Underclass Quotes

The black middle-class in America is a prosperous community that is now larger in absolute terms than the black underclass. Does its existence not suggest that economic adversity is the result of failures of individual character rather than the lingering after-effects of racial discrimination and a slave system that ceased to exist well over a century ago? (David Horowitz)

Since my retirement, I've spent a lot of time trying to help the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina. A society like this just can't afford an uneducated underclass of citizens.

Charles Kuralt

Zionists believe they are entitled by God to the land, groves and homes of the non-Jewish underclass. They quote the Bible as the reference that 'God gave them the land.' The size of the alleged God-given land has never been determined and Israel's borders still remain fuzzy.

Lee Whitnum

What underclass? I mean you know, what underclass? Do you know any of them? Do they have automobiles? Most of them probably do. Do most of them have television sets? Do most of them have telephones? Well, if they can afford automobiles, they can afford computers. And since they have television sets, they already have access to communications technology. And since they have telephones, they can talk to one another. Wherein are they deprived?

Tom Clancy

We have accepted today the existence in perpetuity of a permanent underclass of scores of millions who cannot cope and must be carried by society - fed, clothed, housed, tutored, medicated at taxpayer's expense their entire lives. We have a dependent nation the size of Spain in our independent America. We have a new division in our country, those who pay a double or triple fare, and those who ride forever free.

Pat Buchanan

You're the outcast / You're the underclass / But you don't care / Because you're living fast You're the uninvited guest that stays to the end. I'll be scraping your life from the sole of my shoe tonight" Bring It On Down.

Noel Gallagher

We have a large underclass in Britain, and a fairly low standard of education. Our best universities are extremely good, but a very significant proportion of the British population that comes out of compulsory schooling with very low standards of education.

Nigel Short

You probably know that this week Britain has been terrorized by an underclass of welfare-dependent, drug-addled criminal scum who have been allowed to run riot in the streets because the police haven't been allowed to do their job and protect the public. The media is full of speculation about why it happened and what is the root cause. Well, that's easy. The root cause is stupidity. A complete lack of imagination. A stunted, feral view of the world that amounts to self-inflicted moral and mental disablement. And it's the direct product of an entitlement culture that rewards idleness, encourages victimhood, and compensates criminals.

Pat Condell

Capital is taxed much less than labour; subsidies going to capital, the rich, and middle-income earners greatly exceed the benefits going to the precariat and underclass.

Guy Standing

It's not about creating an equal country, but it is about stopping the development of an underclass cut off from the rest of society. This focus could be a straight forward set of things like a living wage, supporting more effective pathways into work and an effective benefits system.

Jo Cox

The working class of England take their deracination completely for granted. Disenchantment is the happy code that informs every byway of the underclass: service jobs, celebrity dreams, Lotto wins, leisured poverty on pre-crunch credit cards, it's all there, part of the story of an English people whose grandparents never had it so good. (Andrew O'Hagan)

Throughout this country's history there have of course been systematic efforts to create an official underclass.

Eric Liu

Where fashion in clothes, bodily adornment, and music are concerned, it is the underclass that increasingly sets the pace. Never before has there been so much downward cultural aspiration.

Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)

This awful concept of underclass is really horrifying. You're not lower class, you are excluded - outside.

Zygmunt Bauman

[Churchill's wartime menus] show him slurping bottles of whisky, champagne [and] brandy with every sumptuous meal, while the underclass fought and starved for the privilege of poverty and unemployment. Thankfully, the Germans bombed Glasgow back to full employment. Even in the 1960s Earl Mountbatten was prosecuted for adding water to the milk on his farm so you can imagine how the landed gentry 'rationed' themselves during the war.

Ian Brady

I went to England in the '70s, and I was in my early 20s. There was still a residue of that era of being an underclass or colonial. I assume it must have been a more aggressive and prominent attitude 40 years before that, because Australia internationally wasn't regarded as having much cultural value. We were a country full of sheep and convicts.

Geoffrey Rush

Liberals talk about the 'income inequality' and the 'unfairness' and the disparity of the haves and the have-nots in New York City. Who has been running that city for all this time? Who has created the underclass in this country? It's the Democrat Party.

Rush Limbaugh

If we as a nation are to break the cycle of poverty, crime and the growing underclass of young people ill equipped to be productive citizens, we need to not only implement effective programs to prevent teen pregnancy, but we must also help those who have already given birth so that they become effective, nurturing, bonding parents.

Jane Fonda

The most ironic outcome of the black Civil Rights movement has been the creation of a new black middle class which is increasingly separate from the black underclass.

Henry Louis Gates

The historical basis for the gap between the black middle class and underclass shows that ending discrimination, by itself, would not eradicate black poverty and dysfunction. We also need intervention to promulgate a middle-class ethic of success among the poor, while expanding opportunities for economic betterment.

Henry Louis Gates

It's not white versus black any more, it's haves versus have-nots. Unless the black middle-classes unite to promote the interests of the black underclass, tension between them is inevitable. What we, the black middle class have to do, is think of a strategy to avert that. (Henry Louis Gates)

I've seen the future and it will be I've seen the future and it works If there's life after, we will see So I can't go like a jerk Systematic overthrow of the underclass Hollywood conjures images of the past New world needs spirituality that will last I've seen the future and it will be.

Prince (musician)

(Prince Duan and others) with the support of Empress Dowager took control of the Manchu Imperial Court. Using the most ignorant mind, by the most despicable means, with the most selfish goal, using Yihetuan, which was the most prone to rioting social underclass, to "support the Qing, eliminate the foreigners", and to takeover the regime. This coup d'etat was repeated 66 years later, by those aggressive Red Guards (China). History repeated itself, in minute details.

Tong Tekong