A Quote by E. M. Forster
One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such expense to themselves.
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Those who bequeath unto themselves a pompous funeral, are at just so much expense to inform the world of something that had much better be concealed; namely, that their vanity has survived themselves.
Why certain political classes want purposefully to keep Americans in a state of perpetual debt and uncertainty and why certain people don't want a middle class - because middle class creates a certain happiness. You know what I mean?
I think young children in the Western middle classes are objects of incredible anxiety.
Making information free is survivable so long as only limited numbers of people are disenfranchised. As much as it pains me to say so, we can survive if we only destroy the middle classes of musicians, journalists, and photographers. What is not survivable is the additional destruction of the middle classes in transportation, manufacturing, energy, office work, education, and health care. And all that destruction will come surely enough if the dominant idea of an information economy isn't improved.
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.
I need a world filled with wonder, with awe, with awful things. I couldn't exist in a world devoid of marvels, even if the marvels are terrible marvels. Even if they frighten me to consider them.
Why do they [Americans] quarrel, why do they hate Negroes, Indians, even Germans, why do they not have science and poetry commensurate with themselves, why are there so many frauds and so much nonsense? I cannot soon give a solution to these questions ... It was clear that in the United States there was a development not of the best, but of the middle and worst sides of European civilization; the notorious general voting, the tendency to politics... all the same as in Europe. A new dawn is not to be seen on this side of the ocean.
Christian Science has always appealed to the middle-classes and the upper middle classes. In part, this is because it requires a certain amount of education to study 'Science and Health' to the degree that Christian scientists do. It's not an easy book to read! It's 700 pages, and it's written in a nineteenth-century manner and diction.
The second reason why we haven't observed the growing gap is that our historical and social science analyses have concentrated on what has been happening within the 'middle classes' - that is, to that ten to fifteen percent of the population of the world-economy who consumed more surplus than they themselves produced. Within this sector there really has been a relatively dramatic flattening of the curve between the very top (less than one percent of the total population) and the truly 'middle' segments, or cadres (the rest of the ten to fifteen percent).
Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes.
I never understand why people have children and then insist on living as though nothing has shifted.
Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in 19th-century France and England, or 20th-century Russia and America.
You know, it's a truism that writers for children must still be children themselves, deep down, must still feel childish feelings, and a child's surprise at the world.
Middle-class white children, children of privilege, are afforded the opportunity to make a lot of mistakes and still go on to college, still dream big dreams. But for kids who are born in the ghetto in the era of mass incarceration, the system is designed in such a way that it traps them, often for life.
Why not, when it can be done without exposure or expense, let me rescue some of America's miserable children from vice and guilt?
Now we're asking ourselves why our children have no conscience, why they don't know right from wrong, and why it doesn't bother them to kill strangers, their classmates, and themselves.
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