Voltairine de Cleyre Quotes

With the coming of peace, the workers are no longer needed as soldiers; they are no longer comrades, defenders of the fatherland, heroes. Once more they become beasts of burden, objects of exploitation.

With the laborers of England generally, does not the moral coercion of want subject their will as despotically to that of their employer, as the physical constraint does the soldier, the seaman, or the slave?

We have only dented the fortress and the wage slaves are still locked in their cells.

The worker is always in the sun while the landowner is always in the shade.

Solidarity forever …. We stand outcast and starving from the wonders we have made.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

All down history, nine-tenths of mankind have been grinding corn for the remaining one-tenth, been paid with the husks, and bidden to thank God they had the husks.

There is something wrong in a government where they who do the most have the least. There is something wrong when honesty wears a rag, and rascality a robe; when the loving, the tender, eat a crust, while the infamous sit at banquets.

Capitalists … can grow rich only where there is an oppressed body of labourers

We have stricken the shackles from 4,000,000 human beings and brought all laborers to a common level, but not so much by the elevation of former slaves as by reducing the whole working population, white and black, to a condition of serfdom. While boasting of our noble deeds, we are careful to conceal the ugly fact that by our iniquitous money system we have manipulated a system of oppression which, though more refined, is no less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery.

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

In poor countries, the rich and powerful crush the poor and powerless.

The capitalist class shoots down mothers and children. It stops at nothing, no matter how monstrous, to prevent the organization of the workers.

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slaver's scars, I am the Red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek— And finding only the same ole stupid plan Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

The machines, which mark the triumph of science, become, by reason of the antithetic conditions of the social plexus, instruments which impoverish millions and millions of artisans and free peasants.

We believe this is a most ill-judged and suicidal act ... from which we should emerge only through blood and fire or chains and slavery more dire than any we have yet known. There are men earning 15/-, 20/-, 25/- and 30/- a week. I ask, will those men be likely, in a body, to keep the Sacred Holiday? I say not; and, if not, who will be sacrificed? The answer is easy. The most determined, resolute and oppressed.

Ever greater grows the mass of the proletariat, ever vaster the army of the unemployed, ever sharper the contrast between oppressors and oppressed, ever fiercer that war of classes between bourgeoisie and proletariat which divides modern society into two hostile camps and is the common characteristic of ever industrial country.

For the first time in the life of the great republic, there was a political organization which grappled directly and fundamentally with the growing injustice which marked the dealings between Exploiters and the Exploited

Who is looking out for the working class? The answer is, Nobody!

I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.

The rich rob the poor, and the poor rob one another.

We're all born into whatever citizenship, circumstances, or class we happen to be born into. Immigrants and so many people in the working class work so hard every day for nickels and pennies and scraps to just barely get by and then realize that this precious life has been completely drained out of us.

No system has ever as yet existed which did not in some form involve the exploitation of some human beings for the advantage of others.

To constrain the brute force of the people, the European governments deem it necessary to keep them down by hard labor, poverty and ignorance, and to take from them, as from bees, so much of their earnings, as that unremitting labor shall be necessary to obtain a sufficient surplus to sustain a scanty and miserable life.

In war, the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich makes slaves of the poor.