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

“Tax work less. Tax wealth more.”
― Gary Stevenson

“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

“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

“The first problem with the word “diversity” is the word itself. Who is diverse in relation to whom? The way diversity is often framed in institutional domains implies that some people are diverse in relation to others. That some need to learn diversity while others have it and bring it to the table. This framing, I argue, has from the start driven a wedge between a significant percentage of marginalized and disadvantaged white people and other marginalized and disadvantaged groups—groups that should naturally be allies, not enemies. The only group that benefits from this divide is a small percentage of privileged whites who use the structure of whiteness to their full advantage.
[From "Understanding the DEI Dismantlement” published on Counterpunch on January 31, 2025]”
― Louis Yako

“Γνωρίζω ότι δεν τους υπολογίζετε γιατί η Αυλή είναι οπλισμένη, σας ικετεύω όμως να μου επιτρέψετε να σας αναφέρω ότι πρέπει να τους υπολογίζετε πολύ, κάθε φορά που οι ίδιοι θεωρούν ότι είναι το παν. Να σε ποιο σημείο βρίσκονται: κι αυτοί αρχίζουν να μην υπολογίζουν τα στρατεύματά σας γιατί το κακό είναι ότι η δύναμή τους υπάρχει μέσα στη φαντασία τους και μπορεί να ειπωθεί με απόλυτη σιγουριά ότι, εν αντιθέσει προς όλα τα άλλα είδη ισχύος, όταν φτάσουν σ’ ένα ορισμένο σημείο, μπορούν να κάνουν ό,τι νομίζουν ότι μπορούν να κάνουν.”
― Cardinal de Retz

“When gig work is called “flexibility” and poverty is called “grit,” language becomes the prison.”
― Adeel Ahmed Khan

“When poor and working people in the United States become a politically viable force, relief institutions and their technologies of control shift to better facilitate cultural denial and to rationalize a brutal return to subserviency. Relief institutions are machines for undermining the collective power of poor and working-class people, and for producing in difference in everyone else.”
― Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor

“[Denial] contorts our physical geography, as we build infrastructure—suburbs, highways, private schools, and prisons—that allow the professional middle-class to actively avoid sharing the lives of poor and working-class people.”
― Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor

“Classification and criminalization work by including poor and working-class people in systems that limit their rights and deny their basic human needs. The digital poorhouse doesn’t just exclude, it sweeps millions of people into a system of control that compromises their humanity and their self determination.”
― Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor

“Ker zdaj vem, da so tisto, kar imenujejo književnost, zgradili proti življenjem in telesom, kakršno je njeno. Ker odslej vem, da je pisati o njej in pisati o njenem življenju pisati proti književnosti.”
― Édouard Louis, Combats et métamorphoses d'une femme

“Tega sem se zavedel, ko sem prišel živet v Pariz, daleč od tebe: vladajoči se lahko pritožujejo nad levičarsko vlado, lahko se pritožujejo nad desničarsko vlado, vendar jim vlada nikoli ne povzroči težav s prebavo, vlada jim nikoli ne uniči hrbta, vlada jih nikoli ne požene k morju. Politika jim ne spremeni življenja ali pa ga zelo malo. Tudi to je čudno, da namreč oni delajo politiko, politika pa na njihova življenja skoraj nima vpliva. Za vladajoče je politika najpogosteje vprašanje estetike: način, kako mislijo, kako gledajo na svet, kako si izoblikujejo osebnost. Za nas pa je pomenila živeti ali umreti.”
― Édouard Louis, Qui a tué mon père

“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]