Working Class Quotes

“If you've been fat, you will always feel and see the world as a fat person; you know how difficult it is... It's the same coming from a working-class background... it never leaves you.”
― Caitlin Moran, Moranthology

“Belonging to the working class is the economy’s punishment for those who did what they were told to do in class.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“If one man has a dollar he didn’t work for, some other man worked for a dollar he didn’t get.”
― William "Big Bill" Haywood

“olhe, hoje é possível reviver o fascismo, quer saber. é possível na perfeição. basta ser-se trabalhador dependente. é o suficiente para perceber o que é comer e calar, e por vezes nem comer, só calar. vá espirar esses patrões por aí fora. conte pelos dedos os que têm no peito um coração a florescer de amor pelo proletariado. que porra de conversa comunista. mas não é possível deixar de ter conversas comunistas enquanto não se largar a merda das ideias do capitalismo de circo que está montado. um capitalismo de especulação no qual o trabalho não corresponde a riqueza e já nem a mérito, apenas a um fardo do qual há quem não se consiga livrar.”
― valter hugo mãe, A máquina de fazer espanhóis

“The emancipation of the working class can only be achieved by the working class itself — without the assistance of governments.”
― pierre-jospeh proudhon

“One guy yelled at me, 'You stupid bitch, how do you live like that with nothing in your brain?' Well, that did it. I wasn't going to put up with that. Ok, I'm not so smart. I'm working class. But it's the working class that keeps the world running, and it's the working classes that get exploited. What kind of revolution is it that just throws out big words that working-class people can't understand? What kind of crap social revolution is that? I mean, I'd like to make the world a better place, too. If somebody's really being exploited, we've got to put a stop to it. That's what I believe, and that's why I ask questions. Am I right, or what?”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“But the workingpeople, the common people, they won't allow it.' 'It's the common people who get most fun out of the torture and execution of great men.... If it's not going too far back I'd like to know who it was demanded the execution of our friend Jesus H. Christ.”
― John Dos Passos, The Big Money

“She believed that, in an ideal world, the working class would rule the country, but she had no particular desire to ask any of them to tea.”
― John Mortimer, Paradise Postponed

“He’s always complaining about the fucking recession and how the government is working against people like him. He calls himself working class, which I think is a bit ironic since he doesn’t work.”
― Ida Løkås, Det fine som flyter forbi

“Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in their undershirt no matter how hot the weather gets.”
― Russell Baker

“On an opponent:"He loves the working man. He loves to see him work.”
― Winston Churchill

“Never had I felt so much the slave as when I scoured those stone steps each afternoon. Working against time, I would wet five steps, sprinkle soap powder, then a white doctor or a nurse would come and, instead of avoiding the soppy steps, walk on them and track the dirty water onto the steps that I had already cleaned. To obviate this, I cleaned but two steps at a time, a distance over which a ten-year-old child could step. But it did no good. The white people still plopped their feet down into the dirty water and muddled the other clean steps. If I ever really hotly hated unthinking whites, it was then. Not once during my entire stay at the institute did a single white person show enough courtesy to avoid a wet step.”
― Richard Wright, Black Boy

“He calls himself working class, which I think is a bit ironic since he doesn’t work.”
― Ida Løkås, Det fine som flyter forbi

“We are endowed with different kinds of gifts for different kinds of services.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!

“O horário é um triturador de lembranças”
― Hervé Bazin, La Mort du petit cheval

“Die Unzulänglichkeiten ihres Herkunftsmilieus [der Arbeiterschaft], sich in Sprache und Kultur der mittleren und höheren Schichten ausdrücken zu können, erschwerten ihren Aufstieg – und trugen dazu bei, dass sich die sozialen Parvenüs oft geradezu demonstrativ nach unten abgrenzten, um in der Lebenswelt oben willkommen geheißen zu werden. Wohl auch deshalb nahm der spätere Bundeskanzler Schröder den Brioni so wichtig. Störend dabei war, dass der Übereifer in der Adaption der neuen Lebensmaximen die frühere soziale Inferiorität erst recht offenlegte und so auf die Unsicherheit im Stil hinwies; hier machte sich eine von den traditionellen Eliten robust errichtete Sperre bemerkbar, welche die social climbers trotz – besser: gerade wegen – ihres angestrengten Tuns nicht überwinden konnten.”
― Franz Walter, Vorwärts oder abwärts? Zur Transformation der Sozialdemokratie

“So blieb [den individuellen Aufsteigern aus dem Arbeitermilieu] allein die Imitation der Verhaltensweisen und Ideologien von der mindestens heimlich bewunderten privilegierten Schicht, in die einzutreten schließlich Ziel des langen Weges war. Doch das Original mag den Nachahmer nicht, verhält sich bestenfalls gönnerhaft-spöttisch, von oben herab. Der Kopierende gibt sich alle erdenkliche Mühe, wird oft gar zum aggressiven Apologeten des Vorbildes, was – so Norbert Elias – »zu ganz spezifischen Verkrümmungen des Bewußtseins und der Haltung« führt. Der sozialdemokratische Kotau vor den Imperativen der Privatisierung, der finanzkapitalistischen Entgrenzungen, der Steuerbefreiung für Kapitalinvestoren in den Jahren 1999-2005 – er mag damit zu tun haben.”
― Franz Walter, Vorwärts oder abwärts? Zur Transformation der Sozialdemokratie

“Every ever you are in the world, you have to work to earn a living.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“You can work to create a bright future.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“You can find fulfillment in your work, work with all your heart.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“The road to the new society had lengthened and become overgrown sadly since 1904. The working class in many thousands had been shown its errors in thinking, but persisted in them. Very well: the working class must have the rigours of capitalism, and if the rigours were harsh - it serves them right for not accepting socialism.”
― Robert Barltrop

“He referred to Aneurin Bevan as 'Urinal' Bevan. As for the working classes, they couldn't write their own names in shit on a lavatory wall. I said I thought they could.”
― Tony Benn, The Benn Diaries, 1940-1990

“There is a certain pride in work and in your body throbbing beyond any boundaries you imagined you could endure. You identify with those who come home with pieces of pork fat wedged into their boots, with gashes on their arms and legs from their tools and machines, and with black grime etched into the folds of their dark skin.

Too often this country has turned its back on the working class and the working poor, not to mention the undocumented workers who harvest the food for American tables and build our houses.”
― Sergio Troncoso

“The 'free' laborer, thanks to the development of capitalistic production, agrees, i.e. is compelled by social conditions, to sell the whole of his active life, his birthright for a mass of pottage.”
― Karl Marx

“Proletarians of the world, look into the depths of your own beings, seek out the truth and realise it yourselves: you will find it nowhere else.”
― Peter Arshinov, History of the Makhnovist Movement, 1918-1921

“Бедные люди капризны, — это уж так от природы устроено. Я это и прежде чувствовал. Он, бедный-то человек, он взыскателен; он и на свет-то божий иначе смотрит, и на каждого прохожего косо глядит, да вокруг себя смущенным взором поводит, да прислушивается к каждому слову, — дескать, не про него ли там что говорят? ...И ведомо каждому, Варенька, что бедный человек хуже ветошки и никакого ни от кого уважения получить не може, что уж там ни пиши!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Poor Folk

“O.K., so I'm not so smart. I'm working class. But it's the working class that keeps the world running, and it's the working class that gets exploited. What the hell kind of revolution have you got just tossing out big words that working-class people can't understand? What the hell kind of social revolution is that? I mean, I'd like to make the world a better place, too. If somebody's really being exploited, we've got to put a stop to it. That's what I believe, and that's why I ask questions.”
― Haruki Murakami

“ALEXIS
I have made some converts to the principle that men and women should be coupled in matrimony without distinction of rank. I have lectured on the subject at Mechanics' Institutes, and the mechanics were unanimous in favour of my views. I have preached in workhouses, beershops and Lunatic Asylums, and I have been received with enthusiasm. I have addressed navvies on the advantages that would accrue to them if they married wealthy ladies of rank, and not a navvy dissented!

ALINE
Noble fellows! And yet there are those who hold that the uneducated classes are not open to argument! And what do the countesses say?

ALEXIS
Why, at present, it can't be denied, the aristocracy hold aloof.

ALINE
Ah, the working man is the true Intelligence after all!

ALEXIS
He is a noble creature when he is quite sober.”
― W.S. Gilbert, The Sorcerer

“Europe, the land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts. The land where the economy gets to stagger all over the continent.”
― Núria Añó

“But the reality is that chav-hate is a lot more than snobbery. It is a class war. It is an expression of the belief that everyone should become middle class and embrace middle-class values and lifestyles, leaving those who don't to be ridiculed and hated. It is about refusing to acknowledge anything of worth in working-class Britain, and systematically ripping it to shreds in newspapers, on TV, on Facebook, and in general conversation. This is what the demonization of the working class means.”
― Owen Jones