Working Class Struggles Quotes

Everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.

Shipping middle-class jobs to China, or hollowing them out with machines, is a win for smart managers and their shareholders. We call the result higher productivity. But, looked at through the lens of middle-class jobs, it is a loss.

Donald Trump's astonishing victory in the U.S. presidential election has made one thing abundantly clear: too many Americans - particularly white male Americans - feel left behind.

Middle America is dying for a voice.

I come from a working-class family. They're the people I know and the people I love, I guess. I do not write about them for political reasons, but because, as I see it, most interesting things - social, political, emotional - take place there. It's a bottomless well for an author like me.

I come from a working-class family in Pittsburgh, whereas 'Mike & Molly' deals with the working class in Chicago. I swear a little, but I pretty much talk the same. It's not like when you see someone like Tim Allen and he's a lot bluer onstage.

Shameless is a rough show, and it’s not for everyone, but it’s also beautiful.

If I could distil the relevance of Bruce Springsteen's music to Australia it would be this: don't let what has happened to the American economy happen here. Don't let Australia become a down-under version of New Jersey, where the people and the communities whose skills are no longer in demand get thrown on the scrap heap of life.

What I hear people talking about are things that anybody of any color or any religion or any sexual orientation can get with. They cannot earn a decent living if they're working class folks. They're worried about retirement if they're in their 40s and 50s. They're worried about sending their kids to college. If we focus on what really matters, we can get there.

I think Donald Trump tapped into something where folks didn't think the economy and the political system was working for them.

In prosperous times the mercantile classes often realize fortunes, which go far towards securing them against the future; but unfortunately the working classes, though they share in the general prosperity, do not share in it so largely as in the general adversity.

Trump tapped into a lot of middle-class and working-class disillusion with the political establishment and into economic worries and resentments that ballooned in the wake of the 2008 financial crash.

The Gilded Age robber barons - the Goulds, the Vanderbilts, the Morgans and Rockefellers - did quite well under laissez-faire. Most of the rest of Americans were still stuck in the ditch, with little to no economic security, life expectancy of roughly 45 years, and horrific infant mortality rates that claimed 300 babies per 1,000 in the cities.

I'm no different to other working class players.

New York makes me swoony and in love. The New York of the 1880s was a place where black eye fixers did a brisk business and people were routinely killed for their shoes. But, the constant aspiration of the city never changes.

The idealism of the left is a very selfish idealism. In their war against 'the rich' and big business, they don't care how much collateral damage there is to workers who end up end up unemployed.

The philosophers and the moralists had the simplicity to believe that they would stop the woman movement by opposing to it the sacred interest of the family, which they declared could not survive without the subjection of woman to the labors of the household, the sewing on of shirt buttons, the mending of hose, etc., her duty was to devote herself to these obscure and thankless labors, in order that man might freely unfold and display his brilliant and superior faculties. These same philosophers, who lectured the rebellious ladies on the cult of the family, sang the praises of capitalist industry, which, by forcing the wife away from the domestic hearth and her child’s cradle to condemn her to the forced labor of the factory, destroys the working-class family.

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.

Like my father, Trump also understands working-class Americans.

What you don't see on television is people dying today because they can't get to a doctor and they can't afford prescription drugs. That's why they are also dying. They are dying in Iraq because they are poor and they have gone into the military because they can't afford to go to college. They're dying because they're living in communities where asthma rates are extremely high because the air is filthy. The suffering of the poor and working class people is a virtual nonissue for the media. But that is the reality.

I was an only child. Both my parents came from working-class families in Hackney, east London.

In 2009, Scott Rudin sent me August's [Wilson] original screenplay [Fences] and asked me what I wanted to do with it. He wanted to know if I wanted to act in it, direct it or produce it. I said, "Well, let me read it first."

If Americans are working harder than ever earning less than they once did, our government and our leaders should step up, offer a plan, fix what's wrong -- or they should step aside, the recovery has been everywhere but in the family paychecks. The American Dream has become a mirage for far too many.

My people are still poor. They're still working class. All of the characters that I write about are inspired by the community that I'm from.

People at the very top of the income scale also benefited from globalization and automation. But the income of working- and middle-class people in the developed world has stagnated.