These working class quotes will inspire you. “Working class” is a socioeconomic term used to describe persons in a social class marked by jobs that provide low pay, require limited skill, or physical labor.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging working class quotes, working class sayings, and working class proverbs.
Best Working Class Quotes
- “A working-class hero is something to be.” ~ John Lennon
- “Capitalism cannot survive without a working-class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism.” ~ Terry Eagleton
- “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.” ~ Jay Gould
- “The most important word in the language of the working class is “solidarity.”” ~ Harry Bridges , Working class quotes solidarity
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“The working classes in every country only learn to fight in the course of their struggles.” ~ Rosa Luxemburg
- “There is a working class – strong and happy – among both rich and poor: there is an idle class – weak, wicked, and miserable – among both rich and poor.” ~ John Ruskin
- “I would have put more emphasis on bringing working class people together to fight for a government that works for all of us.” ~ Bernie Sanders
- “I grew up on the south side of Chicago in a working class community. There were no miracles in my life, there’s nothing miraculous about how I grew up, and I want people to know when they look at me, to be clear that they see what an investment in public education can look like.” ~ Michelle Obama
- “My father and I used to tussle about me becoming an actor. He’s from strong, Presbyterian Scottish working-class stock, and he used to sit me down and say, ‘You know, 99 percent of actors are out of work. You’ve been educated, so why do you want to spend your life pretending to be someone else when you could be your own man?'” ~ Tom Hiddleston
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“Work is the curse of the drinking classes.” ~ Oscar Wilde
- “If you are from an ordinary working class family, life is just much harder than many people in politics realise.” ~ Theresa May
- “I am not a capitalist soldier; I am a proletarian revolutionist. I do not belong to the regular army of the plutocracy, but to the irregular army of the people. I refuse to obey any command to fight from the ruling class, but I will not wait to be commanded to fight for the working class. I am opposed to every war but one; I am for that war with heart and soul, and that is the world-wide war of social revolution. In that war I am prepared to fight in any way the ruling class may make necessary, even to the barricades.” ~ Eugene V. Debs
- “We’re working-class people, which means we don’t get rich or have maids. Be content with what you are and what you have.” ~ Colleen McCullough
- “The General Strike has taught the working class more in four days than years of talking could have done.” ~ Arthur Balfour
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“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
- “If someone is very upper-class, you have a stereotype of him which is probably true. If someone has a working-class accent, you have no idea who you’re talking to.” ~ Michael Caine
- “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
- “The history of all countries shows that the working class exclusively by its own effort is able to develop only trade-union consciousness.” ~ Vladimir Lenin
- “I am from the working class. I am now what I was then. No amount of balsamic vinegar and Prada handbags could make me forget what it was like to be poor.” ~ Sue Townsend
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“If they want to hang me, let them. And on the scaffold I will shout Freedom for the working class!” ~ Mother Jones
- “I once said, ‘We will bury you,’ and I got into trouble with it. Of course we will not bury you with a shovel. Your own working class will bury you.” ~ Nikita Khrushchev
- “The colors black and white are my uniform, to honor the working class. People like my parents, who were janitors and had to wear a uniform every day. It keeps me grounded.” ~ Janelle Monae
- “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
- “I’m definitely working class, and I still believe in those values. I know that losing everything would not be an unfamiliar feeling. Meaning, if you don’t have it anymore, you didn’t have it to begin with.” ~ John Travolta
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“I’m a working-class kid from a blue-collar New England family.” ~ R. A. Salvatore
- “Women of the working class, especially wage workers, should not have more than two children at most. The average working man can support no more and the average working woman can take care of no more in decent fashion.” ~ Margaret Sanger , Working class quotes woman
- “My sympathies have always been for working-class people.” ~ Christa McAuliffe
- “It used to be that the working class, broadly speaking – Americans who worked with their hands, who worked in factories, who were not in management – were an interest group, a political interest group. And their main spokespersons were the Democrats. Their platform was the Democratic Party. And that began to change after the 1960s. Not for black or other working-class Americans, but for white working class.” ~ George Packer
- “Political economy regards the proletarian like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being. It leaves this to criminal law, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics, and the beadle.” ~ Karl Marx
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“New York City has become a place where it’s not easy for the working class to even live.” ~ Michael Moore
- “The neoliberal programs of the last generation have in fact been, and were intended to be, a pretty serious attack on democracy, but also they’ve led to stagnation or decline for large parts of the population – the working class, the lower middle class, these people have essentially been cast aside.” ~ Noam Chomsky
- “I agree with you, Mr. Chairman, that the working men are the basis of all governments, for the plain reason that they are the more numerous, and as you added that those were the sentiments of the gentlemen present, representing not only the working class, but citizens of other callings than those of the mechanic, I am happy to concur with you in these sentiments, not only of the native born citizens, but also of the Germans and foreigners from other countries.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
- “Make no mistake: The organization of the working class must be both economic and political. The capitalist is organized upon both lines. You must attack him on both.” ~ Daniel De Leon
- “It’s hard for me to understand how working-class people support themselves.” ~ Barbara Kruger
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“The working class must control the factories and the country” ~ Alan Woods
- “Growing up in a particular neighborhood, growing up in a working-class family, not having much money, all of those things fire you and can give you an edge, can give you an anger.” ~ Gary Oldman
- “People like me who grew up in a working-class town, who don’t have a college education, you don’t usually hear from us.” ~ Michael Moore
- “The working class will not halt until socialism has been realized.” ~ Ernst Toller
- “I would prefer to use a very inclusive definition of the working class. I’d like to include all of those people who are, if they’re not exploited by an immediate employer over them, they’re exploited by the system and therefore have a cause to want to change the system. Having a very inclusive definition of the working class creates a great opportunity for organizing people.” ~ Howard Zinn
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“I have that working class fear of having nothing. I’ve always got one eye on what’s in the bank.” ~ Jasper Carrott
- “I was a working class Jewish girl. In my girlhood, anti-Semitism was a daily fact of life in Detroit. I did not come from people who had many options in their lives or many choices open to them. I was a girl in a family in which women were, as in society at large, very much second-class citizens. I did not see why I should accept these forced limitations without a fight. Being free to make my own choices thus became very important to me at an early age.” ~ Marge Piercy
- “I liked work shoes and big, working-class hands. The stars would come and go, but the crew on my movies was my extended family.” ~ Shirley Temple
- “There’s no hall of fame for that working class hero, no statue carved out of stone. And his greatest reward is the love of a woman and his children.” ~ Alan Jackson , Working class quotes hero
- “I have a lot of rage about things that didn’t happen to me, tied up with watching an immigrant, working-class father struggle to make his way through the world – and seeing how society was modeled to keep him in his place.” ~ Dennis Lehane
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“Since the working-class lives from hand to mouth,it buys as long as it has the means to buy.” ~ Karl Marx
- “I grew up in a working-class family, so I guess you could say I write from what I know.” ~ Andrea Arnold
- “I put on the page a third look at what I’ve seen in life – the reinvented experience of a cross-eyed working-class lesbian, addicted to violence, language and hope, who has made the decision to live, is determined to live, on the page and on the street, for me and mine.” ~ Dorothy Allison
- “All contemporary religions and churches, all and every kind of religious organization, Marxism has always viewed as organs of bourgeois reaction, serving as a defense of exploitation and the doping of the working-classes.” ~ Vladimir Lenin
- “The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it’s not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I’ve met, and think they’re incredibly witty, inventive – there’s a lot of poetry there.” ~ Martin Amis
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“I am who I am: an Irish Catholic kid, working class from Long Island. And I made it big.” ~ Bill O’Reilly
- “The hope that poverty and ignorance may gradually be extinguished derives indeed much support from the steady progress of the working classes during the 19th century.” ~ Alfred Marshall
- “I still remember how upset I was in the aftermath of President Obama’s election, where people in Republican leadership didn’t say that, “Hey, I want to focus on the issues and values of our country,” but, “My number one goal is to see that Barack Obama is not a two-term president.” That to me is outrageous. I would never do that. My number one goal is to fight to protect poor people, ethnic and religious minorities, working-class folks.” ~ Cory Booker
- “Once the working classes were in chains, now they’re in chain restaurants.” ~ Will Self
- “If there ever was a poet for the working class Billy Joe Shaver and Merle Haggard would be my nomination” ~ David Allan Coe
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“My working-class Italian-American parents didn’t go to school, there were no books in the house.” ~ Martin Scorsese
- “When the women’s movement began, it was a middle-class phenomenon. Certainly, black women had other stuff to think about in the ’60s besides a women’s movement. Working-class women were slow to get into it.” ~ Gail Collins
- “Lennon’s was one of the first voices I emulated when I began to sing. When we held tryouts in my pal’s dad’s living room for the singer in our band, I sang a Beatles song that Lennon sang. There is something about the timbre of his voice, something that it conveys, that still gets to me. The quality and the poetry of his lyrics. The wry sense of humor. And the boyishness, in the beginning. There are a great many things that touch me about him… Lennon was, to put it in his own words, a ‘working-class hero.'” ~ Don Henley
- “Usually based on an economic agenda, white working-class voters don’t buy into this whole biology-chemistry-abortion-gender agenda as much as they want more take-home pay. They want affordability.” ~ Kellyanne Conway
- “The people’s community must not be a mere phrase, but a revolutionary achievement following from the radical carrying out of the basic life needs of the working class. A ruthless battle against corruption! A war against exploitation, freedom for the workers! The elimination of all economic-capitalist influences on national policy…Maintaining a rotten economic system has nothing to do with nationalism, which is an affirmation of the Fatherland. I can love Germany and hate capitalism. Not only can I, I must.” ~ Joseph Goebbels
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“I feel that I helped the working class by just saying there are no barriers, which I consider to be true.” ~ Michael Caine
- “They talk about class warfare — the fact of the matter is there has been class warfare for the last thirty years. It’s a handful of billionaires taking on the entire middle-class and working-class of this country. And the result is you now have in America the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on Earth and the worst inequality in America since 1928. How could anybody defend the top 400 richest people in this country owning more wealth than the bottom half of America, 150 million people?” ~ Bernie Sanders
- “The economy has definitely been improving, and things like the stock market are doing better, but the economy has to be good for working-class and middle-class families who work every day, send their kids to a school like is in front of my house, and they have to be able to enjoy their lives. That’s why you don’t pass a trade agreement that ships even more jobs overseas.” ~ Russ Feingold
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“It’s very well known that the Republicans have problems with minorities. The Democrats have big problems with white people. Obama only got 39% of the vote. He only got 36% of the working-class white people.” ~ Bill Maher
- “The major problem of our time is the decay in the belief in personal immortality, and it cannot be dealt with while the average human being is either drudging like an ox or shivering in fear of the secret police… How right [the working classes] are to realize that the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time!” ~ George Orwell
- “To begin with, working-class people reacted against our openness about sex. They are frightened of nudity, they’re repressed in that way as well as others. Perhaps they thought ‘Paul [McCartney] is a good lad, he doesn’t make trouble’.” ~ John Lennon
