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.