Abraham Lincoln Quotes

One of the basic tenets of the working class is you want to get out of the working class.

I never met a poor person who wanted to soak the rich; they want to get rich.

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

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

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

When you take out individual initiative, individual responsibility, and the hope that every individual is born with, to better their lives, to climb the economic ladder, to pursue happiness, that is, in fact, a neoslavery.

I'm every bourgeois nightmare - a Cockney with intelligence and a million dollars.

Strip the proud nobility of their bloated estates, reduce them to a level with plain republicans, send forth to labor, and teach their children to enter the workshops or handle the plow, and you will thus humble proud traitors.

No real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist.

In all my novels, a sense of place - not just geographic but social - is a critical element. I have always been drawn to the novels of Edith Wharton, among others, where social dynamics are crucial. Wharton's class consciousness fascinates me, and some of the tension in my books stems from that.

The idea that America is the best place in the world to start out poor, so long as you are willing to work hard, no longer seems to be true. One way of proving that is to ask how accurately your family's income when you were growing up predicted what your own would be. If the American dream were alive, your family's income would not predict your own that well…. Well, on that measure, America is now less the land of opportunity than France, than Germany, than Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark. The only other rich economy that the U.S. outscores in this respect is — you guessed it — the UK. Abolish the estate tax and America will be a serious contender for the bottom of the opportunity league.

We all know from a study of history the progress of the working people from the stage of barbarism to that of slavery, serfdom and later individual freedom... .

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

What is the aim of the feminists? Their aim is to achieve the same advantages, the same power, the same rights within capitalist society as those possessed now by their husbands, fathers and brothers. What is the aim of the women workers? Their aim is to abolish all privileges deriving from birth or wealth. For the woman worker it Is a matter of indifference who is the 'master' a man or a woman. Together with the whole of her class, she can ease her position as a worker.

In the class-struggle the conflict must always concern itself with immediate, practical objects

My job is to raise issues relating to class in Ireland.

To abolish class distinctions means abolishing a part of yourself.

Entire sections of the ruling classes are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.

Southern men declare that their slaves are better off than hired laborers amongst us. How little they know, whereof they speak! There is no permanent class of hired laborers amongst us.

Emancipation at one stroke elevates the poor white of the South, and identifies his interest with that of the Northern laborer.

The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business. They granted that the government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live…. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.

Maybe it’s that silver spoon in his [Mitt Romney’s] mouth that keeps him from seeing why the middle class doesn’t pull itself up by its bootstraps, like he did when Daddy loaned him his first million dollars.

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

I wanted to get rich, like anyone from my background.

I think that social migration to another economic class requires a kind of negotiating with yourself. And also, there's so much ambivalence in your heart about who you are and who you're really not.