Class Distinction Quotes:

We must pick out what is good for us where we can find it.

- Pablo Picasso

source: Elizabeth Cowling, Pablo Picasso (2002). “Picasso: style and meaning”, Phaidon Press

topic: Class Distinction, Picks

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, . . . neither persons nor property will be safe.

- Frederick Douglass

source: Speech on the twenty-fourth anniversary of emancipation in the District of Columbia,Washington, D.C., Apr. 1886

topic: Justice, Safe, Poverty, Justice And Mercy, Justice Denied

The distinctions separating the social classes are false; in the last analysis they rest on force.

- Albert Einstein

source: Albert Einstein (2013). “Einstein on Politics: His Private Thoughts and Public Stands on Nationalism, Zionism, War, Peace, and the Bomb”, p.228, Princeton University Press

topic: Class, Justice, Diversity, Sticks And Stones, Class Distinction

Of all the hokum with which this country [America] is riddled, the most odd is the common notion that it is free of class distinctions.

- W. Somerset Maugham

source: W. Somerset Maugham (2011). “A Writer's Notebook”, p.232, Random House

topic: Country, Class, America, Class Distinction

The class distinctions simply result from the different degrees of success with which men have availed themselves of the chances which were presented to them. Instead of endeavoring to redistribute the acquisitions which have been made between the existing classes, our aim should be to increase, multiply, and extend the chances.

- William Graham Sumner

source: William Graham Sumner (1903). “What Social Classes Owe to Each Other”, p.144, Ludwig von Mises Institute

topic: Men, Class, Degrees, Class Distinction

Genocide begins, however improbably, in the conviction that classes of biological distinction indisputably sanction social and political discrimination.

- Andrea Dworkin

topic: Class, Political, Discrimination, Class Distinction, Anti Discrimination

No power on earth, however, can abolish the merciless class distinction between those who are physically desirable and the lonely, pallid, spotted, silent, unfancied majority.

- John Mortimer

topic: Beauty, Lonely, Class, Class Distinction

We must not discriminate between things. Where things are concerned there are no class distinctions. We must pick out what is good for us where we can find it.

- Pablo Picasso

source: Elizabeth Cowling, Pablo Picasso (2002). “Picasso: style and meaning”, Phaidon Press

topic: Artist, Class, Distinction, Class Distinction

Just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself, so the end goal of feminist revolution must be, ... not just the elimination of the male privilege, but of the sex distinction itself; genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally.

- Shulamith Firestone

source: SHULAMITH FIRESTONE (1970). “THE DIALECTIC OF SEX: THE CASE FOR FEMINIST REVOLUTION”

topic: Sex, Class, Differences, Male Privilege, Class Distinction

Bravely you jog along with the rope of class distinction drawing closer, close, tighter, tighter around you... I see it and know it, but I cannot help you... I am only an unnecessary, little, bush commoner, I am only a - woman.

- Miles Franklin

source: Miles Franklin (2009). “My Brilliant Career”, p.463, The Floating Press

topic: Women, Class, Drawing, Class Distinction, Commoners

There are things in American culture that want to wipe the class distinction. Blue jeans. Ready-made clothes. Coca-Cola.

- Leslie Fiedler

topic: Jeans, Class, Clothes, Blue Jeans, Coca Cola

There's a particular hierarchy in the prison - class distinctions, high-school cliques. You have to learn how to navigate.

- Laura Prepon

source: Source: www.esquire.com

topic: School, Class, Hierarchy, Navigate, Class Distinction

Art is a spiritual function of man, which aims at freeing him from life's chaos. Art is free in the use of its means in any way it likes, but is bound to its laws and to its laws alone. The minute it becomes art, it becomes much more sublime than a class distinction between proletariat and bourgeoisie.

- Kurt Schwitters

source: "Manifesto Proletkult" by Theo van Doesburg, 1923.

topic: Spiritual, Art, Mean, Class Distinction, Proletariat

I think my movie addresses the struggles of communities facing class distinctions, which are timeless. The questions of how we live together and what we do for money are really the stuff of drama.

- Ira Sachs

source: Source: www.avclub.com

topic: Class Distinction

James Baldwin is one of the greatest, North American writers of the second half of the Twentieth Century. A prolific writer and a brilliant social critic, he foreshadowed the destructive trends happening now in the whole Western world and beyond, while always maintaining a sense of humanistic hope and dignity. He explored palpable, yet unspoken, intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies and the inevitable, if unnameable, tensions with personal identity, assumptions, uncertainties, yearning, and questing.

- Raoul Peck

topic: Class, Identity, World, Western Society, American Writer

In Blue Crush , we meet three Hawaiian surfers who work as hotel maids, live in a grotty rental, and are raising the kid sister of one of them. Despite this near-poverty, they look great; there is nothing like a tan and a bikini to overcome class distinctions.

- Roger Ebert

source: Roger Ebert (2004). “Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2005”, p.76, Andrews McMeel Publishing

topic: Crush, Kids, Blue, Hawaiians, Class Distinction

The '80s to me, more than anything else, represents a time of real criminal activity in the office of the president: an incredibly disparate economy in terms of the class distinctions and whatnot, and a tremendous shallowness - a lot of sort of bank robbery by executives.

- Martha Plimpton

topic: Real, Class, Office, Class Distinction, Bank Robbery

As the only class distinction available in a democracy, the college degree has created a caste society as rigid as ancient India's. Condemning elitism and simultaneously quaking in fear that our children won't become members of the elite, we send them to college, not to learn, but to "be" college graduates, rationalizing our snobbery with the cliché that high technology has eliminated the need for the manual labor that we secretly hold in contempt.

- Florence King

topic: Education, Children, College, Manual Labor, Snobbery

I want to get totally rid of class distinction. As someone put it one of the papers this morning: Marks and Spencer have triumphed over Karl Marx and Engels.

- Margaret Thatcher

topic: Morning, Class, Paper, Class Distinction, Engels

Transcending class distinctions, the speaker [Stalin] portrays the relation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as a mere division of labor. The workers and soldiers achieve the revolution, Guchkov and Miliukov "fortify" it.[...] This superintendent's approach to the historical process is exactly characteristic of the leaders of Menshevism, this handing out of instructions to various classes and then patronizingly criticizing their fulfillment.

- Leon Trotsky

topic: Class, Leader, Soldier, Superintendents, Class Distinction

Criminals are never very amusing. It's because they're failures. Those who make real money aren't counted as criminals. This is a class distinction, not an ethical problem.

- Orson Welles

topic: Money, Real, Class, Class Distinction

The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.

- W. H. Auden

topic: Birthday, Time, Money, Class Distinction