William E. Gladstone Quotes

If the rabble were lopped off at one end and the aristocrats at the other, all would be well with the country.

The struggle for power in our day lies not between Crown and people, or between a caste of nobles and a bourgeoisie, but between the classes who have property and the classes who have none.

It is so obvious for the under-privileged to challenge the privileged, saying, 'How can you have something over me?' as opposed to the privileged person saying, 'How can we have something over the rest?' I find the latter more exciting.

Imagine a society in which there were neither rich nor poor. What evils, afflictions, sorrows, disorders, catastrophes, disasters, tribulations, misfortunes, agonies, calamities, despair, desolation and ruin would be unknown to man!

The messenger matters. When people of modest means complain about inequality, it usually gets written off as class warfare, but when billionaires complain, the problem is redefined.

You need just the right amount of protection for the rich under democracy: too little and the elite will not agree to democracy; too much and the poor will go ahead and have the revolution...

What are your masses [of humanity] but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?

Elites always tell poor people, “Work hard and play by the rules.”

The knowing minority had to impose its will on the majority, even by brute force. The great mass, the workers, are in economic slavery. They cannot accomplish their own liberation. Their minds are formed by their masters; they are incapable of understanding their true interests. It is left to the knowing minority to free the mass from the tutelage of its present masters. Only after this is done will the mass understand.

Is the great working class oppressed? Yes, undoubtedly it is. God has intended the great to be great and the little to be little.

The Privileged and the People form Two Nations.

All power is fast getting into the hands of the very lowest people.

Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses. Where equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority.

It is an ugly name, that of "The Masses," for the great majority of human beings in a nation.

Poor men's words have little weight.

The fundamental error of Europe has been to confine the light of knowledge to the wealthy and great, while the humble and the depressed have been as sedulously excluded from its participation as the wretched criminal, immured in a dungeon, is from the light of Heaven.

The history of the Roman Empire is also the history of the uprising of the Empire of the Masses, who absorb and annul the directing minorities and put themselves in their place.

One of the primary tests of the mood of a society at any given time is whether its comfortable people tend to identify, psychologically, with the power and achievements of the very successful or with the needs and sufferings of the underprivileged.

An elite has prospered with our kinds of institutions, but the same cannot be said of the masses.

There are two great enemies of thought and progress, the aristocracy of royalty and the aristocracy of gold.

The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.

Capitalism is very undemocratic. Capitalism gives you power according to your wealth while democracy gives you power according to your existence.

We must counter the strenuous efforts of the Aristocracy to appropriate to itself the power which rightly belongs to the people…. And to monopolize for themselves the enjoyment of liberty while they beguile the people with phantoms.

… the struggling masses

He [Andrew Jackson] looked after the little fellow who had no pull.