Class Quotes

As with outlaw figures, in diverse musical and oral cultures throughout the world- Mexican corridos and Egyptian shaabi music, for example- Hip Hop's irreverence toward dominant values and noncompliance with the status quo creates alternative, counterhegemonic spaces.

~ H. Samy Alim

Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance, class.

~ Alice Munro

The true aristocracy and the true proletariat of the world are both in understanding with tragedy. To them it is the fundamental principle of God, and the key,—the minor key,—to existence. They differ in this way from the bourgeoisie of all classes, who deny tragedy, who will not tolerate it, and to whom the word of tragedy means in itself unpleasantness.

~ Isak Dinesen

When I got to college, the fake ID thing wasn't that important, since pretty much everyone could get away with drinking in New Orleans. But the drugs, well, that was a different story altogether, because drugs are every bit as illegal in New Orleans as anywhere else--at least, if you're black and poor, and have the misfortune of doing your drugs somewhere other than the dorms at Tulane University. But if you are lucky enough to be living at Tulane, which is a pretty white place, especially contrasted with the city where it's located, which is 65 percent black, then you are absolutely set.

~ Tim Wise

I always thought talent was everything, but maybe it was always money. Or even class. Or if not class exactly, connections.

~ Meg Wolitzer

She understood that it had never just been about talent: it had also always been about money. Ethan was brilliant at what he did, and he might well have made it even if Ash’s father hadn’t encouraged him, but it really helped that Ethan had grown up in a sophisticated city, and that he had married into a wealthy family. Ash was talented, but not all that talented. This was the thing that no one said, not once. But of course it was fortunate that Ash didn’t have to worry about money while trying to think about art. Her wealthy childhood had given her a head start, and now Ethan had picked up where her childhood had left off.

~ Meg Wolitzer

Whether life finds us guilty or not guilty, we ourselves know we are not innocent.

~ Sándor Márai

Being classy is my teenage rebellion.

~ Rebecca Mckinsey

Rich people don’t have to have a life-and-death relationship with the truth and its questions; they can ignore the truth and still thrive materially. I am not surprised many of them understand literature only as an ornament. Life is an ornament to them, relationships are ornaments, their 'work' is but a flimsy, pretty ornament meant to momentarily thrill and capture attention.

~ Sergio Troncoso

The cloth cap on my headdoesn't tellwhat's in it.

~ Nâzım Hikmet

With all due respect to all philistines, the dictatorship of the proletariat does just consist in giving a hiding to the classes that were previously supreme, before forcing them to recognize the new order and to submit to it.

~ Leon Trotsky

It is their duty to be infantile, even against their inclination.

~ Aldous Huxley

Since the same human mire remains beneath, does not all civilisation reduce itself to the superiority of smelling nice and living well?

~ Émile Zola

That’s the difference between them and us. ‘Them’ view foxes as vermin, and ‘us’ identify with the fox.

~ Luggs

We Pashtuns love shoes but don't love the cobbler; we love our scarves and blankets but do not respect the weaver. Manual workers made a great contribution to our society but received no recognition, and this is the reason so many of them joined the Taliban—to finally achieve status and power.

~ Malala Yousafzai

Their faces were clay-coloured and featureless, yet not stupid; they might have been shrewd turnips.

~ Rebecca West

England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.

~ George Orwell

All these faces look happy enough, say Shug. Big and beefy. Eyes clear and innocent, like they don't know them other crooks on the front page. But they the same folks, she say.

~ Alice Walker

The patience and forbearance of the poor are among the strongest bulwarks of the rich.

~ C.l.r. James

George Gey paid his way through a biology degree at the University of Pittsburgh by working as a carpenter and mason, and he could make nearly anything for cheap or free. During his second year in medical school, he rigged a microscope with a time-lapse motion picture camera to capture live cells on film. It was a Frankensteinish mishmash of microscope parts, glass, and 16-millimeter camera equipment from who knows where, plus metal scraps, and an old motor from Shapiro’s junkyard. He built it in a hole he’d blasted in the foundation of Hopkins, right below the morgue, its base entirely underground and surrounded by a thick wall of cork to keep it from jiggling when streetcars passed. At night, a Lithuanian lab assistant slept next to the camera on a cot, listening to its constant tick, making sure it stayed stable through the night, waking every hour to refocus it. With that camera, Gey and his mentor, Warren Lewis, filmed the growth of cells, a process so slow - like the growth of a flower - the naked eye couldn’t see it. They played the film at high speed so they could watch cell division on the screen in one smooth motion, like a story unfolding in a flip book.

~ Skloot

I don’t understand why Universities only offer undergraduate classes during the day when their professional staff should be smart enough to know that a large percentage of their students are non-traditional.

~ Heather Chapple

If there are to be rules, they must be articulable and defensible, like etiquette. I do not do anything simply because my family did it. I do things because they make sense, and because they are elegant.

~ Kathleen Rooney

Class never runs scared.It is sure-footed and confident.It can handle anything that comes along.Class has a sense of humor.It knows a good laugh is the best lubricant for oiling the machinery of human relations.Class never makes excuses.It takes its lumps and learns from past mistakes.Class knows that good manners are nothing more than a series of small, inconsequential sacrifices.Class bespeaks an aristocracy that has nothing to do with ancestors or money.Some wealthy “blue bloods” have no class, while individuals who are struggling to make ends meet are loaded with it.Class is real.It can’t be faked.Class never tried to build itself by tearing others down.Class is already up and need not strive to look better by making others look worse.Class can “walk with kings and keep it’s virtue and talk with crowds and keep the common touch.” Everyone is comfortable with the person who has class because that person is comfortable with himself.If you have class, you’ve got it made.If you don’t have class, no matter what else you have, it doesn’t make any difference.

~ Ann Landers

Most of the time, all the separates a class president and a gang leader is numbers: a zip code, a paycheck, or a drug dealer’s phone number.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

He was one of that class of men who, apart from a scientific career in which they may well have proved brilliantly successful, have acquired an entirely different kind of culture, literary or artistic, for which their professional specialisation has no use but by which their conversation profits.

~ Marcel Proust

In every country the intellectual class is the most influential class. This is the class which can foresee advice and lead. In no country does the mass of the people live the life for intelligent thought and action. It is largely imitative and follows the intellectual class. There is no exaggeration in saying that the entire destination of the country depends upon its intellectual class. If the intellectual class is honest and independent, it can be trusted to take the initiative and give a proper lead when a crisis arises. It is true that the intellect by itself is no virtue. It is only a means and the use of a means depends upon the ends which an intellectual person pursues. An intellectual man can be a good man but he may easily be a rogue. Similarly an intellectual class may be a band of high-souled persons, ready to help, ready to emancipate erring humanity or it may easily be a gang of crooks or a body of advocates of narrow clique from which it draws its support.

~ B.r. Ambedkar

Morgan Freeman is so class. He's so cool. He's so scary.

~ Jim Carrey

I thought of computers as very low class. I thought of myself as a pure mathematician and was interested in partial differential equations and topology and things like that.

~ Whitfield Diffie

The brainy class is made up of individuals who think for themselves and beyond formal education are continuous learners who tend to be self-taught.

~ Maximillian Degenerez

Remember, half the doctors in this country graduated in the bottom half of their class.

~ Al Mcguire

I'm not a fan of the working class being mocked, including by some of our famous writers - even those who came from it.

~ Melvyn Bragg

There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.

~ Alfred Austin

In acting class, I used to hide in the corner and pray the teacher wouldn't call on me.

~ Peggy Lipton

If I had not some strength of will I would make a first class drunkard.

~ Ernest Shackleton

I don't like being compared to anyone or being in a class with someone. I'm a teen actress and therefore I'm competing against Hilary Duff. We're different people like everyone else.

~ Amanda Bynes

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

~ Stephen Leacock

The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

~ Karl Marx

Each morning I do my ballet class for one hour; after that, it means one hour less to get ready.

~ Carine Roitfeld

Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

~ George Bernard Shaw

To the first class belong the Gospels and Acts; to the second, the Epistles; to the third, the Revelation.

~ Philip Schaff