Alissa Quart Quotes

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.

Distinction in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions.

There seems to be an idea abroad in this land as well as in others, that a certain class of people are for the purpose of producing servants for another class of people, and that this servant-producing class has no right to give their children an education that is calculated to elevate them above the position of their parents. We are not in sympathy with this idea.

The financial rewards of economic change have accrued disproportionately to the most talented and well-educated members of society.

There once was this powerful, both capital and political, class who cared about supporting and affirming a solid middle class in this country.

Class is real. It can't be faked.

I just think the whole discussion of class is wrong. It's not what we do here in America. I don't think there's anything called 'middle class values' that are different from the values of other people in this country.

Let some people get rich first.

Every society naturally divides itself into classes. The author of nature has bestowed on some greater capacities than on others--birth, education, talents and wealth, create distinctions among men as visible and of as much influence as titles, stars and garters. In every society, men of this class will command a superior degree of respect--and if the government is so constituted as to admit but few to exercise the powers of it, it will, according to the natural course of things, be in their hands.

If class warfare is being waged in America, my class is clearly winning.

There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents;... The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy.

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

People say law but they mean wealth.

Keep up the middle class; lop off aristocracy on the one hand, and a rabble at the other; let the middle class ... have the power.

As long as inheritance lasts, there will be hereditary economic inequality—not the natural inequality of individuals, but the artificial inequality of classes—which will necessarily continue to be expressed in hereditary inequality of the development and cultivation of intelligence and will remain the source and sanction of all political and social inequality.

We once had a society stratified by bloodlines, in which the Protestant Establishment was in one class, immigrants were in another and African-Americans were in another. Now we live in a society stratified by education. In many ways this system is more fair, but as the information economy matures, we are learning it comes with its own brutal barriers to opportunity and ascent.

Inequality is an inevitable product of capitalist activity, and expanding equality of opportunity only increases it—because some individuals and communities are simply better able than others to exploit the opportunities for development and advancement that capitalism affords.

To be concerned about inequality is not engaging in class warfare.

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.

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

The life prospects of an American are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in any of the other advanced industrial countries.

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

The middle class creates us rich people, not the other way around.

Luxury may possibly contribute to give bread to the poor; but if there were no luxury, there would be no poor.

Outside of the family, education is the greatest determinant of social mobility.