Famous quotes containing the words middle class, middle, class and/or speakers:
“The pursuit of Fashion is the attempt of the middle class to co-opt tragedy. In adopting the clothing, speech, and personal habits of those in straitened, dangerous, or pitiful circumstances, the middle class seeks to have what it feels to be the exigent and nonequivocal experiences had by those it emulates.”
—David Mamet (b. 1947)
“You can always tell a Midwestern couple in Europe because they will be standing in the middle of a busy intersection looking at a wind-blown map and arguing over which way is west. European cities, with their wandering streets and undisciplined alleys, drive Midwesterners practically insane.”
—Bill Bryson (b. 1951)
“The enemy are no match for us in a fair fight.... The young men ... of the upper class are kind-hearted, good-natured fellows, who are unfit as possible for the business they are in. They have courage but no endurance, enterprise, or energy. The lower class are cowardly, cunning, and lazy. The height of their ambition is to shoot a Yankee from some place of safety.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“What’s this, Aurora Leigh,
You write so of the poets and not laugh?
Those virtuous liars, dreamers after dark,
Exaggerators of the sun and moon,
And soothsayers in a tea-cup? I write so
Of the only truth-tellers, now left to God,—
The only speakers of essential truth,
Opposed to relative, comparative,
And temporal truths;...
The only teachers who instruct mankind,
From just a shadow on a charnel-wall.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)