These middle class quotes will inspire you. Middle class is the social group between the upper and working classes, including professional and business people and their families.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging middle class quotes, middle class sayings, and middle class proverbs.
Best Middle Class Quotes
- “I have to live for others and not for myself: that’s middle-class morality.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
- “The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes.” ~ Aristotle
- “The enemy of society is middle class and the enemy of life is middle age.” ~ Orson Welles
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“Upper classes are a nation’s past; the middle class is its future.” ~ Ayn Rand
- “The middle class is growing that’s the reality that nobody can stop.” ~ Li Fan
- “Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.” ~ Matthew Arnold
- “Rich people buy luxuries last, while the poor and middle class tend to buy luxuries first.” ~ Robert Kiyosaki
- “Don’t be defeatist, dear, it’s very middle class.” ~ Maggie Smith
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“Economic theology is the opiate of the middle classes.” ~ Thurman Arnold
- “Independence? That’s middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
- “It was the labor movement that helped secure so much of what we take for granted today. The 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, family leave, health insurance, Social Security, Medicare, retirement plans. The cornerstones of the middle-class security all bear the union label.” ~ Barack Obama
- “The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.” ~ William James
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“It is to the middle-class we must look for the safety of England.” ~ William Makepeace Thackeray
- “We don’t use the term ‘working class’ here because it’s a taboo term. You’re supposed to say ‘middle class,’ because it helps diminish the understanding that there’s a class war going on.” ~ Noam Chomsky
- “In the richest country in the history of the world, this Obama economy has crushed the middle class. Family income has fallen by $4,000, but health insurance premiums are higher, food prices are higher, utility bills are higher, and gasoline prices have doubled. Today more Americans wake up in poverty than ever before.” ~ Mitt Romney
- “We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.” ~ George Orwell
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“Comfort came in with the middle classes.” ~ Clive Bell
- “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” ~ Louis D. Brandeis
- “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
- “Planning ahead is a measure of class. The rich and even the middle class plan for future generations, but the poor can plan ahead only a few weeks or days.” ~ Gloria Steinem
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“Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.” ~ Cyril Connolly
- “Most middle-class whites have no idea what it feels like to be subjected to police who are routinely suspicious, rude, belligerent, and brutal.” ~ Benjamin Spock
- “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
- “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
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“To be of mixed blood is a great gift for a writer. I have one foot on tribal lands and one foot in middle-class life.” ~ Louise Erdrich
- “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
- “For 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
- “For though we are perpetually bragging of it as our safety, it is nothing but a poor fringe on the mantle of the upper.” ~ Charles Dickens
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“The overtime threshold is to the middle class as the minimum wage is to low-wage workers.” ~ Nick Hanauer
- “Now that I’m more middle class, I have access to consumer goods. I do enjoy feminine frippery, feminine doo-da, stuff like that.” ~ Shirley Geok-lin Lim
- “When in one area of the world the standard of living and the size of the middle class increases, it is going to have an effect elsewhere in the world as well.” ~ Christine Lagarde
- “In economic panics throughout history, the wiping out of the savings accounts of lower earners and the middle class has often led to social revolution, sometimes violent upheavals.” ~ Nick Clooney
- “Middle-class-led reform movements, from the Progressive Era to the War on Poverty, have been marred by an elitist distance from the would-be beneficiaries of reform.” ~ Barbara Ehrenreich
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“Middle-class societies don’t emerge automatically as an economy matures, they have to be CREATED through political action.” ~ Paul Krugman
- “The middle classes shouldn’t be getting tax cuts, while those in tough, poorly paid jobs, who are already running out of money at the start of the month, are getting their benefits cut. That’s not one-nation conservatism; it’s two nations conservatism.” ~ Tim Montgomerie
- “Most middle-class people I know don’t really live like me. Middle-class people worry a lot about money. They worry a lot about job security, and they do a lot of nine-to-five stuff.” ~ Irvine Welsh
- “The trickle-down experiment that began in the Reagan years failed America’s middle class. Sure, the rich are doing great. Giant corporations are doing great. Lobbyists are doing great. But we need an economy where everyone else who works hard gets a shot at doing great!” ~ Elizabeth Warren
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“Left-leaning policies – I’m 52 years old, I’ve been to Cuba, I’ve been to dysfunctional state oriented places – left-leaning policies fail the lower and middle classes.” ~ Anthony Scaramucci
- “Here’s a current example of the challenge we face. At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only thirteen people. Where did all those jobs disappear to? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?” ~ Jaron Lanier
- “New York rushed to get students into early childhood programs, but the research is clear that it has to be high quality. What we are giving poor kids now in early childhood is nothing like what we are giving middle-class kids in most places.” ~ Pedro Noguera
- “Middle-class kids get to play, develop their thinking ability. Poor kids are much more likely to get regimentation under the guise of socialization. On top of it, we have huge segregation in early childhood programs. I don’t see these patterns changing anytime soon, and that’s a big obstacle.” ~ Pedro Noguera
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“Because I work quite slowly, I have to keep myself interested over a long research and writing period. So I can’t see myself writing about modern middle-class Londoners anytime soon.” ~ Stef Penney
- “Marriage equality is a very middle-class issue and voting rights is a very working-class issue. If you do not vote, who are you speaking for? Who will be the next Fannie Lou Hamer? If not you or someone you know, then who?” ~ Darryl Pinckney
- “When I think about the folks who are out there at home tonight watching… They know that this country is not respected around the world anymore. They know that this country is pushing the middle class, the hardworking taxpayers, backwards, and they saw a president who doesn’t understand their pain, and doesn’t have any plan for getting away from it.” ~ Chris Christie
- “I started to understand what the song could be about. The ache of nostalgia even for things we don’t like, the commitment to keep moving despite that ache. It made me think of how I relate to my privilege – as a white person, as someone who grew up upper middle class.” ~ Erin McKeown
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“Drugs and drinking affect every family I know, country and city, middle-class and poor.” ~ Bonnie Jo Campbell
- “Our traditional stories are based on an aristocratic model without a middle class, whereas The Arabian Nights reflect people living in cities, traders, merchants, travelers, with a wide range of personalities.” ~ Marina Warner
- “One of the things about me is that I actually had marginally middle-class living from writing. For years and years, I actually wrote so much through the ’70s and ’80s that I made a living. And very rarely have I had to take another job. And now it’s impossible for anybody coming up to make such a living. They’ve pissed in the temple, you know?” ~ Richard Meltzer
- “I guess I’m also obligated to note that the experience of sex workers who are not upper/middle class/white probably have much worse conditions than anything that’s portrayed commonly in media/what I experienced.” ~ Marie Calloway
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“What I want to do is make sure middle-class kids, not Donald Trump’s kids, get to be able to afford college.” ~ Hillary Clinton
- “If India is an emerging economy with millions of new consumers, sell them the Volvo. Sell them the Cielo car. Sell them whatever you can, hamburgers and KFCs. Its the middle classes who have moved into being able to own a car, a refrigerator. For them there is this mantra that the General Electric refrigerator is better than some other model, that the Cielo car is fancier than the Ambassador.” ~ Vandana Shiva
- “Health care is still the number-one issue out there. Someone who seizes it, I think, will do very well in an election. Let’s face it: Clinton’s two big issues were the middle class tax cut, which he dropped, wisely, at the time to help reduce the deficit, and health care. That’s what he ran on.” ~ Russ Feingold
- “I do believe that we should substantially lower student debt in this country, which is crushing millions of people. We pay for it, in my view, by a tax on Wall Street speculation. The middle class bailed out Wall Street in their time of need. Now, it is Wall Street’s time to help the middle class.” ~ Bernie Sanders
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“It is a campaign to break down every barrier that holds you back. We need more than a plan for the big banks. The middle class needs a raise. And we need more jobs.” ~ Hillary Clinton
- “The reality is that we have one of lowest voter turnouts of any major country on earth because so many people have given up on the political process. The reality is that there has been trillions of dollars of wealth going from the middle class in the last 30 years to the top 1/10th of 1 percent.” ~ Bernie Sanders
- “I’m not going to tell people that I will raise your incomes and not your taxes, and not mean it, because I don’t want to see the kind of struggle that the middle class is going through exemplified by these promises that would raise taxes and make it much more difficult for many, many Americans to get ahead and stay ahead. That is not my agenda.” ~ Hillary Clinton
- “To my mind, if we do not get a handle on money in politics and the degree to which big money controls the political process in this country, nobody is going to bring about the changes that is needed in this country for the middle class and working families.” ~ Bernie Sanders
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“I’m from a middle class family but my father squandered all the money, so I didn’t really run around with rich people. I was very judgmental towards a lot of them.” ~ Benjamin Clementine
- “Mexico City is very different now than when I grew up, but I was in the streets all the time – though I was born to a middle-class neighborhood where there weren’t a lot of gangs and things. I was always comfortable.” ~ Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
- “The people who perpetrated the terror of the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings are something different because these people were obviously not desperate and poor refugee dwellers. They were middle class, educated enough to speak English, to be able to go to flight school, to come to America, to live in Florida.” ~ Edward Said
- “I did my BA in English lit, and hated the restriction – I’d always read more in translation than not; coming from a working-class background, what I knew of as British literature – the writers who made big prize lists and/or were stocked in WH Smith, Doncaster’s only bookshop until I was 17 – seemed incredibly, alienatingly middle-class. Then in 2009, just after the financial crash, I graduated with no more specific skill than ‘can analyze a bit of poetry’.” ~ Deborah Smith
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“I understood that these trade agreements were going to destroy the middle class of this country. I led the fight against us. That is one of the major differences that we have.” ~ Bernie Sanders
- “Not only are unpaid internships exploitative, they’re one of the main forces keeping publishing in this country a primary white middle-class industry, which has a direct knock-on effect on what gets published and how.” ~ Deborah Smith
- “It may not be replicable: One of the hardest transition that a developing country can make is the transition to middle-class status. Governments have to let go, people start insisting on following their own lights, etc.” ~ Charles R. Morris
- “America was middle-class for the very start – the people who came first were hyper-strivers from England. There were no vested interests, no ranks, no classes, it was very lightly populated, there were unlimited natural resources – for free essentially – if you failed, you could always start over.” ~ Charles R. Morris
