Richard Burdon Haldane Quotes

Every society naturally divides itself into classes. The author of nature has bestowed on some greater capacities than on others--birth, education, talents and wealth, create distinctions among men as visible and of as much influence as titles, stars and garters. In every society, men of this class will command a superior degree of respect--and if the government is so constituted as to admit but few to exercise the powers of it, it will, according to the natural course of things, be in their hands.

Class structures are a luxury that we cannot afford.

His lordship may compel us to be equal upstairs, but there will never be equality in the servants hall.

The distinctions separating the social classes are false, in the last analysis they rest on force.

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

This College system went into practice to draw a line of demarcation between the two classes of society—it separated the children of the rich from the children of the poor.

The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.

I can be influenced by what seems to me to be justice and good sense; but the class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.

The higher classes constitute the mind of the single large whole of humanity; the lower classes constitute its limbs;

We once had a society stratified by bloodlines, in which the Protestant Establishment was in one class, immigrants were in another and African-Americans were in another. Now we live in a society stratified by education. In many ways this system is more fair, but as the information economy matures, we are learning it comes with its own brutal barriers to opportunity and ascent.

In this respect, higher education is now causing most of the growing inequality and strengthening class structure of the United States.

A dangerous chasm in the classes is alive and well in the United States of America. Don’t let anybody tell you it’s not.

The want of education and moral training is the only real barrier that exists between the different classes of men.

The point of my work is to show that culture and education aren't simply hobbies or minor influences. They are hugely important in the affirmation of differences between groups and social classes and in the reproduction of those differences.

Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.

They cannot divide us by saying that you're middle class or you're lower class.

The ignorant classes are the dangerous classes.

It is the dissimilarities and inequalities among men which give rise to the notion of honor; as such differences become less, it grows feeble; and when they disappear, it will vanish too.

I don't believe in social equality, and they know it.

The difference between rich and poor is becoming more extreme, and as income inequality widens the wealth gap in major nations, education, health and social mobility are all threatened.

The purposeful restriction of knowledge has been at the heart of untold misery and hardship in this world. Serfs were kept illiterate so as to not jeopardize the feudal system. Slaves were kept in the dark on a variety of subjects so as to not provide them the possibility of escape.

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.

An imbalance between the rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.

Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? … Was it because our predecessors were thick? Does anybody really think that they didn't get what we had because they didn't have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand.

The courts, over time, have always responded to the dominant classes in our society.