Nicolas Chamfort Quotes

Globalization is a form of totalitarianism... It is the rich who rule, and the poor live as they can.

If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life.

Poor people who had escaped from poverty as I had, feared it, hated it and fled from it all their lives. Those born rich could afford to be touched by it.

Coming from where I came from, it was unimaginable to ever be wealthy. That was just too far out of my reach.

I'd like to live as a poor man with lots of money.

The poor don’t know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.

Inequality [is] a social control mechanism supported by financial interests’ belief in the desirability of oligarchy.

But avarice and ambition in the rich, in the poor the hatred of labour and the love of present ease and enjoyment, are the passions which prompt to invade property, passions much more steady in their operation, and much more universal in their influence. Wherever there is great property there is great inequality. For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many.

In verity we are the poor. This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands and thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of a stable upper class that is responsible for much of the vulgarity of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this deficiency?

"Freedom" in capitalist countries exists only for those who possess money and who consequently hold power.

We who are rich are often demanding and difficult. We shut ourselves up in our apartments and may even use a watchdog to defend our property. Poor people, of course, have nothing to defend and often share the little they have. When people have all the material things they need, they seem not to need each other. They are self-sufficient. There is no interdependence. There is no love.

Sane is rich and powerful. Insane is wrong and poor and weak. The rich are free, the poor are put in cages. Res Ipsa Loquitur, amen. Mahalo.

Distance, n. The only thing that the rich are willing for the poor to call theirs and keep.

Class war is not the cause of social progress; it is a disease developed in the course of social progress. The cause of the disease is the inability to subsist, and the result of the disease is war.

A poore mans Cow dies a rich mans child.

It's easier to ask for money from the poor than from the wealthy.

Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes.

I'm not used to having a boss. I'm the boss. I don't need the money. I'm filthy f... rich!

Socially, I never belonged to any class, rich or poor. To the rich I was poor, and to the poor I was poor pretending to be like the rich.

If the poor ever feel poor as the rich do, we will have a most bloody revolution.

The real difference between democracy and oligarchy is poverty and wealth. Wherever men rule by reason of their wealth, whether they be few or many, that is an oligarchy, and where the poor rule, that is a democracy.

The poor have the same basic pleasures as the rich, and the rich will always resent it.

You speak of poverty and dependence. Who are poor and dependent? Who are rich and independent? When was it that men agreed to respect the appearance and not the reality?