Working Class Quotes

“She hated her job the same way I hated my jobs because she knew she was worth more, but she also hated herself so there wasn't much point in trying to do better.”
― Tawni O'Dell, Back Roads

“Their society had been built to fail. Dynasties of power and parties of authority had on retrospect, staged countless renditions of the same play. Granted, an evolution had occurred. But the story unfolded the same way.”
― Rohith S. Katbamna, Down and Rising

“I didn't want to be in the teeming mass of the working class.... I didn't want to live and die in the same place with only a week at the seaside in between. I dreamed of escape -- but what is terrible about industrialisation is that it makes escape necessary. In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community -- to society?”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“--You're rather well read for a working-class girl, she said with her back to me.
--Really? I've found that all my well-read friends are from the working class.
--Oh my. Why do you think that is? The purity of poverty?
--No. It's just that reading is the cheapest form of entertainment.
--Sex is the cheapest form of entertainment.
--Not in this house.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“This business of petty inconvenience and indignity, of being kept waiting about, of having to do everything at other people’s convenience, is inherent in working-class life. A thousand influences constantly press a working man down into a passive role. He does not act, he is acted upon. He feels himself the slave of mysterious authority and has a firm conviction that ‘they’ will never allow him to do this, that, and the other. Once when I was hop-picking I asked the sweated pickers (they earn something under sixpence an hour) why they did not form a union. I was told immediately that ‘they’ would never allow it. Who were ‘they’? I asked. Nobody seemed to know, but evidently ‘they’ were omnipotent.”
― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

“I'm not working-class: I come from the criminal classes.”
― Peter O'Toole

“The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.”
― Núria Añó

“Only from a capitalist viewpoint being productive is a moral virtue, if not a moral imperative. From the viewpoint of the working class, being productive simply means being exploited.”
― Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle

“As to the 'Left' I'll say briefly why this was the finish for me. Here is American society, attacked under open skies in broad daylight by the most reactionary and vicious force in the contemporary world, a force which treats Afghans and Algerians and Egyptians far worse than it has yet been able to treat us. The vaunted CIA and FBI are asleep, at best. The working-class heroes move, without orders and at risk to their lives, to fill the moral and political vacuum. The moral idiots, meanwhile, like Falwell and Robertson and Rabbi Lapin, announce that this clerical aggression is a punishment for our secularism. And the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, hitherto considered allies on our 'national security' calculus, prove to be the most friendly to the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Here was a time for the Left to demand a top-to-bottom house-cleaning of the state and of our covert alliances, a full inquiry into the origins of the defeat, and a resolute declaration in favor of a fight to the end for secular and humanist values: a fight which would make friends of the democratic and secular forces in the Muslim world. And instead, the near-majority of 'Left' intellectuals started sounding like Falwell, and bleating that the main problem was Bush's legitimacy. So I don't even muster a hollow laugh when this pathetic faction says that I, and not they, are in bed with the forces of reaction.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left

“Let these men sing out their songs,
they've been walking all day long,
all their fortune's spent and gone...
silver dollar in the subway station;
quarters for the papers for the jobs.”
― Roman Payne

“People are born on this planet with no choice at all
And have to spend most of their life working to pay it off.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“hablaba del desasosiego de la clase trabajadora, de la infelicidad constante a pesar de cumplir con las expectativas, de hacer lo que se supone que uno debe hacer y, sin embargo, no tener nunca una sensación de plenitud. Morrissey cantaba sobre la insatisfacción que provocan los trabajos de mierda y la obligación de pagar facturas, sobre la alienación que causan las horas en la oficina y el poco espacio para disfrutar de los verdaderos placeres de la vida.”
― Beatriz Serrano, El descontento

“To all you who believe we shouldn't have a minimum wage -- that the minimum amount you can be paid should be determined solely by your employer. We tried it once before: it was called SLAVERY.”
― Quentin R. Bufogle

“Embrace dysfunction" this one helps in the workplace!”
― Rick Hein

“The occupants of the other three looked like the people they had seen rioting in the streets of Paris that morning. They were citizens of the other France, the France one didn’t read about in guidebooks. They were the put-upon and the left-behind, the ones without glittering degrees from elite institutions of learning. Globalization and automation had eroded their value in the workforce. The service economy was their only option. Their counterparts in Britain and America had already had their say at the ballot box. France, reckoned Gabriel, would be next.”
― Daniel Silva, The New Girl

“And we won because we insisted that no longer would politics be something that is done to us. Now, it is something that we do.”
― Zohran Mamdani

“Look at a list of the lead actors of a major motion picture nowadays and you are likely to find barely a single one that can’t boast at least two generations of Hollywood actors, writers, producers, and directors in their family tree. The film industry has come to be dominated by an in-marrying caste. Is it surprising, then, that Hollywood celebrities’ pretensions to egalitarian politics tend to ring a bit hollow in the ears of most working-class Americans? Neither is Hollywood in any way an exception in this regard. If anything it’s emblematic of what has happened to all the liberal professions (if, perhaps, a trifle more advanced).”
― David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

“The belief that what ultimately motivates human beings has always been, and must always be, the pursuit of wealth, power, comforts, and pleasure, has always and must always be complemented by a doctrine of work as self-sacrifice, as valuable precisely because it is the place of misery, sadism, emptiness, and despair. As Carlyle put it: “All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble; work is alone noble, be that here said and asserted once more. And in like manner too, all dignity is painful. A life of ease is not for any man . . . Our highest religion is named the Worship of Sorrow. For the son of man there is no noble crown, well worn or even ill worn, but there is a crown of thorns!”56”
― David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

“One thing is inescapable: such work arrangements foster a political landscape rife with hatred and resentment. Those struggling and without work resent the employed. The employed are encouraged to resent the poor and unemployed, who they are constantly told are scroungers and freeloaders. Those trapped in bullshit jobs resent workers who get to do real productive or beneficial labor, and those who do real productive or beneficial labor, underpaid, degraded, and unappreciated, increasingly resent those who they see as monopolizing those few jobs where one can live well while doing something useful, high-minded, or glamorous—who they refer to as “the liberal elite.” All are united in their loathing for the political class, who they see (correctly) as corrupt, but the political class, in turn, finds these other forms of vacuous hatred extremely convenient, since they distract attention from themselves.”
― David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

“Invoking the term “working class” instantly draws up images of men in overalls toiling on production lines, and it’s common to hear otherwise intelligent middle-class intellectuals suggest that, with the decline of factory work, the working class in, say, Britain or America no longer exists—as if it were actually ingeniously constructed androids that were driving their buses, trimming their hedges, installing their cables, or changing their grandparents’ bedpans. In fact, there was never a time most workers worked in factories. Even in the days of Karl Marx, or Charles Dickens, working-class neighborhoods housed far more maids, bootblacks, dustmen, cooks, nurses, cabbies, schoolteachers, prostitutes, caretakers, and costermongers than employees in coal mines, textile mills, or iron foundries. Are these former jobs “productive”? In what sense and for whom? Who “produces” a soufflé?”
― David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

“The soul of this country lives in the gap-toothed smiles of gas station cashiers, the matted fur of small-town dogs, the buzzing of neon signs in small dives where a layer of dust covers every surface, the shattered spirit of drive-through employees in nowhere towns, the weird smells and carpet stains in cheap motels where the windows look out at empty parking lots.”
― Gabino Iglesias, The Devil Takes You Home

“Death by Starvation or Boredom”
Many toil for scraps and cheap wages, surviving one fragile breath at a time— just one more breath...

While others, bloated with excess, labor only to escape boredom, pretending they’re saving a world drowning in the greed they created, and the power they refuse to let go.

The first walks a tightrope between breath and hunger. The second, cushioned by comfort, drifts closer to spiritual starvation, their soul numbed by excess.

And here lies the cruel symmetry— fate, with its blunt hands, levels the field by offering death either way: starvation... or boredom.

But the greatest tragedy belongs to those who die of both.”
― Louis Yako, سرطان في كل مكان [Cancer Everywhere]

“Taxi Driver”
There’s a strange kind of liberation in being just a taxi driver— the freedom tucked inside that word: just.

Because you’re just a driver, no one truly sees you. Yet you see it all— the absurdities, the shallows, the beauty, sorrow, joy, heartbreak—passengers unknowingly exposed.

They grant you a diluted respect, sometimes half-fake, sometimes not at all— because you’re just a taxi driver.

But they leave you be. No one's scheming to steal your seat. They want you in that seat. They ride with you because, for now, it’s a seat they don’t desire.

Still, like all fleeting liberations, this too carries disappointment— a bittersweet sting.

You realize the only reason they leave you alone is because you've escaped into a seat they never wanted in the first place. And that hurts.”
― Louis Yako, سرطان في كل مكان [Cancer Everywhere]

“The fighting that ensued recalls a quote attributed to 19th-century capitalist Jay Gould: ‘I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”
― Raymond Tyler, Black Coal and Red Bandanas: An Illustrated History of the West Virginia Mine Wars

“If tonight teaches us anything, it is that convention has held us back. We have bowed at the altar of caution and we have paid a mighty price. Too many working people cannot recognize themselves in our party. And too many among us have turned to the right for answers to why they've been left behind. We will leave mediocrity in our past. No longer will we have to open a history book for proof that Democrats can dare to be great.”
― Zohran Mamdani

“Fun Fact: Albert Einstein, considered by many to be the smartest man ever, was a Democratic socialist like Bernie and Zohran Mamdani.

Einstein agreed with Karl Marx, that capitalism is a corrupt system that brings out the worst in people and allows greedy robber barons to exploit the working class.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, American Fascism: A German Writer's Urgent Warning To America

“Oh, for a life of Pleasure rather than of Labor!”
― Pietros Maneos

“The audience was composed of the lower stratum of white working people: hard-faced, lantern-jawed, dull-eyed adult children, seeking like all humanity for something permanent in the eternal flux of life. The young girls in their cheap finery with circus makeup on their faces; the young men, aged before their time by child labor and a violent environment; the middle-aged folk with their shiny, shabby garb and beaten countenances; all ready and eager to be organized for any purpose except improvement of their intellects and standard of living.”
― George S. Schuyler, Black No More

“Middle-class Americans, like myself and my fellow seekers, have been raised with the old-time Protestant expectation that hard work will be rewarded with material comfort and security. This has never been true of the working class, most of which toils away at wages incommensurate with the effort required. And now, the sociologists agree, it is increasingly untrue of the educated middle class that stocks our corporate bureaucracies.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“…perhaps, he reflected now, he’d been trying to atone somehow for what had happened at the hui, to prove to himself that he was not just yet another Marxist intellectual cliché, not just yet another armchair critic with soft hands and smug opinions, who theorised about the working class while never having done a day of drudge work in his life. Tony was very proud to be well read, and had often railed against the defensive anti-intellectualism that defined his country’s culture, but he had nevertheless recognised in himself, at times, a deep desire to perform a kind of excessive rugged practicality in compensation for his bookishness, submitting himself to physical privations, testing his strength and his endurance well beyond what was called for, and devising circuitous home-made solutions to problems that could be solved much more easily, and often more cheaply, by paying someone else to fix them. It hadn’t been until he’d gone abroad that he’d been able to identify this trait as itself peculiarly Kiwi, reflecting a broader attitude held among his countrymen that to do a thing with effort was always more respectable than to have it done with ease; inconvenience, in New Zealand, tended to be treated as a test of character, such that it was a point of national pride to be able to withstand discomfort or poor service without giving in to the temptation to complain.”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood