Middle Class

(293 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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(290 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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(255 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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(240 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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(142 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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(142 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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(138 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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(130 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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(125 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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(124 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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(114 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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(109 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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(99 votes)   I simply contend that the middle-class ideal which demands that people be affectionate, respectable, honest and content, that they avoid excitements and cultivate serenity is the ideal that appeals to me, it is in short the ideal of affectionate family life, of honorable business methods.

Gertrude Stein
1874-1946, American Author

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(96 votes)   This miserable state is borne by the wretched souls of those who lived without disgrace and without praise.

Dante (Alighieri)
1265-1321, Italian Philosopher, Poet

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(93 votes)   A theory of the middle class: that it is not to be determined by its financial situation but rather by its relation to government. That is, one could shade down from an actual ruling or governing class to a class hopelessly out of relation to government, thinking of government as beyond its control, of itself as wholly controlled by government. Somewhere in between and In gradations is the group that has the sense that gov't exists for it, and shapes its consciousness accordingly.

Lionel Trilling
1905-1975, American Critic

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