It was difficult for me to distinguish one class from another [in America], everybody looked middle-class in European eyes, including the black students in the university and the beggars in the street.

I call bourgeois anyone who says no to himself, who gives up struggle and renounces love in favor of his security. i call bourgeois anyone who places anything above feeling.

The very development of the American city has removed poverty from the living, emotional experience of millions upon millions of middle-class Americans.

The bourgeois prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire.

A moderately honest man with a moderately faithful wife, moderate drinkers both, in a moderately healthy house: that is the true middle class unit.

I have to live for others and not for myself; that's middle class morality.

Behind the contained and orderly lives we lead as members of the respectable middle class there's a terrible human capacity that may one day overwhelm any of us.

The provincial, the middle-class, the bourgeois, are to be found everywhere; they are necessary, i suppose-only, when you differ from their own narrow molds, they may try to crucify you.