Alissa Quart Quotes

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

Workers cannot buy with their salaries what they have produced and at the same time copiously nourish the swarm of idlers who live upon their work.

The higher classes constitute the mind of the single large whole of humanity; the lower classes constitute its limbs;

I was also pained to notice an institution which I certainly did not expect to find in this country – I mean caste. Your rich people are really Brahmins, and your poor people are Sudras.

There never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other.

What has destroyed every previous civilization has been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power.

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.

Workers in decent jobs view the economy as unjust if they or their children have virtually no chance of climbing to a higher rung in the socioeconomic ladder.

Colour is not the issue in America; class is.

It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.

Between richer and poorer classes in a free country a mutually respecting antagonism is much healthier than pity on the one hand and dependence on the other, as is, perhaps, the next best thing to fraternal feeling.

Class structures are a luxury that we cannot afford.

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.

It's not white versus black any more, it's haves versus have-nots. Unless the black middle-classes unite to promote the interests of the black underclass, tension between them is inevitable. What we, the black middle class have to do, is think of a strategy to avert that.

American democracy in the past has always been known for its large middle class and its relatively few very wealthy people and very few very poor people, but that is gone to today and the middle class is shrinking.

I don't mind the rich getting richer, but the poor shouldn't be getting poorer, and there should be more people moving into the middle class.

The forces in a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

The middle class has just fallen further and further behind the rich.

Revolutions break out when opposite parties, the rich and the poor, are equally balanced, and there is little or nothing between them.

Is the great working class oppressed? Yes, undoubtedly it is. God has intended the great to be great and the little to be little.

We are undemocratic, then, in our religion, as is proved by our efforts to “raise” the poor.

The middle class serves as a bridge between the haves and the have-nots. If it goes, so goes political stability.

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

The working class’s share in the national product is constantly diminishing – there is not a shade of doubt about that. The working class is becoming poorer not only relatively, but absolutely too; its income, far from increasing in the same progression as those of other classes in society, is falling; the real wages of the modern proletarian (the quantity of consumer goods falling to his share) are less than the worker’s pay was five hundred years ago

Choose equality …. Inequality has the natural and necessary effect … of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.