These lower class quotes will inspire you. Lower class, the economic group with the least wealth and power in society.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging lower class quotes, lower class sayings, and lower class proverbs.
Best Lower Class Quotes
- “Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” ~ Eugene V. Debs
- “There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.” ~ Victor Hugo
- “Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.” ~ Matthew Arnold
- “Socialism is nothing but the capitalism of the lower classes.” ~ Oswald Spengler
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“Welfare corrupts the lower class much faster than the middle class.” ~ James Cook
- “While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” ~ Eugene V. Debs
- “Generosity toward the lower classes historically has never been an important part of upper-class awareness.” ~ Michael Parenti
- “This awful concept of underclass is really horrifying. You’re not lower class, you are excluded – outside.” ~ Zygmunt Bauman
- “They cannot divide us by saying that you’re middle class or you’re lower class.” ~ H. Rap Brown
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“The incognito of lower class employment is an effective cloak for any dagger one might wish to hide.” ~ Margaret Cho
- “Realistically, I think we are not prepared to go home until we do get more teachers and lower class sizes.” ~ John Podesta
- “Laws for the liberal education of youth, especially of the lower class of people, are so extremely wise and useful, that, to a humane and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant.” ~ John Adams
- “My plan of instruction is extremely simple and limited. They learn, on week-days, such coarse works as may fit them for servants. I allow of no writing for the poor. My object is not to make fanatics, but to train up the lower classes in habits of industry and piety.” ~ Hannah More
- “In other countries, they have histories with revolutions and class movements. In America, people don’t like to think of themselves like being in a lower class. They all like to think of themselves as potential millionaires.” ~ Matt Taibbi
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“Really, if the lower orders don’t set a good example, what on earth is the use of them?” ~ Oscar Wilde
- “You know, without China, there is no Wal-Mart and without Wal-Mart there is no middle class and lower class prosperity in the United States.” ~ Arthur Laffer
- “I have no doubt but that the misery of the lower classes will be found to abate whenever the Government assumes a freer aspect,& the laws favor a subdivision of property.” ~ James Madison
- “There is a degree of wretchedness and want among the lower class of people which is not anywhere so common as among the Spanish and Portuguese settlements.” ~ William Bligh
- “At the same time, I was listening to black music, and I began to think that the best musicians were receiving the worst treatment. The people who were doing the greatest work were despised as lower class, with no dignity accorded to what they did.” ~ Henry Flynt
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“There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.” ~ Judith Martin
- “The trouble with the lower classes is that they lack the sense of tragedy given to them by the upper classes.” ~ Oscar Wilde
- “We lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the ‘lower classes’ when we mean humanity minus ourselves.” ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton
- “Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes.” ~ Howard Zinn
- “Among the lower classes of mankind there will be found very little desire of any other knowledge than what may contribute immediately to the relief of some pressing uneasiness, or the attainment of some near advantage.” ~ Samuel Johnson
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“Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
- “Much of what is today called “social criticism” consists of members of the upper classes denouncing the tastes of the lower classes (bawdy entertainment, fast food, plentiful consumer goods) while considering themselves egalitarians.” ~ Steven Pinker
- “Inequality has the natural and necessary effect, under the present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.” ~ Matthew Arnold
- “I have never said, as is sometimes believed, or even suggested that lower-class children should not learn the so-called educated norm of the Portuguese language of Brazil. What I have said is that the problems of language always involve ideological questions and, along with them, questions of power.” ~ Paulo Freire
- “The lower classes of men, though they do not think it worthwhile to record what they perceive, nevertheless perceive everything that is worth noting; the difference between them and a man of learning often consists in nothing more than the latter’s facility for expression.” ~ Georg C. Lichtenberg
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“The San Francisco Stock Exchange was the place that continuously pumped up the savings of the lower classes into the pockets of the millionaires.” ~ Robert Louis Stevenson
- “Exemplary people concern themselves with virtue,
small people concern themselves with territory. The ruling class
thinks of punishment, the lower classes hope for benevolence.” ~ Confucius - “If you have an economic system in which there must be a lower class, there must be unemployed. There must be a large pool of people working at the worst jobs and the lowest paid jobs. Once you have a system like that, then the most likely people to be victims of that are people of color.” ~ Howard Zinn
- “When I was growing up, you were supposed to marry and therefore didn’t plan ahead. Planning ahead is one of the few reliable measures of class in the sense that rich people plan for generations forward and poor people plan for Saturday night, and by that measure, women have been lower class. We were less likely to plan ahead because we’re more likely to think that who we marry and our children are going to dictate our plans.” ~ Gloria Steinem
- “All fear of ‘offensive’ speech is bourgeois and reactionary. Historically, profane or bawdy language was common in both the upper and the lower classes, who lived together in rural areas amid the untidy facts of nature. Notions of propriety and decorum come to the fore in urbanized periods ruled by an expanding middle class, which is obsessed with cleanliness, respectability, and conformism.” ~ Camille Paglia
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“A broad definition of crime in England is that it is any lower-class activity that is displeasing to the upper class.” ~ David Frost
- “For those parents from lower-class and minority communities[who] have had minimal experience in negotiating dominant, external institutions or have had negative and hostile contact with social service agencies, their initial approaches to the school are often overwhelming and difficult. Not only does the school feel like an alien environment with incomprehensible norms and structures, but the families often do not feel entitled to make demands or force disagreements.” ~ Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot
- “Zombies are the real lower-class citizens of the monster world and that’s why l like them.” ~ George A. Romero
- “Those people that created the cultural Marxist thoughts, one guy by the name of Antonio Gramsci, very important within the Frankfurt School, argued against the concept of Marxist Leninism, in which it was basically the revolutionary spirit where someone would say we need to rile up the lower classes and have a revolution and take over the factories.” ~ Andrew Breitbart
- “I never knew that the lower classes had such white skins.” ~ George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston
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“Everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.” ~ Arthur Young
- “If we want to have a two-class society and an unemployed, welfare-crippled lower class that has no access to equality and educational opportunity and no access to jobs and is resentful and furiously angry, we can have it – that’s what we’ve been willing to pay for so far.” ~ Robert Hass
- “War is rich old men protecting their property by sending middle class and lower class young men off to die. It always has been.” ~ George Carlin
- “As a lower-class kid, I was raised to think success would be owning stuff. Having that great job, too. Now I find my parents’ dream was wrong. You never really own anything. And you’re never really finished as a person.” ~ Chuck Palahniuk
- “Capitalism in the 19th century did not doom the worker to a life of perpetual poverty. Instead, they kept creating new and better-paying employments as the decades went by. They produced the wealth and rising income that resulted in the emergence of a phenomenon completely new to human history: a self-supporting and educated middle class that grew more and more as they lower classes bettered their economic well-being.” ~ Richard Ebeling
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“The upper class desire to remain so, the middle class wish to overthrow the upper class, and the lower class want a classless system.” ~ George Orwell
- “We got to face some facts. That the masses are poor, that the masses belong to what you call the lower class, and when I talk about the masses, I’m talking about the white masses, I’m talking about the black masses, and the brown masses, and the yellow masses, too. We’ve got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don’t fight racism with racism. We’re gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don’t fight capitalism with no black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism.” ~ Fred Hampton
- “It’s incumbent on the President to entertain. Clinton did a better job of it – and was forgiven for the scandals, incidentally. Bush is entertaining us with what I call the Republican Super Bowl, which is played by the lower classes using live ammunition.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut
- “I was raised in California during the Second World War and into the ’50s and everything was fine, everything was great. The sun always shone, everybody looked healthy and wore ties and smoked in restaurants, and there were cars for everybody – except us, because I came from a lower class neighbourhood. But [in France] I realised there was a different point of view, so when I came back to America a year and a half later I was much more focused on my own country culturally and politically.” ~ Robert Redford
- “I have known female whores who spoke very bitterly of their calling. “If they don’t like my face, they can put a cushion over it. I know it’s not that they’re interested in.” But to the boys this profession never seemed shameful. It was their daytime occupations for which they felt the need to apologize. In some instances, these were lower class or humdrum or, worst of all, unfeminine. At least whoring was never that.” ~ Quentin Crisp
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“I’ve gradually risen from lower-class background to lower-class foreground.” ~ Marvin L. Cohen
- “I am not afraid of the priests in the long-run. Scientific method is the white ant which will slowly but surely destroy their fortifications. And the importance of scientific method in modern practical life–always growing and increasing–is the guarantee for the gradual emancipation of the ignorant upper and lower classes, the former of whom especially are the strength of the priests.” ~ Thomas Huxley
- “Society is doing a great deal for the workingman, for the lower classes; but it seems to me, sometimes, as if it formed associations to obtain for them toys, and then formed other associations to teach them to play with them.” ~ John Bartholomew Gough
- “The whole famous Reign of Terror [of the 1790s] in fifteen months guillotined 2,596 aristos. The Versaillists [the anti-Communards of 1871] executed 20,000 before their firing squads in one week. Do these figures represent the comparative efficiency of guillotine and modern rifle or the comparative cruelty of upper and lower class mobs?” ~ Guy Endore
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“The lower classes are such fools. They waste their money on the pools. I bet, of course, but that’s misleading. One must encourage bloodstock breeding.” ~ Bernard Fergusson, Baron Ballantrae
- “Those other lands were Christian, and they boiled with bigotry. The rulers themselves were more or less tolerant, for they depended upon Jews as their financiers. But the lower classes had no use for them, and butchered them whenever a righteous excuse could be found. And righteous excuses were not wanting. If a plague broke out, of course the Jews had poisoned the wells. If a war was lost, of course the Jews had aided the enemy. If a boy mysteriously disappeared, of course the Jews had murdered him to procure blood for their Passover drink.” ~ Lewis Browne
- “Kools and Newports were for black people and lower-class whites. Camels were for procrastinators, those who wrote bad poetry, and those who put off writing bad poetry. Merits were for sex addicts, Salems were for alcoholics, and Mores were for people who considered themselves to be outrageous but really weren’t.” ~ David Sedaris
- “These people—the employed, the somewhat privileged—are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls.” ~ Howard Zinn
- “No state has hitherto existed (at least that we have any account of) … that no check whatever has existed to early marriages, among the lower classes, from a fear of not providing well for their families, or among the higher classes, from a fear of lowering their condition in life.” ~ Thomas Malthus
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“All the old history was written for the amusement of the ruling classes. The lower classes couldn’t read, and their rulers didn’t care about remembering what happened to them.” ~ Frank Zappa
- “Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes. . . . it was essential that they should keep on going to the country, even though they hated it.” ~ Aldous Huxley
- “In boxing, where most of the guys are from lower-class backgrounds and have darker skin than most of the fans, one might fear that the athletes are being exploited. But that narrative doesn’t hold up very well in the world of MMA, where 99 percent of fighters are amateurs who will never earn a dime. They aren’t seeking fame and fortune. For the most part, these guys are fighting because they want to and because it gives them an opportunity to strive for something big in their lives. It gives them a chance to become their best selves.” ~ Jonathan Gottschall
- “When Ling was communicating to any person the signs by which messengers might find him, he was compelled to add, “the neighbourhood in which this contemptible person resides is that officially known as ‘the mean quarter favoured by the lower class of those who murder by treachery’,” and for this reason he was not always treated with the regard to which his attainments entitled him, or which he would have unquestionably received had he been able to describe himself as of “the partly-drained and uninfected area reserved to Mandarins and their friends.” ~ Ernest Bramah
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“Necessity is the constant scourge of the lower classes, ennui of the higher ones.” ~ Arthur Schopenhauer
- “Most armies are in fact run by their sergeants – the officers are there just to give things a bit of tone and prevent warfare becoming a mere lower-class brawl.” ~ Terry Pratchett
- “First impressions of medieval life are usually colored by the courtly romances of Malory and his later refiners. Chaucer brings us down to reality, but his people belong to a prosperous middle-class world, on holiday and in the holiday mood. Piers Plowman stands alone as a revelation of the ignorance and misery of the lower classes, whose multiplied grievances came to a head in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.” ~ William Langland
