Jarvis Cocker Quotes

One of the great things about making 'Reel History' was meeting British people from all over the class system. It made me realise that London is a different country.

I've been through college, and I lived in a trailer park for five years. I've lived in the trenches of Maryland, and I've lived in the suburbs. I've seen all aspects of American life.

A lot of the things that we think of as being racial differences are really class differences in America.

There's a great variety of people in Washington, but I think because of the great concentration of people in New York, that variety is more visible. You walk the streets and there are people of every color, shape and size, ethnic background, religion, it doesn't matter. It's always present.

I went to a middle-class school, but my background is working class. I got the best of both worlds, I saw both classes, so I have a pretty fair idea of how people live and why they do it.

Class is not a fixed designation in this country. We are an upwardly mobile society with a lot of movement between income groups.

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.

I was friends with all different people and all different groups. And that led me to being friends with a few people who didn't even go to my school. Now I have the most amazing collection of friends of all ethnic backgrounds and upbringing and financial backgrounds.

Different races never fazed me because coming from Bethnal Green, I'd been around people of different races forever. Different class? That was much harder.

There has never been an immigrant group that has not contributed to America more than it has received.

The most beautiful thing about Brazil that I always find that is so unlike any other place I've been in the world is the diversity of its people.

I've been with all walks of life... All people from all status.

I think, probably, socially, in some ways New York may be the least American city. It represents too many things that Americans really don't entirely want in their lives.

I grew up around whites, I grew up around Jews, I grew up around blacks, I grew up around Hispanics. We moved a lot.

Thinking ahead, what really happens to us will depend on how many people we have who are of the great and sober and dynamic middle-class - the strivers, the planners, the ambitious ones.

Growing up in Jersey City was interesting. I got to learn a lot about different cultures: I had Hindu friends, Middle Eastern friends, black friends, Spanish friends.

Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway? – diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you'll have no tyrant states . Why, if they follow this conformity business they'll end up by forcing me, an invisible man, to become white, which is not a color but the lack of one. Must I strive toward colorlessness? But seriously, and without snobbery, think of what the world would lose if that should happen. America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.

I am struck again by the fact that as soon as a working man gets an official post in the Trade Union or goes into Labour politics, he becomes middle-class whether he will or no. ie. by fighting against the bourgeoisie he becomes a bourgeois. The fact is that you cannot help living in the manner appropriate and developing the ideology appropriate to your income.

By... [selecting] the youths of genius from among the classes of the poor, we hope to avail the State of those talents which nature has sown as liberally among the poor as the rich, but which perish without use if not sought for and cultivated.

An old joke has an Oxford professor meeting an American former graduate student and asking him what he's working on these days. 'My thesis is on the survival of the class system in the United States.' 'Oh really, that's interesting: one didn't think there was a class system in the United States.' 'Nobody does. That's how it survives.

I find L.A. very interesting, partly because I think something new is forming there, but not in a moment of good fellowship as you might think from all this "diversity" claptrap. It's not as if we'll all go down to the Civic Center in our ethnic costumes and dance around.

It seems to me that awakening to the full potential of what your life might be - beyond the possibilities of your own family, your own class, your own race, your own neighborhood - that is one of the great gifts that art affords.

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.

Objectively, class differences in accent, dress, manners, and general style of life are very much smaller; and one cannot, strolling about the street or travelling on a train, instantly identify a person's social background as one can in England. Subjectively, social relations are more natural and egalitarian, and less marked by deference, submissiveness, or snobbery, as one quickly discovers from the cab-driver, the barman, the air-hostess and the drug-store assistant.

Class is rarely talked about in the United States; nowhere is there a more intense silence about the reality of class differences than in educational settings.