A Quote by Simon Raven

I wanted to look at the upper-middle-class scene since the war, and in particular my generation's part in it. We had spent our early years as privileged members of a privileged class. How were we faring in the Age of the Common Man? How ought we to be faring?

Simon Raven

Quote Topics

Age Class Common Common Man Early Early Years Generation Had How Look Man Members Middle My Generation Ought Our Part Particular Privileged Scene Since Spent Upper Wanted War Were Years

Quote Author

Simon Raven
English - Writer
December 28, 1927 - May 12, 2001

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

The upper class desire to remain so, the middle class wish to overthrow the upper class, and the lower class want a classless system.

George Orwell

I think the working-class part of me comes out. Sometimes the people who have the loudest mouths are upper-class, upper-middle-class. The quietest are often working-class people, people who are broke. There is a fear of losing whatever it is that you have. I come from that background.

Billie Joe Armstrong

I think there's a tendency in England, when you look at the past, to either have upper middle class period drama with its own rules, or if you're going to look at working class people, you have to do that in a particular 'Isn't it a shame, aren't they oppressed' way, or it's treated comically.

Steven Knight

Look, there is a sort of old view about class which is a very simplistic view that we have got the working class, the middle class and the upper class, I think it is more complicated than that.

Ed Miliband

I think 'The Wood' was probably more concerned with the parts of Inglewood that aren't usually seen on film - the areas that were middle-class, or upper-middle-class - and that idea that these worlds do exist, and should be accepted as part of Inglewood itself.

Rick Famuyiwa

Mr. Cosby wanted to do a show not about an upper-middle-class black family, but an upper-middle-class family that happened to be black. Though it sounds like semantics, they're very different approaches.

Malcolm-Jamal Warner

Inequality has the natural and necessary effect, under the present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.

Matthew Arnold

It's strange because we think of the upper middle class, for example, as being secular, that they've fallen away from religion. Well, it turns out that the upper middle class goes to church more often and feels a much stronger affiliation with their religion than the white working class.

Charles Murray

If you were a successful upper-middle-class Negro girl in the 1950s and '60s, you were, in practice and imagination, a white Protestant upper middle-class girl. Young, good-looking white women were the most desirable creatures in the world. It was hard not to want to imitate them; it was highly toxic, too, as we would learn.

Margo Jefferson

It is as if, to every period of history, there corresponded a privileged age and a particular division of human life: "youth" is the privileged age of the seventeenth century, childhood of the nineteenth, adolescence of the twentieth.

Philippe Aries

Almost all the fathers of socialism were members of the upper middle class or of the professions.

Ludwig von Mises

I grew up in a working class neighborhood in Sweden, which, during my teens, gentrified and is now completely middle class and even upper middle class.

Joel Kinnaman

My parents were decent, aspirant first-generation middle class. They read 'Reader's Digest', listened to classical music; my grandparents had a bust of Stalin on the mantelpiece. The kids of that generation were terrified of being below par, class-wise.