When you go to work, if your name is on the building, you’re rich. If your name is on your desk, you’re middle-class. If your name is on your shirt, you’re poor.
—Rich Hall
In my experience, middle-class Americans do not feel at ease around poor people. Even people of high ideals who care about the needy experience discomfort in the presence of the needy themselves.
—Rabbi Eliezer Finkelman
The rich are never threatened by the poor—they do not notice them.
—Marie de France
There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.
—Judith Martin
People who work sitting down get paid more than people who work standing up.
—Ogden Nash
The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
—Gustave Flaubert
A man's respect for law and order exists in precise relationship to the size of his paycheck.
—Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
I have long been of the opinion that if work were such a splendid thing the rich would have kept more of it for themselves.
—Bruce Grocott
There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else.
—Oscar Wilde
Upscale people are fixated with food simply because they are now able to eat so much of it without getting fat, and the reason they don't get fat is that they maintain a profligate level of calorie expenditure. The very same people whose evenings begin with melted goat cheese… get up at dawn to run, break for a midmorning aerobics class, and watch the evening news while racing on a stationary bicycle.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
The stress laid on upward social mobility in the United States has tended to obscure the fact that there can be more than one kind of mobility and more than one direction in which it can go. There can be ethical mobility as well as financial, and it can go down as well as up.
—Margaret Halsey
The vices of the rich and great are mistaken for errors; and those of the poor and lowly, for crimes.
—Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington
We must be careful that the people who make $5,000 a year are not pitted against those who make $25,000 a year by those who make $900,000.
—Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski
Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.
—Peter Ustinov
The trouble is that rich people, well-to-do people, very often don't really know who the poor are; and that is why we can forgive them, for knowledge can only lead to love, and love to service. And so, if they are not touched by the poor, it's because they do not know them.
—Mother Teresa