Class Discrimination Quotes

Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful easily break through them.

We love wealth, and we hate poor people. I know people who work in TV news who have actually been told to do stand-ups rather than put interviews with poor people on the air. We physically don't want to look at them.

Class is often invisible in America in the movies, and usually not the subject of the film.

I'm concerned about - the oppression of the poor.

It is only the poor who are forbidden to beg.

None of us should be ashamed to speak of our class power or lack of it. Overcoming fear, even the fear of being immodest, and acting courageously to bring issues of class- especially radical standpoints – into the discourse of blackness is a gesture of militant defiance, one that runs counter to bourgeois insistence that we think of “money” in particular and class in general as private matters.

Nobody likes being around poor people, especially poor people.

When poor and ordinary Americans who commit crimes are prosecuted and imprisoned, that is Justice. When the same thing is done to Washington elites, that is Ugly Retribution.

Only the rich can get justice, only the poor cannot escape it.

The British Airways steward announced that the in-flight movie would be Chariots of Fire. 'Is that the only one?' I asked. 'We are also showing Gandhi,' he replied. 'Where do I have to sit to see it?" I responded. 'I'm sorry, sir, but Gandhi is only showing in first class.' The irony seemed to escape him.

Throughout this country's history there have of course been systematic efforts to create an official underclass.

There's always been a nasty strain of class prejudice ingrained in the condemnation of football's 'undeserving rich,' as if the working class is uniquely susceptible to being corrupted by money, and as if they deserve their wealth less than those born to it.

Like so much in Singapore, admission to the Marina Bay's casino is hierarchical: Free for anyone with an international passport, costly for locals, off-limits to migrant workers altogether.

The majority decision constitutionalizes a distinction between a red leather pouch and a paper bag that is necessarily based at least in some part on economic and class differences and perceptions.

A person should not have a second class life because he chose the wrong parents.

In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.

people who pay greater respect to a wealthy villain than to an honest, upright man in poverty, almost deserve to be enslaved; they plainly show that wealth, however it may be acquired, is, in their esteem, to be preferred to virtue.

I am not ashamed to use the word class. I will also plead guilty to another charge. The charge is that people belonging to my class think they're better than other people. You're damn right we're better. We're better because we do not shirk our obligations either to ourselves or to others. . . .we live by our lights, we die by our lights, and whoever the high gods may be, we'll look them in the eye without apology.

That system, unequal as it is indefensible, is the mightiest engine of oppression imposed upon an honest yeomanry since the feudal ages. This system places a high premium on wealth and a severe penalty on poverty.

They [Harvard academia] liked the poor, but didn't like the smell of the poor.

The indiscriminate denunciation of the rich is mischievous.... No poor man was ever made richer or happier by it. It is quite as illogical to despise a man because he is rich as because he is poor. Not what a man has, but what he is, settles his class. We can not right matters by taking from one what he has honestly acquired to bestow upon another what he has not earned.

I gained direct knowledge of the life of the poor in big towns: I have lived the narrowing mechanism of its conditioning and feared it.

At the same time, I was listening to black music, and I began to think that the best musicians were receiving the worst treatment. The people who were doing the greatest work were despised as lower class, with no dignity accorded to what they did.

Shame is no comrade for the poor, I weet.