{"quotes":[{"text":"But these are sad times, the 'prentices wanting to be masters, and every little tradesman wanting to be a Senator, and every dirty little urchin thinking he can giveimpudence to his betters!","author":"Hope Mirrlees","tags":["fantasy","hope-mirrlees","involution","lud-in-the-mist","oliviu-craznic","postmodernism","selected","social-class","social-injustice"],"id":2334,"author_id":"Hope+Mirrlees"},{"text":"Life curses some poor people with the love of luxury, while it blesses some with the very same thing.","author":"Mokokoma Mokhonoana","tags":["aphorism","aphorisms","bless","blessing","blessings","business","businesses","businessman","businessmen","businesspeople","businessperson","businesspersons","businesswoman","businesswomen","class","classes","curse","cursed","end-poverty","entrepreneur","entrepreneurs","entrepreneurship","god","half-empty","half-full","humor","humour","hustle","hustle-and-bustle","hustler","hustlers","hustling","life","love","luxurious","luxury","optimism","perspective","pessimism","poor","poverty","quotation","quotations","quote","quotes","rich","riches","satire","social-class","social-classes","wealth","wealthy"],"id":21935,"author_id":"Mokokoma+Mokhonoana"},{"text":"I'll put it on my table where I keep my drawings,' Hassan said.His saying that made me kind of sad. Sad for who Hassan was, where he lived. For how he'd accepted the fact that he'd grow old in that mud shack in the yard, the way his father had.","author":"Khaled Hosseini","tags":["empathy","friendship","innocence","social-class","social-ladder"],"id":99051,"author_id":"Khaled+Hosseini"},{"text":"The poor, I am told, are kind to each other but that is because they have nothing to lose,' he said. 'The rich cannot afford to be.","author":"M.R.C. Kasasian","tags":["poverty","social-class","wealth"],"id":100970,"author_id":"M.R.C.+Kasasian"},{"text":"The train bore me away, through the monstrous scenery of slag-heaps, chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud criss-crossed by the prints of clogs. This was March, but the weather had been horribly cold and everywhere there were mounds of blackened snow. As we moved slowly through the outskirts of the town we passed row after row of little grey slum houses running at right angles to the embankment. At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked. I had time to see everything about her—her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever-seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that ‘It isn’t the same for them as it would be for us,’ and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her—understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe.","author":"George Orwell","tags":["1930s","despair","england","hopelessness","plumbing","poverty","slums","social-class","trains"],"id":118030,"author_id":"George+Orwell"},{"text":"In effect, nobody who is not from the losing classes has ever been thrust into a death cell in these United States.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["1998","capital-punishment","capital-punishment-in-the-us","social-class","united-states"],"id":126601,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"The streets are a poor kid’s PlayStation™.","author":"Mokokoma Mokhonoana","tags":["game","play","playstation","poor","rich","social-class","streets","toys"],"id":129651,"author_id":"Mokokoma+Mokhonoana"},{"text":"Morals are like social classes, there are poor and rich people.","author":"Eyden I.","tags":["morals","poor-people","rich-people","social-class"],"id":138760,"author_id":"Eyden+I."},{"text":"Now, I have always wanted to agree with Lady Bracknell that there is no earthly use for the upper and lower classes unless they set each other a good example. But I shouldn't pretend that the consensus itself was any of my concern. It was absurd and slightly despicable, in the first decade of Thatcher and Reagan, to hear former and actual radicals intone piously against 'the politics of confrontation.' I suppose that, if this collection has a point, it is the desire of one individual to see the idea of confrontation kept alive.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["confrontation","england","margaret-thatcher","oscar-wilde","political-radicalism","politics","ronald-reagan","social-class","social-structure-of-the-uk","the-importance-of-being-earnest","united-kingdom","united-states"],"id":161662,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"Religions and states and classes and tribes and nations do not have to work or argue for their adherents and subjects. They more or less inherit them. Against this unearned patrimony there have always been speakers and writers who embody Einstein's injunction to 'remember your humanity and forget the rest.' It would be immodest to claim membership in this fraternity/sorority, but I hope not to have done anything to outrage it. Despite the idiotic sneer that such principles are 'fashionable,' it is always the ideas of secularism, libertarianism, internationalism, and solidarity that stand in need of reaffirmation.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["albert-einstein","atheism","internationalism","libertarianism","politics","religion","secularism","social-class"],"id":170311,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":21,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}