Tim Ryan Quotes

Do not mistake a crowd of big wage-earners for the leisure class.

I'm working class, my family was working class, and we have struggled the same way our neighbors here in San Francisco have struggled.

The people who talk about the middle class aren't upholding their interests in the legislature.

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.

I've never felt entirely comfortable in high society. I'm more comfortable talking to the bar staff than the super-rich. I don't really get what makes them tick.

Economic issues are a subset of social justice. Social justice is unimaginable without economic justice. Isn't that obvious?

A doctrine of class war seemed to provide a solution to the problem of poverty to people who know nothing about how wealth is created.

I think you can have a Left that isn't culturally conservative talking about lunch-bucket issues.

The Democrats have pretty much given up on the white working class. That would require a commitment to economic issues, and that's not their concern.

I'm not posh, not in the slightest. My parents spent some money on my education, but I wasn't born to the purple.

As the middle class is predated upon with an ever greater malicious intensity, their children stand to lose more and harder than their parents ever did.

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

The middle-class America of my youth was another country.

It’s no surprise that a global economy creates a global class conflict…. All markets create classes and class conflicts.

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

The man who is possessed of wealth, who lolls on his sofa or rolls in his carriage, cannot judge the wants or feelings of the day-laborer.

Apparently, there is no bad economic turn a conservative cannot do unto his buddy in the working class, as long as cultural solidarity has been cemented over a beer.

The Great Gatsby Curve

It would be well for those interested to reflect whether there now exists, or ever has existed, a wealthy and civilized community in which one portion did not live on the labor of another.... Remember that labor is the only source of wealth, and how small a portion of it, in all old and civilized countries, even the best governed, is left to those by whose labor wealth is created.

We deny your internationalism, because it is a luxury which only upper classes can afford; the working people are hopelessly bound to their native shores.

I'm not running from the left; I'm running from the bottom. I'm running in fierce advocacy for working-class New Yorkers.

Even when candidates have degrees from Harvard and Yale, they try to run as the candidate of the common man.

If you are from an ordinary working class family, life is just much harder than many people in politics realise.

I believe Colorado needs representation from a conservative who has worked his way through the types of obstacles with which nearly all middle-class and lower-income people struggle.

The working class who toil everyday to pay their rent and put food on their families' tables are tired of being lectured by the fat cats in Washington and Brussels who preach what we need and when we need it.