Charles Murray Quotes

And understand: class differences will not save you.

The struggle, begun this morning upon the hustings of your old town, is not a struggle between two men—it is a struggle between two countries. On the one side, the side of the Whig candidate, hangs the red banner beneath which your senate has been sacked, your commerce has been wrecked, your nobility has been dishonored, your peasants have been starved. On the other side … floats the green flag beneath which your senate sat, your commerce thrived, your nobility honored, your peasants prospered.

The political tendencies of the various social classes are based on a correct practical instinct.

The historical method is often deemed conservative, because it traces the gradual and stately growth of our venerable institutions; but it may exercise a precisely opposite influence by showing the gross injustice which was blindly perpetrated during this growth. The historical method is supposed to prove that economic changes have been the inevitable outcome of natural laws. It just as often proves them to have been brought about by the self-seeking action of dominant classes.

The complex origins of class cleavage in politics are not easily unraveled

The history of the Republican Party is marked by vacillation between its founding principle of opportunity and its domination by the wealthy elite.

A permanent division of labor inevitably creates occupational and class inequality and conflict.

The economic and political roots of the conflicts are too strong for us to pretend to create a lasting state of harmonious understanding between men.

Class structures are a luxury that we cannot afford.

The more dynamic the capitalistic expansion, the greater the disparity. It is from the disparity that we are going to get all the political upheaval for the next few years.

In New York, you've got Donald Trump, Woody Allen, a crack addict and a regular Joe, and they're all on the same subway car.

Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.

No real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist.

Political institutions are a superstructure resting on an economic foundation.

In today’s America the working class is paid to fight wars that the powerful would never risk.

The middle class is always a firm champion of equality when it concerns a class above it; but it is its inveterate foe when it concerns elevating a class below it.

The notion that all human beings born into this world enter at birth into a definite social and economic classification, in which classification they must remain permanently through life, is wholly false and fatal to a progressive civilization.

Women are now in the situation of the mass of mankind a few years since, when science and learning were in the hands of priests, and property was held by vassalage.

I ... think public service and private misery inseparably linked together.

The ruling ideas of each age have always been the ideas of the ruling class.

Can we blame an elector of the poorer classes, who has only the choice among two or three rich men, for requiring from the one he votes for a pledge to those measures which he considers as a test of emancipation from the class-interests of the rich?

[Capitalism is] a special machine for the suppression of one class by another.

The division of society into estates or castes means in effect that conceptually and organizationally these ‘natural’ forms are established without their economic basis ever becoming conscious

The Left’s essential mental instrument is class analysis, according to which society is best understood in terms of the competing interests of aggregate groups.

The U. S. business class is highly class conscious and its members have long seen themselves as fighting a bitter class war, except that they don’t want anybody to know about it.