A Quote by J. G. Ballard

My upbringing was so middle-class and repressed. It wasn't until I was placed in Lunghua that I met anyone from any other social strata. When I did, I found them colossally vital.

J. G. Ballard

Quote Topics

Any Anyone Class Did Found Met Middle Other Placed Repressed Social Strata Them Until Upbringing Vital

Quote Author

J. G. Ballard
British - Novelist
November 15, 1930 - April 19, 2009

Because [Donald Trump] so clearly - through his words and actions and the type of people that turn up at his rallies - represents people who are not the middle, not the upper middle educated class, there is a fear of seeming to be associated in any way with them, a social fear that lowers the class status of anyone who can be accused of somehow assisting Trump in any way, including any criticism of Hillary Clinton.

Julian Assange

The State did not originate in any form of social agreement, or with any disinterested view of promoting order and justice. Far otherwise. The State originated in conquest and confiscation, as a device for maintaining the stratification of society permanently into two classes-an owning and exploiting class, relatively small, and a propertyless dependent class. . . . No State known to history originated in any other manner, or for any other purpose than to enable the continuous economic exploitation of one class by another.

Albert J. Nock

There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.

Judith Martin

I was not from a middle-class family at all. I did not have middle-class possessions and what have you. But I had middle-class parents who gave me what was needed to survive in society.

Sugar Ray Leonard

'WASP' is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata, so it's inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not.

Christopher Hitchens

The Canadian middle class is under less pressure than any other middle class in any developed country on the planet. So they feel good. They feel optimistic. They feel secure.

David Frum

My upbringing was middle-class but my parents' families were both working-class so I had this odd combination of working-class background but in a privileged position.

Denise Mina

I read comics and I did science, and never really put them together until I accidentally found myself in the middle of one.

Randall Munroe

Americans ... do not naturally apply the term "bourgeois" to themselves, or to anyone else for that matter. They do like to call themselves middle class, but that does not carry with it any determinate spiritual content. ... The term "middle class" does not have any of the many opposites that bourgeois has, such as aristocrat, saint, hero, or artist - all good.

Allan Bloom

One thing I love about America is that I'm not boxed in by my upbringing here. England is still so class-based that there are certain roles that I just won't go for. I'm a middle-class boy and I won't go for the scruffy working-class role, which is frustrating, and here I can play anything.

Tom Payne

When I met scientists, I found them to be as various as any other group of people.

Harrison Ford

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

Glenn Reynolds

It's so easy for anyone to deal with their own guilt of being a middle-class white music fan by pointing to other people who they perceive to be richer than them, whiter than them.

Ezra Koenig

in our culture, the professional, and largely white, middle class is taken as a social norm - a bland and neutral mainstream - from which every other group or class is ultimately a kind of deviation.

Barbara Ehrenreich

The middle class, in any society, plays the role of graphite rods in nuclear reactors: they slow down the reaction and, if it weren't for them, the reactor would explode. A society without a middle class is a society primed for explosion.