Working Class Quotes

“She hated her job the same way I hated my jobs because she knew she was worth more, but she also hated herself so there wasn't much point in trying to do better.”
― Tawni O'Dell, Back Roads

“I didn't want to be in the teeming mass of the working class.... I didn't want to live and die in the same place with only a week at the seaside in between. I dreamed of escape -- but what is terrible about industrialisation is that it makes escape necessary. In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community -- to society?”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“This business of petty inconvenience and indignity, of being kept waiting about, of having to do everything at other people’s convenience, is inherent in working-class life. A thousand influences constantly press a working man down into a passive role. He does not act, he is acted upon. He feels himself the slave of mysterious authority and has a firm conviction that ‘they’ will never allow him to do this, that, and the other. Once when I was hop-picking I asked the sweated pickers (they earn something under sixpence an hour) why they did not form a union. I was told immediately that ‘they’ would never allow it. Who were ‘they’? I asked. Nobody seemed to know, but evidently ‘they’ were omnipotent.”
― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

“--You're rather well read for a working-class girl, she said with her back to me.
--Really? I've found that all my well-read friends are from the working class.
--Oh my. Why do you think that is? The purity of poverty?
--No. It's just that reading is the cheapest form of entertainment.
--Sex is the cheapest form of entertainment.
--Not in this house.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“Well, it's a good life and a good world, all said and done, if you don't weaken.”
― Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

“I'm not working-class: I come from the criminal classes.”
― Peter O'Toole

“The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.”
― Núria Añó

“Face it: You're always just a breath away from a job in telemarketing.”
― Douglas Coupland, Microserfs

“As to the 'Left' I'll say briefly why this was the finish for me. Here is American society, attacked under open skies in broad daylight by the most reactionary and vicious force in the contemporary world, a force which treats Afghans and Algerians and Egyptians far worse than it has yet been able to treat us. The vaunted CIA and FBI are asleep, at best. The working-class heroes move, without orders and at risk to their lives, to fill the moral and political vacuum. The moral idiots, meanwhile, like Falwell and Robertson and Rabbi Lapin, announce that this clerical aggression is a punishment for our secularism. And the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, hitherto considered allies on our 'national security' calculus, prove to be the most friendly to the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Here was a time for the Left to demand a top-to-bottom house-cleaning of the state and of our covert alliances, a full inquiry into the origins of the defeat, and a resolute declaration in favor of a fight to the end for secular and humanist values: a fight which would make friends of the democratic and secular forces in the Muslim world. And instead, the near-majority of 'Left' intellectuals started sounding like Falwell, and bleating that the main problem was Bush's legitimacy. So I don't even muster a hollow laugh when this pathetic faction says that I, and not they, are in bed with the forces of reaction.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left

“Only from a capitalist viewpoint being productive is a moral virtue, if not a moral imperative. From the viewpoint of the working class, being productive simply means being exploited.”
― Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle

“Let these men sing out their songs,
they've been walking all day long,
all their fortune's spent and gone...
silver dollar in the subway station;
quarters for the papers for the jobs.”
― Roman Payne

“People are born on this planet with no choice at all
And have to spend most of their life working to pay it off.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“To all you who believe we shouldn't have a minimum wage -- that the minimum amount you can be paid should be determined solely by your employer. We tried it once before: it was called SLAVERY.”
― Quentin R. Bufogle

“All together, these powers and abilities combine to face an enemy that depends on you believing that it cannot be defeated. But we know that it can. Every person in this crowd is dedicated to stories about overcoming impossible odds and telling people that, in the depths of despair, there is always hope. And no matter what you are facing, when you face it together, you are unstoppable.”
― Brennan Lee Mulligan

“Embrace dysfunction" this one helps in the workplace!”
― Rick Hein

“The occupants of the other three looked like the people they had seen rioting in the streets of Paris that morning. They were citizens of the other France, the France one didn’t read about in guidebooks. They were the put-upon and the left-behind, the ones without glittering degrees from elite institutions of learning. Globalization and automation had eroded their value in the workforce. The service economy was their only option. Their counterparts in Britain and America had already had their say at the ballot box. France, reckoned Gabriel, would be next.”
― Daniel Silva, The New Girl

“Und doch ist jeder Beruf auf seine Art notwendig und ehrenvoll. Aber nur diejenigen, die keinen Beruf auszuüben brauchen, die sich ihr Geld nicht durch Arbeit verdienen müssen, sondern von ihrem Vermögen leben können, die auf dem Land ein geregeltes Leben führen, sich ihre zeit nach ihrem Belieben einteilen und sich ihren persönlichen Beschäftigungen hingeben können, nur diejenigen, sage ich, haben das Glück, sich ihre Gesundheit und ihr gutes Aussehen auch noch dann erhalten zu können, wenn sie nicht mehr ganz jung sind. Alle anderen büßen bald etwas von ihrer Schönheit ein.”
― Jane Austen, Die Liebe der Anne Elliot - Das Buch zu der Netflix Verfilmung "Überredung"!

“Don’t bite the hand that feeds you, as the saying went. Unless it’s also holding the key to your cage. That might actually be worth it.”
― Cliff Jones Jr., Dreck

“Laila could picture the flow of traffic all around her. From above, she watched the cars move along in streams like all those ants on her kitchen floor. What had they been looking for anyway? A crumb here, a speck of sugar there? The vast stockpiles of food in the pantry and fridge remained untouched. For that matter, what kept all these cars returning to the city day after day? A little money, a little entertainment? Surface operations like Livetrac kept the ants fighting over crumbs while the obscene fortunes of a shadowy elite were counted not in dollars but in lives.”
― Cliff Jones Jr., Dreck

“A Moment of Joy"
The ruling global elites
are holding their breath in anticipation of
who may be the first to start a nuclear war!
The wealthy and the stock market traders
are fearfully watching the fluctuation in the stock prices…
Writers, media pundits, and academics
on the payroll of power and authority
are worried about a potential revolution
that may put an end to the powers in place,
and consequently to their existence!
Doctors, engineers, and other professionals
are all alarmed and watching the job market
in fear of losing their cushy jobs!
Only the waitress at the nearby restaurant
is experiencing a moment of joy
for the generous tip she just received
from the last customer tonight!

[Original poem published in Arabic on October 30,2023 at ahewar.org]”
― Louis Yako

“When making the case for liberal education to low-income students and families, I often point out that there is a long tradition of steering working-class students toward an education in servitude, an education in obedience and docility, an education in not asking questions. The idea that liberal education is only for the already privileged, for the pampered elite, is a way of carrying on this odious tradition. It is a way of putting liberal education out of the reach of the people who would most benefit from it—precisely the people who have historically been denied the tools of political agency. I ask them to take a look at who sends their children to liberal arts colleges and at what liberal arts college graduates go on to do with their “useless” education.”
― Roosevelt Montás, Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation

“What the poor as well as the rich require is not to be indoctrinated, is not to be taught other people’s opinions, but to be induced and enabled to think for themselves. It is not physical science that will do this, even if they could learn it much more thoroughly than they are able to do. After reading, writing, and arithmetic (the last a most important discipline in habits of accuracy and precision, in which they are extremely deficient), the desirable thing for them seems to be the most miscellaneous information, and the most varied exercise of their faculties. They cannot read too much. Quantity is of more importance than quality, especially all reading which relates to human life and the ways of mankind; geography, voyages and travels, manners and customs, and romances, which must tend to awaken their imagination and give them some of the meaning of self-devotion and heroism, in short, to unbrutalise them.”
― John Stuart Mill, The Letters of John Stuart Mill, Vol 1

“A class that had never before existed in Russia, a working class, was suddenly created. While thousands of jobs were created, the necessary laws—limits on the workday, standard wage scales, child-labor laws, and safe conditions—did not exist. This resulted in worker unrest, and revolt quickly followed.”
― Greg King, The Last Empress: The Life and Times of Alexandra Feodorovna, Tsarina of Russia

“When I was a teenager I started to think about how dedicated Dad was to the struggle for working-class rights. He had devoted his life to the Labour cause fighting inequality and that’s fucking great. I was proud of him. But what about women? He was out fighting the cause, and my mother was at home running the house. Where do women stand in the revolution? I’d seen Paine’s Rights of Man on his bookshelf. I wondered to myself, what about the rights of women?”
― Bobby Gillespie, Tenement Kid

“Critical Criticism creates nothing, the worker creates everything”
― Karl Marx, The Holy Family

“Every class which struggles for its enfranchisement seeks to realize a social ideal, in complete opposition with that of the ruling class.”
― Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy

“You’ve always been the underdog, the underclass, the underestimated, but to me, you were always gonna win.”
― Dr Jessica Taylor

“School, and it's shite attitudes towards whatever or whoever I was, was the source of my frustration. They shunted my classes a little as I found myself falling headfirst into the comprehensive school abyss, Joining the educational subnormal in staring at walls for hours on end whilst being babysat whatever lesson I had been removed from. Black and Asian capitalise that undo that people went from being my neighbours and classmates to parasitical leeches I could barely bring myself to acknowledge joining the educational subnormal in staring at walls for hours on end whilst being babysat through whatever lesson I had been removed from. Black and Asian people went from being my neighbours and classmates to parasitical leeches I could barely bring myself to acknowledge. they were not worth my time. I was beginning to understand what the stickers and I newspapers had meant. I was beginning to understand that deep sense of frustration that these people were sealing my history and by birthright. Why couldn't they just fuck off where they truly belong? And their 'protectors', the teachers and civil servants with their bleeding Hearts and cheap, shit, French cars were little more than university-educated scum from the middle classes sent to suppress my freedom.”
― Matthew Collins, HATE: My Life In The British Far Right

“The people of the East End have a marvellous tradition of fighting facism, but facism still always manifests itself in the East End because poverty exists at its heart.”
― Matthew Collins, HATE: My Life In The British Far Right

“We wanted a body race war, we felt it was inevitable and we would have to be the ones controllling the streets when it happened. We weren't the kind of blokes who could cry on each other's shoulders over loves gone-astray or bitter person dissatisfactions. All of these friendships were built solely on our hatred and distrust of others. The class system, or what little I knew of it, was quite obviously separate to race. There were two ways of looking at it: downtrodden and ignored because we were either white or because we were also working class.”
― Matthew Collins, HATE: My Life In The British Far Right