Top 161 Working-Class Quotes

Where I’m from is like ‘Hustle & Flow’ versus ‘8 Mile.’ It’s that really grimy, box-Chevy, dope-boy, working-class music.

For me, as someone growing up in a working-class suburb in Stockholm, I couldn’t afford all the music. So back in ’98, ’99, I was really thinking about how I could get all the music and do it in a legal way while at the same time compensating the artist.

I will stand with the working-class citizens over all else.

Annapolis’ is a very personal journey about this working-class kid trying to find out who he is, and every time he steps into the ring we get a sense of who he is as a person.

I think it’s very clear to be able to be a working-class mom of two and veteran and to be able to take on an entrenched, establishment, dark-money-backed Washington lackey, that I’m gonna have to be able to excite people and gain momentum and gain attention and get people excited and energized.

A lot of the city boys in London, a lot of the hedge-fund, young city workers at the height of the financial boom were a lot of working-class, brilliantly minded young fellows and women.

Focusing on the gifted always leaves people behind, and portrays working-class people as a repellent hinterland that ‘gifted’ and ‘talented’ children need rescuing from.

I’m a working-class person, working with class.

The current leadership of the Labor party react to the idea that working-class students might study the subjects they studied with the same horror that the Earl of Grantham showed when a chauffeur wanted to marry his daughter.

I actually like the sort of industrial, working-class woman like Rosie the Riveter, so I’m kind of like the sort of street style of the ’50s.

The romantic notion of the clubhouse as a traveling fraternity of working-class heroes – the boys of summer – is perhaps the most potent in all of baseball.

Working-class Americans have waited too long, close to a decade in fact, for an increase in the minimum wage. This has been the second longest period without a pay raise since the Federal minimum wage law was first enacted in 1938.

Trump tapped into a lot of middle-class and working-class disillusion with the political establishment and into economic worries and resentments that ballooned in the wake of the 2008 financial crash.

It’s hard for me to understand how working-class people support themselves.

The Democratic Party is supposed to be the party that looks out for the working-class citizens.

I believe that if we are going to create jobs in this country, then let’s create jobs that will absolutely put the working-class people at work to the point where they have one job. They don’t have to work three because they have to work Wendy’s, McDonald’s, and Walmart to survive.

Every household down my road in Peckham, south-east London, stunk of deep-fat frying and I’m sure every working-class home around the country was the same. How would you have done chips and Spam fritters without a deep-fat fryer?

I grew up with Jilly and Tamsin driving Volvos. But I wasn’t one of them… I always felt more comfortable with Cockney and working-class people. My heroes were the Beatles and people like Michael Caine.

The idea that working a blue-collar job and living in a working-class community provides barriers that are unique to your circumstances – that’s not a very controversial subject anymore. I think it’s something that people on both the Left and the Right probably accept.

I have a visceral response to a memory of working-class life.

My father was a black, working-class man who arrived here with no money in his pocket from Nigeria; my mum came from more of a middle-class background, whose father had prosecuted the Nazis at Nuremberg.

The northern part of Sweden is considered more isolated, not so sociable, not so educated, more unemployment, very working-class, and people drink more than rest of Sweden; that’s the kind of area I’m from.

I grew up poor with a very distinctive working-class accent. In England in the 1980s and 1990s this would have impeded my professional advancement. This background has never set me back in America.

I like working-class people, generally speaking.

I want people to realise we’re not just stuffy aristocrats and Old Etonians. There are black Tories and lots of middle and working-class people of different skin colour who are Conservatives.

I can’t talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement.

The Margaret Thatchers of this country made it through – like I did – because of the grammar school system, which gave the opportunity of a lifetime to working-class kids. It put them on a level playing field with the privately educated kids, and opened up the top universities to them.

My parents, Arthur and Olwen, were honest, working-class people who raised my brother Arthur, sister June, and me with the values of that era – patriotism, stoicism, honesty, concern for your neighbours, and judging a man by what he did rather than what he had.

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.

I grew up in a show-business family, but we were working-class show business. There was nothing glamorous about it. You had great things one day and the next day, nothing.

I can’t escape being born in Pike County, Kentucky, grandson of a miner, Luther Tibbs, and his wife, Earlene, and traveling as a child up and down Route 23 between Kentucky and Columbus, Ohio, where I was raised, experiencing life via working-class people. Nor do I want to escape.

I come from an Irish working-class background but went to a posh school, and any type of pretension was quickly mocked at home. I’ve always had a keen eye for pretension.

I meet people from really grand backgrounds who had horrible parents who took no interest in them, whereas I’m a working-class boy from Deptford who was worshipped by all my rellies. Everybody in my extended family helped to raise me, and I realise now how lucky I was to grow up among kind folk.

Working-class students more often lack the advice, guidance and support needed to navigate the tricky application process, whereas their wealthy peers at top public schools have admissions tutors to help their students game the system.

I was a weedy kid, not like one of those working-class men who can accommodate not being academically clever by physical strength and prowess.

There is the idea that there’s a section of society, these working-class tradesmen, are driving around and they all think the same. Everybody who has tools in their vehicle have all the exact same thoughts: it’s incredibly patronising isn’t it?

I come from a working-class background in Queens, New York.

Some accents people – internationally – can’t understand, also they come with baggage. London means a certain thing, Liverpool means a certain thing. Whereas with Welsh, he can be a middle-class man with working-class roots and still have an accent and it not be an issue.

When I write about working-class people, I do so in ways that reveal them at their absolute, magnificent worst.

We concentrate too much on ethnic diversity and not enough on class. It’s dead important to represent loads of different cultures. But what the BBC doesn’t do enough of is thinking about getting people from more working-class backgrounds.

I come from a working-class background, and I thought I had to be studying something that would get me a job.

Like my father, Trump also understands working-class Americans.

These were all middle-class kids from literary backgrounds, joining this sort of train going by, this pop train, jumping on. Whereas the rest of the rock scene, you’ll find that there’s mostly working-class people.

I like to think I won’t change as a person, even if I go on to win 20 world titles. I will still be just a working-class lad from the Potteries, the same daft old me.

It was a very normal working-class family. My dad used to play guitar in a band around pubs and clubs and stuff, so we’ve always been surrounded by music and we all love musicals. There was really no escape from it as a child. It just manifested itself in me and my brother in that we want to be actors.

Take care of your working-class citizens, and your working-class citizens will take care of you.

Too often, it is presumed that young people will only like art that they can immediately relate to. Working-class students may be steered towards popular culture like hip-hop, new media and film on the basis that they will find older art forms such as opera or ballet irrelevant.

My working-class Italian-American parents didn’t go to school, there were no books in the house.

Like any working-class boy growing up in north London, I wanted to be a footballer.

There is a lot more opportunity now, and I welcome all the conversations we are having about diversity, about women and about class… I come from a very working-class background, and I think the class thing is still probably more tricky.

But I’m grateful for everything I’ve got and I think that’s part of my working-class background.

The piano has disappeared from working-class family life, which is a shame. It’s associated with the middle classes now. Everyone in my family sang and played piano, but my parents were delighted and amazed when I became the first professional performer in the family – apart from a clog-dancer way back.

I am no longer a scientist as I stopped in 2000. Science was quite a testing place to be as a working-class woman.

We need candidates who are deeply rooted in their communities, working-class people who understand the struggles their neighbors face. That is the future of the Democratic Party.

I keep my house tidy, because then I can think clearly. I feel the same about myself. Presenting yourself well is a working-class thing – my dad was a printer, but he wore a tie most days. The ungroomed look belongs more to the middle classes.

I am a gay man who loves James Bond films and snooker – all kinds of working-class pursuits.

Undoubtedly there is a difference between people with money having access to the arts that people from working-class backgrounds don’t have, but that’s not their fault. I’m not taking anything away from these brilliant actors who are doing great stuff in Hollywood. A lot of them are my friends.

People have to recognise I’m a working-class lad. Forget what I’ve done and where I’ve been. I’m a working-class lad. I’ve come from nothing and I’ve not forgotten that.

It’s hard to get the downtrodden working-class wifey sometimes because ‘You don’t look like it’. Well, that’s weird because I grew up on a scheme in Paisley. But everyone’s got a viewpoint about what you should look like, and it’s tainted by prejudices and assumptions.

I grew up one of six children with working-class parents in the Deep South. My mother was a college librarian, and my father worked in a shipyard. I never saw them balance a checkbook, but they kept a roof over our heads and got all six of us into college.

I think how veterans are treated in our country is an abomination. We don’t have the draft any more, which is why so many soldiers come from working-class – rather than middle- or high-income families. Those wealthier families aren’t affected, so they’re not agitating for change.

I have a working-class approach to music.

History is a sly boots, and for a generation of blacks that cannot identify with the frustrations of Jim Crow, and for whites who cannot understand the hard deal that faces working-class blacks, it is difficult to reconcile Hughes’s reputation as a poet-hero with his topical verse and uncomplicated prose.

As a working-class girl, receiving free school dinners, I studied art history. Having never had the chance to visit art galleries, I devoured the knowledge, and it has served me well as a practising artist.

Working-class Americans want a clear champion, and there is nothing radical about moral clarity in 2018.

This led me to understand that trade unionism, the instrument of working-class liberation and of social change could, and indeed should, be also an instrument of industrial progress.

I don’t know anyone, from any class, who’s had a perfectly easy life. I’ve met people born into wealthy families who feel like they didn’t have much emotional support, and people who come from working-class families who had loads of love but no money.

All the working-class people could feel a Malcolm X. They could hear Malcolm X, and two weeks later they could whisper back what he said. Verbatim. They could remember the way he put it, and he put it so well.

Tax expenditures for middle- and working-class Americans – like the earned income tax credit – aren’t thought of as loopholes; they’re just thought of as benefits.

There’s this working-class guilt – you don’t want to be flashy.

I was brought up a working-class Tory. I believe, to be a true socialist, you have to be a capitalist first. In my heart, I’m a socialist; in my mind, I’m a capitalist.

I have that working-class show-business blood coursing through my veins.

I am a Democrat because I believe in what the Democratic Party is supposed to be: taking care of our working-class citizens.

People like me who grew up in a working-class town, who don’t have a college education, you don’t usually hear from us.

It’s like, sometimes I’ll watch a movie, and it’s got some big star in it playing a working-class person, and the character is in a grocery store, and you can kind of tell, from just watching the scene, that this actor doesn’t do their own shopping. So you have to have some sense of reality.

There are a lot of communities within the Asian Pacific Islander umbrella that are predominantly more working-class or lower class, and those stories haven’t been told yet, so my hope is that we see the gamut of perspectives.

I grew up in a house with a mother who was a teacher and a Freedom Rider – very left-wing Democrats living in a heterogeneous working-class neighborhood. I picked up a lot of those values there, and I brought them with me when I showed up in Hollywood.

My dad was part of that generation with Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay, of working-class actors breaking through. They’d never had an actor in the family.

When I first left drama school, I was too posh for the working-class parts and not posh enough for the upper-class roles. You know what England is like: the gradations of accent and how you’re judged by them are still there. I discovered that to get a break you have to lie about where you’re from.

Unlike the Tory millionaires, I live in the heart of the proud working-class community of the Bogside in Derry.

In ‘Love Story,’ Oliver Barrett IV comes from generations of wealth and privilege, but when he meets working-class Jennifer Cavilleri, he can’t resist. When they marry, his father disowns him, but they struggle on in love, until she’s diagnosed with cancer and they can’t afford the costly treatments.

As a kid, as a poor-ish, working-class kid, even visiting America seemed like an impossible dream. Every time I ever went anywhere in America, it always felt cinematic and dreamlike and like a movie from the ’70s or something.

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.

I grew up in Solihull, on the edge of what was then the Birmingham conurbation. It was a good place to write comedy from. I didn’t feel allegiance to anything. I didn’t have working-class pride or upper-class superiority.

I think English punk died in ’79 or ’80. Maybe ’82 at the latest. As far as American punk goes, it wasn’t the same as English punk. It wasn’t a working-class movement that was protesting the conditions under which this class had to work. I don’t think American punk ever died.

I’m a working-class guy.

I still consider myself a working-class girl and would send my kids to public school.

I come from a working-class family, and I’ve been working since I was 13, from babysitting to blueberry picking to factory work to bookstore work. And of course, being a mother and homemaker, the hardest work of all.

I come from a working-class family. They’re the people I know and the people I love, I guess. I do not write about them for political reasons, but because, as I see it, most interesting things – social, political, emotional – take place there. It’s a bottomless well for an author like me.

I came from a real working-class show business family.

I grew up in a very working-class area with a high crime rate and when I first started to break away from my social conditioning, I fell into a life of crime.

I come from a very working-class background.

I’m from a salt-of-the-earth, working-class, northern background. My dad’s a steelworker and a firefighter, and my mum is a secretary for the NHS.

I’ve never been aware of the difference between so-called posh actors and working-class actors.

I was only a working-class boy from a Nationalist ghetto. But it is repression that creates the revolutionary spirit of freedom.

I’m a working-class former apprentice electrician; at the age of 14, if you’d told me I would one day be standing on a stage with Mel Brooks, I’d have thought you were off your head. But these things can happen.

My parents came from working-class, small-peasant, farm-labourer backgrounds and had made the grade during the fascist years; my father came out of the army as a captain.

While my parents both worked full-time, we still grappled with the scourge of working-class poverty. But my entrepreneurial mother used her research skills to consult. And, along with my dad, she even ran a soul food restaurant for my great-aunt.

I came from a working-class family. My dad was in a union. I never forgot what it was like to be a private.

Children in working-class communities – like the one I grew up in – face higher rates of asthma and respiratory issues, which have a direct impact on their ability to learn.

I was brought up in a strong working-class community by working-class parents and relations until I was 18, and that’s what I really am. Now all sorts of things have been added, but that’s what I am.

Tax cuts that actually go to working-class, middle-class people, I’m not opposed to.

I always thought that socialism here would be peculiarly American, with some reasonable, post-industrial evolution between working-class needs and market forces. It won’t be bloody like the Russian Revolution.

In one sense, Obama’s point couldn’t be clearer: race is a distraction from class-based inequities. And if we dismiss working-class resentment as camouflaged racism, we will continue to be distracted by the spectre of race.

Democrats may want working-class white Rust Belters to have good jobs at high wages with pensions and health benefits, but they can’t make them vote that way.

I come from the working-class area of Stockholm, and I grew up with Serbian and Chilean people.

The establishment wants to connect with people who are like them, and I wasn’t. I’m a black gay man from a poor working-class family. Most of the people who look like me are in prison.

I come from a working-class background where I was much more likely to read socialist books and leaflets than Bronte or Dickens – neither of whom I’ve yet read.

With a few notable exceptions, literary fiction in the U.K. is dominated by an upper and upper middle-class clique who usually have a tin ear for the demotic and who portray working-class characters with, at best, a benevolent condescension.

As a working-class boy, golf was never really on my radar, and when I was growing up, Irish football was my sporting passion.

It should go without saying that there are as many working-class people who hold socially liberal views as there are public-school bigots.

Working-class actors have no identity. Our identity is playing every single poor person on ‘Game Of Thrones.’

Rock n’ roll was my art school. For many people from working-class backgrounds, rock wasn’t a chosen thing, it was the only thing: the only avenue of creativity available for them.

My parents’ parents were regular working-class people. I ended up speaking in a certain way, and one gets sidelined into doing certain parts. I think that is really quite narrow-minded.

My sympathies have always been for working-class people.

I grew up in the suburbs, a calm suburb, without tension, with working-class and middle-class people mixed together.

Much like the opportunities that factory work provided for working-class Americans in the last century, microwork will provide opportunities for marginalized people in this one. All they really need is basic literacy, a cheap computer, and an internet hookup.

I’m a progressive who knows how to talk to working-class people, and I know how to get elected in working-class districts. Because at the end of the day, the progressive agenda is what’s best for working families.

I think the reason working-class people don’t write books is because they are encouraged to believe that only certain people are permitted to write books.

During grade school, we moved to a white, working-class suburb in San Diego, and there were no Mexicans.

I reckoned my accent and class would count against me; I didn’t see actresses as being working-class.

What I say about ‘This Is England’ is they’re like my best friends back home. Normal, working-class, beautiful people who I’m creative with.

I’m from a working-class background – I had free school meals all my life and then spent six years in art school.

With upper- and middle-class lawns, there’s more hidden, whereas with working-class or poor lawns, there’s more out to see. It just sits right out there. Very honest. Like the people.

In the 1970s, girls didn’t do anything. It wasn’t their fault. For me and the other working-class girls I hung around with, our route was plotted – you were a secretary and a wife. I wanted to hitchhike around the world, go on motorbikes, be in bands.

As a boy, I was never interested in theater because I came from a working-class Scottish home. I thought, ‘I want to do movies.’ Then it was finding the means to do it.

Me, I’m a working-class man, and I go to my job, put in the work, and walk away clean and unscathed, and I like it that way.

In Britain, we need to start presenting the option of being a writer in front of black women. We need to present the idea of being a writer into poorer communities because the majority of black people in this country are working class. We need to let working-class people know that their voices are important.

Working-class and poor urban Americans are not benefiting economically from our current food system. It relies too much on transportation, chemical fertilization, big use of water, and also refrigeration.

I come from a very working-class background.

My childhood was as heavily gendered as any you would find in a working-class household in Lincolnshire.

I grew up in a working-class Israeli family, which was feminist only in its female-dominated structure.

I was a working-class kid in a middle-class environment. Fashion was my way of saying, ‘You can tap me for this and tap me for that, but you can’t deny I look good.’

Working-class, blue-collar guys who volunteered for Vietnam were ascribed certain political beliefs. It’s time that this was redressed. It had nothing to do with politics. Once these men got to Vietnam, it was a matter of survival.

I’m not running from the left; I’m running from the bottom. I’m running in fierce advocacy for working-class New Yorkers.

I come from a working-class family in Pittsburgh, whereas ‘Mike & Molly’ deals with the working class in Chicago. I swear a little, but I pretty much talk the same. It’s not like when you see someone like Tim Allen and he’s a lot bluer onstage.

There was a time in my life when I was going in and out of houses that were extraordinarily different – from a working-class terrace in Northampton to the homes of friends who were really very wealthy. It was quite an odd position to be in, I realise looking back, and quite a nice one.

It was important to focus on working-class women because we so rarely focus, particularly in period films, on the working people. The suffragettes brought together women of all classes, which was one of the striking things about the movement.

My childhood growing up in that part of Glasgow always sounds like some kind of sub-Catherine Cookson novel of earthy working-class immigrant life, which to some extent it was, but it wasn’t really as colourful that.

When the women’s movement began, it was a middle-class phenomenon. Certainly, black women had other stuff to think about in the ’60s besides a women’s movement. Working-class women were slow to get into it.

My mum grew up in Oldham and was going to work at a cigarette factory till she decided to go to drama school, so there’s part of me that wants to represent the Northern working-class background.

When I grew up, my house contained only two books: the Bible and the ‘Edmonds’ cookbook. We were a working-class household. Books were a poor second to the television, which was always on, usually with me in front of it.

Where I come from, everyone talks like me. It’s working-class Edinburgh.

People say I’ve ‘retained’ my Cockney accent. I can do any accent, but I wanted other working-class boys to know that they could become actors.

As a working-class actor, leaving school with no qualifications, being a printer and then becoming an actor and then working with people who to a certain extent had had a leg up. I never had that advantage. It’s less an artistic need to express myself and more a need to prove myself.

I’m a great candidate for why arts funding shouldn’t be cut, because I had no experience other than what was at school, I’m from a working-class town, there were no theaters, and the cinema closed when I was a kid. Anything that gave me a voice or a way to express myself I went running headlong toward.

My parents both came from working-class backgrounds, my father particularly. He came from a very poor family, 12 of them lived in a little three-bedroom terrace house in Fulham, it was very small with an outside loo and a tin bath on the scullery wall.

Mine was quite a working-class childhood with very little money, and my father was out of work a couple of times, which had quite a traumatic effect.

In the U.K., working-class lives are depicted with the characters’ humour, but in the U.S., people with difficulties are often depicted with pious or simply dreary lives.

I am born and raised in the Bronx. Where I grew up, it is a really working-class neighborhood and it does give you a really good work ethic.

Our admissions system should be a vehicle for justice, but it is failing working-class students, especially those who are the first in their family to go to university.

My dad grew up in a working-class Jewish neighbourhood, and I got a scholarship from my dad’s union to go to college. I went there to get an education, not as an extension of privilege.

I understand working-class culture, tribalism and the ethos of violence, so I make films about these things.

The North East is a tough, working-class area. Its people boast great humour. But for two days every year, when Newcastle and Sunderland play football, it’s absolute chaos. And very nasty. It borders on tribal hatred.

I spent the 1960s and 1970s seeking myself – the working-class tradition of self-education.

The working-class aspirations are worse now than when I was a kid – and it was pretty bad when I was a kid. Reality TV means they are being told they are no longer a working class, they’re an underclass. Young lassies want to be Jordan or Jade, but very few aspire to be the next Germaine Greer.

People fell in love with Alex Higgins, a working-class fellow from the back streets of Belfast. That’s what brought the game alive.

I was born and raised in a suburb of Paris by a working-class family.

For working-class families and small businesses… we have got to find ways to lower energy costs.

I grew up in a working-class neighborhood, so there was always a sense of struggle, but we had hope.

Working-class people don’t tend to be wooed by celebrity.