51 Inspiring Classroom Quotes

There's something truly magical about the power of words. In a classroom setting, a well-placed quote can ignite a spark of curiosity, bolster confidence, and foster an environment of encouragement and positivity. Whether you're a teacher looking to inspire your students, or a student seeking motivation, the right words can make a significant impact. We've curated a collection of the top 51 inspiring classroom quotes to help you fill your classroom with wisdom, optimism, and the fuel for lifelong learning. Dive in to discover these timeless gems that can transform any educational experience.

1. “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.” - Woodrow Wilson

2. “One man to live in pleasure and wealth, whiles all other weap and smart for it, that is the part not of a king, but of a jailor.” - Sir Thomas More

3. “Class is an aura of confidence that is being sure without being cocky. Class has nothing to do with money. Class never runs scared. It is self-discipline and self-knowledge. It's the sure-footedness that comes with having proved you can meet life. ” - Ann Landers

4. “Most middle-class whites have no idea what it feels like to be subjected to police who are routinely suspicious, rude, belligerent, and brutal.” - Dr. Benjamin Spock

5. “There is only one class of men, the privileged class.” - Albert Camus

6. “I see men assassinated around me every day. I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead; men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions; men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideas. Kennedy himself was 9/10ths the way around the clock or he wouldn't have accepted such an enervating and enfeebling job -- meaning President of the United States of America. How can I be concerned with the murder of one man when almost all men, plus females, are taken from cribs as babies and almost immediately thrown into the masher?” - Charles Bukowski

7. “Given the freedom to create, everybody is creative. All of us have an innate, instinctive desire to change our environment, to put our original stamp on this world, to tell a story never told before. I’m absolutely thrilled at the moment of creativity – when suddenly I’ve synthesized my experiences, reality, and my imagination into something entirely new. But most people are too busy working on survival to find the opportunity to create. Fortunately, I’ve been freed by reputation, by the economics of success, and by emotional contentment to turn my ideas into reality. I’ve discovered that the more freedom I have to be creative, the more creative I become.” - William Shatner

8. “Had he lived some centuries ago, in the brightly coloured civilizations of the past, he would have had a definite status, his rank and his income would have corresponded. But in his day the angel of Democracy had arisen, enshadowing the classes with leathern wings, and proclaiming, "All men are equal--all men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas...” - E.M. Forster

9. “I'm the girl nobody knows until she commits suicide. Then suddenly everyone had a class with her.” - Tom Leveen

10. “Maintaining connections with family and community across class boundaries demands more than just summary recall of where one’s roots are, where one comes from. It requires knowing, naming, and being ever-mindful of those aspects of one’s past that have enabled and do enable one’s self-development in the present, that sustain and support, that enrich. One must also honestly confront barriers that do exist, aspects of that past that do diminish.” - bell hooks

11. “They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar” - Henry David Thoreau

12. “I could have done even better, miss, and I'd know a lot more, if it wasn't for my destiny ever since childhood. I'd have killed a man in a duel with a pistol for calling me low-born, because I came from Stinking Lizaveta without a father, and they were shoving that in my face in Moscow. It spread there thanks to Grigory Vasilievich. Grigory Vasilievich reproaches me for rebelling against my nativity: 'You opened her matrix,' he says. I don't know about her matrix, but I'd have let them kill me in the womb, so as not to come out into the world at all, miss.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky

13. “Their only chance to mix with royalty was while they played Bezique. They never played any other game but this one that had grown out of the French court: it was the game of the cavaliers, a game of waiting between battles.” - Lisa St. Aubin de Teran

14. “She observed the dumb-show by which her neighbour was expressing her passion for music, but she refrained from copying it. This was not to say that, for once that she had consented to spend a few minutes in Mme. de Saint-Euverte's house, the Princesse des Laumes would not have wished (so that the act of politeness to her hostess which she had performed by coming might, so to speak, 'count double') to shew herself as friendly and obliging as possible. But she had a natural horror of what she called 'exaggerating,' and always made a point of letting people see that she 'simply must not' indulge in any display of emotion that was not in keeping with the tone of the circle in which she moved, although such displays never failed to make an impression upon her, by virtue of that spirit of imitation, akin to timidity, which is developed in the most self-confident persons, by contact with an unfamiliar environment, even though it be inferior to their own. She began to ask herself whether these gesticulations might not, perhaps, be a necessary concomitant of the piece of music that was being played, a piece which, it might be, was in a different category from all the music that she had ever heard before; and whether to abstain from them was not a sign of her own inability to understand the music, and of discourtesy towards the lady of the house; with the result that, in order to express by a compromise both of her contradictory inclinations in turn, at one moment she would merely straighten her shoulder-straps or feel in her golden hair for the little balls of coral or of pink enamel, frosted with tiny diamonds, which formed its simple but effective ornament, studying, with a cold interest, her impassioned neighbour, while at another she would beat time for a few bars with her fan, but, so as not to forfeit her independence, she would beat a different time from the pianist's.” - Marcel Proust

15. “When red-headed people are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn.” - Mark Twain

16. “The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.” - Karl Marx

17. “While there is a lower class, I am in it. While there is a criminal element, I am of it.While there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” - Eugene Debs

18. “One is never over-dressed or underdressed with a Little Black Dress.” - Karl Lagerfeld

19. “You had to have these peasant leaders quickly in this sort of war and a real peasant leader might be a little too much like Pablo. You couldn't wait for the real Peasant Leader to arrive and he might have too many peasant characteristics when he did. So you had to manifacture one. At that, from what he had seen of Campesino, with his black beard, his thick negroid lips, and his feverish, staring eyes, he thought he might give almost as much trouble as a real peasant leader. The last time he had seen him he seemed to have gotten to believe his own publicity and think he was a peasant.” - Ernest Hemingway

20. “Why do you like Hugh better? Because he is a Viscount?''Well, that's one reason,' I admitted, without any false shame. Respect for degree was in my blood and I didn't think of it as snobbery.” - L.P. Hartley

21. “An old joke has an Oxford professor meeting an American former graduate student and asking him what he's working on these days. 'My thesis is on the survival of the class system in the United States.' 'Oh really, that's interesting: one didn't think there was a class system in the United States.' 'Nobody does. That's how it survives.” - Christopher Hitchens

22. “[Very rich people] with brains make a great effort to hold on to every penny they have while preaching to the general population that freedom and dignity and patriotism are possible only under their protection; in this way they elicit the support of the very people they hold in subjection.” - James A. Michener

23. “Being classy is my teenage rebellion.” - Rebecca McKinsey

24. “Back in Russia we were dirt-poor. Here in the West we are still poor but have risen above the dirt to tower alongside stalks of grass!” - Vera Nazarian

25. “Class is entirely intangible, and the way it affects things isn't subject to scientific analysis, and it's not supposed to be real but it's pervasive and powerful. See; just like magic.” - Jo Walton

26. “Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun.” - Kurt Vonnegut

27. “What better way for a ruling class to claim and hold power than to pose as the defenders of the nation.” - Christopher Hitchens

28. “All the golden societies of the past to which historians point and turn their wistful smiles have had what patience-players would call a discard pile. They operated on two levels with a slave class who worked, ate, slept, and died and a leisured class who reclined on one elbow and spoke. Naturally it is from this latter group that we learn what life at that time was like. It often makes charming reading but we can hardly take it to be the whole truth.” - Quentin Crisp

29. “Never use the word “cheap”. Today everybody can look chic in inexpensive clothes (the rich buy them too). There is good clothing design on every level today. You can be the chicest thing in the world in a T-shirt and jeans — it’s up to you.” - Karl Lagerfeld

30. “All men are born free: just not for long.” - John le Carré

31. “Treat each other like human beings? But the other great apes have no class hierarchy.” - Bauvard

32. “A class system is something you use to discriminate against someone who looks like you.” - Reginald D Hunter

33. “The few own the many because they possess the means of livelihood of all ... The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands - the ownership and control of their livelihoods - are set at naught, we can have neither men's rights nor women's rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease.” - Helen Keller

34. “When I look at a person, I see a person - not a rank, not a class, not a title.” - Criss Jami

35. “Whether life finds us guilty or not guilty, we ourselves know we are not innocent.” - Sándor Márai

36. “When I got to college, the fake ID thing wasn't that important, since pretty much everyone could get away with drinking in New Orleans. But the drugs, well, that was a different story altogether, because drugs are every bit as illegal in New Orleans as anywhere else--at least, if you're black and poor, and have the misfortune of doing your drugs somewhere other than the dorms at Tulane University. But if you are lucky enough to be living at Tulane, which is a pretty white place, especially contrasted with the city where it's located, which is 65 percent black, then you are absolutely set.” - Tim Wise

37. “I suppose there is no place in the world where snobbery is quite so ever-present or where it is cultivated in such refined and subtle forms as in an English public school. Here at least one cannot say that English ‘education’ fails to do its job. You forget your Latin and Greek within a few months of leaving school — I studied Greek for eight or ten years, and now, at thirty-three, I cannot even repeat the Greek alphabet — but your snobbishness, unless you persistently root it out like the bindweed it is, sticks by you till your grave.” - George Orwell

38. “The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle.” - Christopher Hitchens

39. “England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.” - George Orwell

40. “Yet in the most mean, cowardly, hypocritical way the British ruling class did all they could to hand Spain over to Franco and the Nazis. Why? Because they were pro-Fascist, was the obvious answer.” - George Orwell

41. “As with outlaw figures, in diverse musical and oral cultures throughout the world- Mexican corridos and Egyptian shaabi music, for example- Hip Hop's irreverence toward dominant values and noncompliance with the status quo creates alternative, counterhegemonic spaces.” - H. Sammy Alim and Geneva Smitherman

42. “In our country for all her greatness there is one thing she cannot do and that is translate a person wholly out of one class into another. Perfect translation from one language into another is impossible. Class is the British language.” - William Golding

43. “Theban who acquires his wealth by inheritance builds his mansion with the weak poor's money. The clergyman erects his temple upon the graves and bones of the devoted worshippers. The prince grasps the fellah's arms while the priest empties his pocket; the ruler looks upon the sobs of the fields with frowning face, and the bishop consoles them with his smile, and between the frown of the tiger and the smile of the wolf the flock is perished; the ruler claims himself as king if the law, and the priest as the representative if god, and between these two, the bodies are destroyed and the souls wither into nothing.” - Khalil Gibran

44. “The Poverty Tour provided the opportunity to meet many people who had been living paycheck to paycheck even before the economic downturn. To so quickly slide from the great middle into the underworld of the poor validated our suspicions that perhaps these citizens never really were bona fide, middle class Americans. Indeed, some economists assert that the middle class evaporated decades ago.” - Cornel West

45. “People who dismiss the unemployed and dependent as ‘parasites’ fail to understand economics and parasitism. A successful parasite is one that is not recognized by its host, one that can make its host work for it without appearing as a burden. Such is the ruling class in a capitalist society.” - Jason Read

46. “Since the same human mire remains beneath, does not all civilisation reduce itself to the superiority of smelling nice and living well?” - Émile Zola

47. “Verily, I swear, 'tis better to be lowly born, and range with humble livers in content, than to be perk'd up in a glistering grief, and wear a golden sorrow.” - William Shakespeare

48. “The patience and forbearance of the poor are among the strongest bulwarks of the rich.” - C.L.R. James

49. “To be white, or straight, or male, or middle class is to be simultaneously ubiquitious and invisible. You’re everywhere you look, you’re the standard against which everyone else is measured. You’re like water, like air. People will tell you they went to see a “woman doctor” or they will say they went to see “the doctor.” People will tell you they have a “gay colleague” or they’ll tell you about a colleague. A white person will be happy to tell you about a “Black friend,” but when that same person simply mentions a “friend,” everyone will assume the person is white. Any college course that doesn’t have the word “woman” or “gay” or “minority” in its title is a course about men, heterosexuals, and white people. But we call those courses “literature,” “history” or “political science.”This invisibility is political.” - Michael S. Kimmel

50. “She was simple, not being able to adorn herself, but she was unhappy, as one out of her class; for women belong to no caste, no race, their grace, their beauty and their charm serving them in place of birth and family. Their inborn finesse, their instinctive elegance, their suppleness of wit, are their only aristocracy, making some daughters of the people the equal of great ladies.” - Guy de Maupassant

51. “Class never runs scared.It is sure-footed and confident.It can handle anything that comes along.Class has a sense of humor.It knows a good laugh is the best lubricant for oiling the machinery of human relations.Class never makes excuses.It takes its lumps and learns from past mistakes.Class knows that good manners are nothing more than a series of small, inconsequential sacrifices.Class bespeaks an aristocracy that has nothing to do with ancestors or money.Some wealthy “blue bloods” have no class, while individuals who are struggling to make ends meet are loaded with it.Class is real.It can’t be faked.Class never tried to build itself by tearing others down.Class is already up and need not strive to look better by making others look worse.Class can “walk with kings and keep it’s virtue and talk with crowds and keep the common touch.” Everyone is comfortable with the person who has class because that person is comfortable with himself.If you have class, you’ve got it made.If you don’t have class, no matter what else you have, it doesn’t make any difference.” - Ann Landers