“The American uppermiddle-class citizen is a composite of negatives. He is largely delineated by what he is not.- pg. 41”

“The fortunate people in the world - the only really fortunate people in the world, in my mind - are those whose work is also their pleasure. The class is not a large one, not nearly so large as it is often represented to be; and authors are perhaps the most important elements in its composition.(Churchill)”

“Another Mexican American in another class, approaches Victor after class, carrying his copy of Fahrenheit 451, required reading for the course. The student doesn't understand the reference to a salon. Victor explains that this is just another word for the living room. No understanding in the student's eyes. He tries Spanish: la salon. Still nothing. The student has grown up as a migrant worker. And Victor remembers the white student who had been in his class a quarter ago, who had written about not understanding racism, that there was none where he had grown up, in Wennatchee, that he has played with the children of his father's migrant workers without there being any hostility. His father's workers. Property. Property that doesn't know of living rooms. And Victor thought of what the man from Wennatchee knew, what the ROTC Mexican American knew, what the migrant worker knew. And he thought of getting up the next morning to go with Serena to St. Mary's for cheese and butter. And he knew there was something he was not doing in his composition classrooms.”

“What sense would it make to classify a man as handicapped because he is in a wheelchair today, if he is expected to be walking again in a month, and competing in track meets before the year is out? Yet Americans are generally given 'class' labels on the basis of their transient location in the income stream. If most Americans do not stay in the same broad income bracket for even a decade, their repeatedly changing 'class' makes class itself a nebulous concept. Yet the intelligentsia are habituated, if not addicted, to seeing the world in class terms.”

“I'm just one molecule of plastic in the composition of a little pin on a very large map”

“Experience taught me that it is wise to be patient and forbearing with opponents and to use the divine cure of repeling with what is best (then verily he, between whom and you there was enmity, (will become) as though he was a close friend.) Quran 41:34”