that I would have an advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission, and to have taken my disguises too seriously.

In the Conservative Party we have no truck with outmoded Marxist doctrine about class warfare. For us it is not who you are, who your family is or where you come from that matters, but what you are and what you can do for your country that counts.

Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid.

The Class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.

Let's be honest: Kerry has no idea what it is to be even a middle-class white in this country.

My roots, my background and the way I act is working class, but it would be hypsocritical to say I'm anything else than middle class now.

A name, for me, is a short way of working out what class that child comes from. Do I want my child to play with them?

If two New Hampshiremen aren't a match for the devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians.

I've always said as a political scientist that "culture" is what we use when we can't explain things. I think it's more about accessibility. Part of the problem is that this is an expensive game [golf]. I know in a couple of places where there are black members, and they come from pretty much the same socioeconomic level that the white members come from.

Marriages are so complicated that no one person is the culprit. But, I am really interested in class without really realizing that I am. It's more the manifestations of different classes that interest me.

We have a new class in this country: the deserving rich. ... The deserving rich do nice things for each other. Comforting the unafflicted is something that comes naturally to them.

Social change rarely comes about through the efforts of the disenfranchised. The middle class creates social revolutions.

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.

In some countries, of course, Spanish is the language spoken in public. But for many American children whose families speak Spanish at home, it becomes a private language. They use it to keep the English-speaking world at bay.

Let no one try to justify the glaring difference between the classes and the masses, the prince and the pauper, by saying that the former need more.

The best example of all, to me, that our problems are both personal and cultural and political and social is the whole condition of the middle class economically.

We all like to think of ourselves as a standard, and I can see that it is genuinely difficult for the English middle class to suppose that the working class is not desperately anxious to become just like itself. I am afraid this must be unlearned.