“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.”

“Any flights would be taken business class, since Roger thought that the whole point of having money, if it had to be summed up in a single point, which it couldn't, but if you had to, the whole point of having a bit of money was not to have to fly scum class.”

“I aspire to be of the leisure class, therefore, I go to class. Because I am of the working class, needs must, I teach class, where it is to be learned, I have no class.”

“A history of the working class in the United States should, first of all, give a sense of what is meant by "the working class in the United States." It means most of us who live in the United States of America-which, unfortunately, has not been the focus of a majority of history books that claim to tell the story of this country. This doesn't make sense because without the working class there would be no United States. (From a certain point of view, this history book deficiency does make sense, given the biases built into our business-dominated culture.)”

“What was the fun of being upper-class if you had to work so hard to appear bored all the time?”

“we are all murderers and prostitutes – no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.”