Quotes about Class

Here was no retrospective pretense of an opulent past, such as the other Invaders were given to parading before the bland but undeceived subject race. The Spraggs had been plain people and had not yet learned to be ashamed of it.

You might as well say that the only way not to think about air is to have enough to breathe. That is true enough in a sense, but your lungs are thinking about the air if you are not. And so it is with your rich people: they may not be thinking of money, but they're breathing it all the while; take them into another element and see how they squirm and gasp!

I regard class differences as contrary to justice and, in the last resort, based on force.

All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. the first are the rich and well-born, the other the mass of the people.

The bourgeois takes economic power very seriously, and often worships it quite unselfishly.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

Life's a university that'll teach you lessons, regardless of your desire to pass the "class" or not, there is always something else to learn

You could not open a book in this library that I have not looked into...it is as much as you can expect from a poor man's daughter.

Living among clowns and misanthropists, she probably cannot appreciate a better class of people when she meets them.

To Yossarian, the idea of pennants as prizes was absurd. No money went with them, no class privileges. Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else.

Peace requires the capacity to forgive. Peace requires a readiness to share generously. Peace requires the violation of strict class stratification in society. Peace requires attentiveness to the vulnerable and the unproductive. Peace requires humility in the face of exaltation, being last among those who insist on being first and denying self in the interest of the neighbor. These are all practices that mark his presence in his society.

Propertied persons typically have large estates and freedom of movement through the society. At the same time, the property of the rich has the effect of crowding and confining the less propertied. The very poor are typically restricted to narrow geographical limits and are regarded as aliens outside them.