Top 161 Working-Class Quotes

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

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

I grew up in a working-class area, and I stood out – for my voice, my appearance, I did dance and things like that. But I always had faith in my charm.

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

I support progressive revenue sources that ease the burden on low-income and working-class individuals and families who are least able to shoulder the burden of regressive taxes and fees.

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

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.

While our corporatists burn incense at the shrine of the global economy, Trump went to visit the working-class casualties. And those forgotten Americans in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin responded.

I was brought up and raised in Britain as a Labour man, and that quickly changed. And I find there are more working-class people in the Conservative Party than the Labour party.

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.

I’m really good at turning off lights, it’s a working-class thing.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

It’s easy to be famous today. People pay a million dollars to be recognized, but nobody cares about them. They cared about me because I did things other men were afraid to do. That’s why my fans identified with me. They were mostly working-class.

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 came from a hard, working-class world which, since my mother‘s death, had been dominated by men. I hadn’t been encouraged to talk about the burden of grief, and because I was severely underdeveloped when it came to sharing my emotions, I mustn’t have been the most communicative husband.

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

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.

I have a lot of rage about things that didn’t happen to me, tied up with watching an immigrant, working-class father struggle to make his way through the world – and seeing how society was modeled to keep him in his place.

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

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

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.

My upbringing was very basic working-class on the outskirts of Nottingham. My mother, Glenis, was a nursery nurse, looking after special-needs children, and my father, Brian, became the manager of a lace factory after working his way up as an apprentice.

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.

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

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.

The American cinema in general always made stories about working-class people; the British rarely did. Any person with my working-class background would be a villain or a comic cipher, usually badly played, and with a rotten accent. There weren’t a lot of guys in England for me to look up to.

I come from a working-class background and it wasn’t in my world to be a writer – I had no direct access to those kind of jobs. But I sensed I wanted to do something like that.

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 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.

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.

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’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.

I’m a working-class guy.

I know a lot of people in the music business who came from working-class backgrounds and they vote Tory.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

If someone is very upper-class, you have a stereotype of him which is probably true. If someone has a working-class accent, you have no idea who you’re talking to.

I come from a coal-mining, working-class background. My father was a coal miner.

I think the country will get behind someone who comes from a working-class background, who truly epitomizes the American Dream.

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.

I was working – just a regular working-class guy – but, at the same time, always aspired to do music.

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.

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.

From the year of his birth in 1914 until the outbreak of war in 1941, my father lived in a mostly white, mostly working-class, mostly Irish Catholic neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York.

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.

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.

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?

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’m from a working-class background, and I’ve experienced that worry of not having a job next week because the unions are going on strike. I know that because I don’t come from a wealthy background.

I think Ant and I were ambitious because of where we come from. Both of us are from working-class families on council estates in Newcastle.

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

Growing up we were very working-class; you had dinner at 12, then tea at 4:30. If you got supper, you were doing bloody well.

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.

In America, the policeman is a working-class hero. In England, the policeman is a working-class traitor.

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.

It’s a very working-class thing, to get where you want and then not feel worthy.

I’m from a working-class background, and I’ve experienced that worry of not having a job next week because the unions are going on strike.

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.

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

My dad didn’t have a formal education, but he had a wonderful vocabulary. So in ‘Harvest,’ I wanted my main character to be an innately intelligent man who would have the vocabulary to say whatever he wanted in the same way as lots of working-class people can.

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.

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

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

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

My sympathies have always been for working-class people.

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.

My father kept his distance from working-class American blacks.

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.

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.

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.

While unions did not play a part in my family life when I was being brought up, my early years were most certainly spent in a working-class community.

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.

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

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.

I dunno whether it was to do with my parents – we were working-class – but it was important to me to be self-sufficient.

I grew up in a working-class family, so I guess you could say I write from what I know.

I’m from working-class, blue-collar America, and I don’t believe that people in that socioeconomic strata wait until they’re 40 to have children.

Feckless as it was for Bush to ask Americans to go shopping after 9/11, we all too enthusiastically followed his lead, whether we were wealthy, working-class or in between. We spent a decade feasting on easy money, don’t-pay-as-you-go consumerism and a metastasizing celebrity culture.

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.

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

I don’t think that 60-70 percent of working-class white voters would have supported a Muslim ban before Donald Trump said something about a Muslim ban.

I came from a working-class family, but I was supported by a grant system and had my fees paid, so I came out of Oxford with a debt of something like £200.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

We need to be a party saying, ‘We are not going to be happy until we get those $30, $40, $50 an hour jobs back for working-class people.’

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.

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.

There’s been a kind of inverse snobbery about culture. I get the feeling some people would look at Shakespeare and say, that’s a bit too intimidating for working-class people.

We weren’t very wealthy, but I had a real working-class guilt about wanting to perform. I felt disdain towards it because of the thought that performers were looking for attention. I did theatre studies for my A levels, but didn’t think a career as a performer was something I could do.

We’ve all got to discover the courage to ask the difficult questions about the future of our party and the future of the working-class communities who need a Labour government.

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

I’m a working-class kid from a blue-collar New England family.

I grew up in a very working-class family and also a very fundamentalist Christian family. So, we didn’t have access to the arts in the house in any form other than the Sunday funnies.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

My family has been poor and working-class for generations. And we live – I live in this really small community in Southern Mississippi where you don’t evacuate, and you have never evacuated because there are too many people in your family to evacuate.

Growing up in a particular neighborhood, growing up in a working-class family, not having much money, all of those things fire you and can give you an edge, can give you an anger.

My mother taught public school, went to Harvard and then got her master‘s there and taught fifth and sixth grade in a public school. My dad had a more working-class lifestyle. He didn’t go to college. He was an auto mechanic and a bartender and a janitor at Harvard.

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.

Football is generally a working-class sport, and because of the fact I went to private school and was brought up slightly differently, people think that makes me a different person.

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.

No one has a copyright on working-class struggles.

The COVID-19 pandemic has taken an incredible toll on our country. Every state has been impacted. Every community has suffered. Especially working-class communities of color, like the neighborhoods Attorney General Becerra and I grew up in.

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 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.

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 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.

In all of my books, I really want to work with working-class people. My goal is to show the moments of grace and dignity in their 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.

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.

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 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.

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 far right was on the march in the 1930s, and we defeated the fascists through a great united working-class effort. That sense of unity and strength is what gave people confidence to change things.

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.

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.

When I was young, I grew up in a family of working-class people. Not just my parents, but my extended family, as well.

My first husband Alec was a very good-looking man, but by the time he came out of the war, his sort of acting was no longer in demand – although he was a working-class boy, he was actually very good at suave handsome-men parts. I began to get successful when he was out of fashion; it was agony to watch him.

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

You grow up skinny in Canada; in working-class Montreal, you’re definitely the underdog.

I can’t tell a story about a working-class family on a premium channel that you have to pay to get.

Having come from a working-class family in the rural South, the fashion industry opened my eyes to culture, arts, and the world.

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

One of the nicest things about receiving the accolade of Australia is that, previously, the knighthood was historically for what was termed ‘the establishment.’ Now, this is an accolade for somebody who comes from a working-class background. Someone whose father was a truck driver and decided to buy a truck.

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

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.

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.

It is critical that low-income consumers have access to alternative products and services such as rent-to-own. It gives working-class families opportunities to obtain decent household items without incurring the burden of debt.

I come from a very working-class background, so my family would have been downstairs in the past, as opposed to upstairs. People are often quite surprised to hear that, that I’m not actually posh.

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

I grew up in a family that was working-class, which taught me to be careful with money.

Even when I was a model, I was like, ‘How am I doing this?’ I think it’s partly that I’ve grown up in a normal place, living a very normal working-class life and this doesn’t happen to people like me.

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

The BBC say we need more working-class comedies, which is rubbish. We need funny comedies; it doesn’t matter where they come from.

I come from a pretty working-class neighborhood in Chicago. Hard work was just expected of you. It wasn’t some noble thing you did; it was a prerequisite. It’s what a man did. You get up, you put on your boots, and you work hard. We’ve lost a lot of that, I’m afraid.

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.