John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

They cannot divide us by saying that you're middle class or you're lower class.

Poverty divide not only nations but societies within nations.

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

If everybody lives in the same way, there's something almost narcotizing about it, but the true misery of economic class difference is knowing that you can't have what somebody else does.

An imbalance between the rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.

The rich don’t want the poor to get ahead of them.

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.

There are no great lords who possess everything and a herd of people who have nothing

As income inequality increases, social mobility falls.

Inequality is bad for everyone, not just the middle class and the poor.

The burning issue of our time is the growing inequality in income and wealth in our country.

Everybody wants to talk about black and white, when the situation is really about rich people against poor people.

You can only choose between rich and poor. The middle class is gone.

When I ascended from the depths of the working class to the middle class, the higher I got, the more dishonesty I found.

Uncertainty and fears of social decline and exclusion have reached the middle class in many societies.

Greater inequality in Europe has made people less happy.

We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.

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.

Class still matters in Britain today.

Increasingly, staying in the middle class - let alone aspiring to become middle class - is becoming a game of chance.

If you have extremes of haves and have-nots where the gap keeps growing, the have-nots group together and create social disorder, as they can't see a way out of their situation.

Colour is not the issue in America; class is.

France has the least social mobility of any developed country. The social elevator no longer works. It's broken.

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

The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I've met, and think they're incredibly witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.