(159 votes)   The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms.

Oscar Wilde
1856-1900, British Author, Wit

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(136 votes)   The working-class is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman's heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes.

Matthew Arnold
1822-1888, British Poet, Critic

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(117 votes)   Real good breeding, as the people have it here, is one of the finest things now going in the world. The careful avoidance of all discussion, the swift hopping from topic to topic, does not agree with me; but the graceful style they do it with is beyond that of minuets!

Thomas Carlyle
1795-1881, Scottish Philosopher, Author

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(115 votes)   What I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.

Hermann Hesse
1877-1962, German-born Swiss Novelist, Poet

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(94 votes)   Books that have become classics -- books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal -- always remind me of retired colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired on half pay.

Thomas B. Aldrich
1836-1907, American Writer, Editor

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(82 votes)   If experience has established any one thing in this world, it has established this: that it is well for any great class and description of men in society to be able to say for itself what it wants, and not to have other classes, the so-called educated and intelligent classes, acting for it as its proctors, and supposed to understand its wants and to provide for them. A class of men may often itself not either fully understand its wants, or adequately express them; but it has a nearer interest and a more sure diligence in the matter than any of its proctors, and therefore a better chance of success.

Matthew Arnold
1822-1888, British Poet, Critic

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(69 votes)   The worst fault of the working classes is telling their children they're not going to succeed, saying: ''There is life, but it's not for you.''

John Mortimer
1923-, British Barrister, Novelist

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(63 votes)   In every one of those little stucco boxes there's some poor bastard who's never free except when he's fast asleep and dreaming that he's got the boss down the bottom of a well and is bunging lumps of coal at him.

George Orwell
1903-1950, British Author, ''Animal Farm''

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(58 votes)   That's what being in the working class is all about -- how to get out of it.

Neville Kenneth Wran

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(58 votes)   There are books which take rank in your life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
1803-1882, American Poet, Essayist

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(55 votes)   The most perfect political community must be amongst those who are in the middle rank, and those states are best instituted wherein these are a larger and more respectable part, if possible, than both the other; or, if that cannot be, at least than either of them separate.

Aristotle
BC 384-322, Greek Philosopher

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(55 votes)   The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.

William James
1842-1910, American Psychologist, Professor, Author

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(54 votes)   It is to the middle-class we must look for the safety of England.

William M. Thackeray
1811-1863, Indian-born British Novelist

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(51 votes)   I have to live for others and not for myself: that's middle-class morality.

George Bernard Shaw
1856-1950, Irish-born British Dramatist

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(48 votes)   What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary.

Frantz Fanon
1925-1961, French Psychiatrist

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