Bill Ayers Quotes

I had an Edinburgh, middle-class childhood and a public school education.

Working-class people don't tend to be wooed by celebrity.

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.

Americans have so far put up with inequality because they felt they could change their status. They didn't mind others being rich, as long as they had a path to move up as well. The American Dream is all about social mobility in a sense - the idea that anyone can make it.

And I am interested in the fact that class is very much a factor in America, even though it's not supposed to be.

Class - or the economic status of individuals - is evident in all societies, some very well stratified by a rigid caste system determined by birth.

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

There's often an assumption you're more privileged if you belong to a family with people who have made a success.

Of course, in the United States, which at the time was a very young country, there were also class distinctions. They weren't as pronounced, but they quickly evolved as well.

The difference between rich and poor is becoming more extreme, and as income inequality widens the wealth gap in major nations, education, health and social mobility are all threatened.

The middle class is always a firm champion of equality when it concerns a class above it; but it is its inveterate foe when it concerns elevating a class below it.

Economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege

I'm tired of people on trust funds telling people on food stamps how to live.

Americans have historically been more willing than Europeans to tolerate high inequality levels if accompanied by strong economic growth and a healthy middle class.

Sometimes I think that the public's lack of criticism of the rich - and how they seek their pleasure - might derive from the fact that Americans still believe they will one day be joining their number.

We have a myth of the classless society. You won't hear an American politician apart from Bernie Sanders talk about the working class. We are all middle class, apparently.

'High Cotton' is more conscious of class than 'Black Deutschland.'

Inequality is partly a marker of success.

Of all the hokum with which this country [America] is riddled, the most odd is the common notion that it is free of class distinctions.

The most efficient way of rendering the poor harmless is to teach them to want to imitate the rich.

For all the chatter that Britain has moved beyond class, recent studies have found that it determines the life chances of British people more today than at any point since the Second World War... A child born into a rich family in Britain will almost certainly live and die rich, while a child born into a poor family will almost certainly live and die poor.

I think there's a certain sense of grounding that comes from not being a rich kid from a media-elite school.

I've always enjoyed studying the small clues that indicate a particular class level.

Growing up on, say, the Upper East Side, you're so isolated. If you go to the Hamptons every weekend, you never talk to a construction worker, and the construction worker would never talk to you.

I wanted to look at the upper-middle-class scene since the war, and in particular my generation's part in it. We had spent our early years as privileged members of a privileged class. How were we faring in the Age of the Common Man? How ought we to be faring?