It is a life-and-death conflict between all those grand, universal, man-respecting principles which we call by the comprehensive t...erm democracy, and all those partial, person-respecting, class-favoring elements which we group together under that silver-slippered word aristocracy. If this war does not mean that, it means nothing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Talk about the flag or drugs or crime (never about race or class or justice) and follow the yellow brick road to the wonderful lan...d of "consensus." In place of honest argument among consenting adults the politicians substitute a lullaby for frightened children: the pretense that conflict doesn't really exist, that we have achieved the blessed state in which ... we no longer need politics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When we think offhand of a politician, we think of a man who works for a partial interest. At the worst it is his own pocket. At t...he best it may be his party, his class, or an institution with which he is identified. We never feel that he can or will take into account all the interests concerned, and because bias and partisanship are the qualities of his conduct, we feel, unless we are naively afflicted with the same bias, that he is not to be trusted too far. Now the word "statesman," when it is not mere pomposity, connotes a man whose mind is elevated sufficiently above the conflict of contending parties to enable him to adopt a course of action which takes into account a greater number of interests in the perspective of a longer period of time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I know that I will always be expected to have extra insight into black texts--especially texts by black women. A working-class Jew...ish woman from Brooklyn could become an expert on Shakespeare or Baudelaire, my students seemed to believe, if she mastered the language, the texts, and the critical literature. But they would not grant that a middle-class white man could ever be a trusted authority on Toni Morrison.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ermined and minked and Persian-lambed, Be-puffed (be-painted, too, alas!)... Be-decked, be-diamonded--be-damned! The Women of the Better Class.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Had middle class black women begun a movement in which they had labeled themselves "oppressed," no one would have taken them serio...usly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No matter how well-born, how intelligent, how highly educated, how virtuous, how rich, how refined, the women of to-day constitute... a political class below that of every man, no matter how base-born, how stupid, how ignorant, how vicious, how poverty-stricken, how brutal. The pauper in the almshouse may vote; the lady who devotes her philanthropic thought to making that almshouse habitable, may not. The tramp who begs cold victuals in the kitchen may vote; the heiress who feeds him and endows universities may not.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I assure you that in our next class we will concern ourselves solely with the history of Egypt, and not with the more lurid and no...n-curricular subject of living mummies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To most middle-class feminists, as to most middle-class non-feminists, working-class women remain mysterious creatures to be "reac...hed out to" in some abstract way. No connection. No solidarity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If a foreign country doesn't look like a middle-class suburb of Dallas or Detroit, then obviously the natives must be dangerous as... well as badly dressed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »