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“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

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

“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

“Women trailed around vendors, baskets on their arms, bartering for a low price, despite the fact their purses carried plenty of coin. I envied their warm coats and the ruffles on their long dresses. They were never cold, never dressed in threadbare clothes, and never went hungry. They also never worried about what would happen to them if they had an episode and passed out in a gutter. It was no use dwelling on what I didn’t have.”
― Angela J. Ford, A Sleet Storm's Seduction

“The people of the East End have a marvellous tradition of fighting facism, but facism still always manifests itself in the East End because poverty exists at its heart.”
― Matthew Collins, HATE: My Life In The British Far Right

“We wanted a body race war, we felt it was inevitable and we would have to be the ones controllling the streets when it happened. We weren't the kind of blokes who could cry on each other's shoulders over loves gone-astray or bitter person dissatisfactions. All of these friendships were built solely on our hatred and distrust of others. The class system, or what little I knew of it, was quite obviously separate to race. There were two ways of looking at it: downtrodden and ignored because we were either white or because we were also working class.”
― Matthew Collins, HATE: My Life In The British Far Right

“Blue Blood & Blue Collar (The Sonnet)

I have nothing against blue blood,
any more than I'm against blue collar.
But blue blood think honor is an heirloom,
while blue collar earn their rightful honor.

That's what I call true human character,
unreliant on some fictitious identity.
Every human must earn their admittance,
into the civilized realm of humanity.

I can still accept any blood, blue or otherwise,
if they have the decency to acknowledge atrocity.
Otherwise, all blue blood are canine incarnate,
unworthy of acknowledgment of their existentiality.

King and president, ceo and janitor,
all are equal, only behavior merits honor.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Brit Actually: Nursery Rhymes of Reparations

“to be able to study at a tertiary institution, when I compared myself to those farmers who actually grew our cash crops. They worked the hardest to supply most of our country’s foreign exchange, yet they didn’t harvest those benefits of education, healthcare or even running water and electricity”
― Adwoa Badoe, Aluta

“You go on and on about laboring with the common man. And at the very first instance of real work, you go and find cushy jobs doing nothing”
― Adwoa Badoe, Aluta

“How do you recognise a Glaswegian in English literature? He's the cut-out figure who wields a razor-blade, gets moroculous drunk and never has a single, solitary 'thought' in his entire life. He beats his wife and beats his kids and beats his next door neighbour. And another striking thing; everybody from a Glaswegian or working-class background, everybody in fact from any regional part of Britain -none of them knew how to talk! Unlike the nice, stalwart upper-class English hero whose words on the page were always absolutely splendidly proper and pure and pristinely accurate whether in dialogue or without. Most interesting of all, for myself as a writer, the narrative belonged to them and them alone. They owned it. The place where thought and spiritual life exists.”
― James Kelman, Some Recent Attacks: Essays Cultural & Political

“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