John Trudell Quotes

A person born in the middle class, as I was, educated in bourgeois institutions, … is poorly prepared to take a leading part in revolutionary activity.

The middle has not enough class that I think about the middle class.

It isn't what you earn but how spend it that fixes your class.

In the United States, the working class are Democrats. The middle class are Republicans. The upper class are Communists.

Inequality has the natural and necessary effect, under the present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.

Class isn't something you buy. Look at you. You have a $500 suit on and you're still a lowlife.

I would rather write for the instruction, or even the amusement of the poor than for the amusement of the rich.

The working class is my home country, and my future is linked with the proletariat.

The whole contention lies between those that labor for a living and those that do not.

My job is to raise issues relating to class in Ireland.

In order to find work for all the non-producers of our present society, in order to leave room for the industrial equipment to go on developing indefinitely, the working class will be compelled, like the capitalist class, to do violence to its taste for abstinence and to develop indefinitely its consuming capacities. Instead of eating an ounce or two of gristly meat once a day, when it eats any, it will eat juicy beefsteaks of a pound or two; instead of drinking moderately of bad wine, it will become more orthodox than the pope and will drink broad and deep bumpers of Bordeaux and Burgundy without commercial baptism and will leave water to the beasts

Choose equality …. Inequality has the natural and necessary effect … of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.

God help the rich, the poor can look after themselves

I remember arguing with kids on the street who were talking about Santa Claus. I said don't be so daft - Santa Claus doesn't come down our chimney. He's an economic Santa Claus; he goes down chimneys where they've got money.

Feed the poor and get rich or feed the rich and get poor.

Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.

Charity has always been a expression of the guilty consciences of a ruling class.

I got a chance to be in a society where the barriers between classes - social and economic - are not insuperable, where money is not everything all the time. Americans have been manipulated into a space by those who profit from the arrangements of that system. People feel a conscious disease - a dis-ease or an unease - but I don't think they know what causes it.

I am not your dear; I cannot lie down: send me to school soon, Mrs. Reed, for I hate to live here.

More important than anything else is for Americans to wise up to class warfare demagoguery and reject the politics of envy.

The interesting thing about class warfare is that it's only class warfare if it's up, not down. If you talk about welfare cheats or something, that's not class warfare because it's down; you have to talk about rich people before it's class warfare.

Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.

The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist.

The most efficient way of rendering the poor harmless is to teach them to want to imitate the rich.

Historically and politically, the petit-bourgeois is the key to the century. The bourgeois and proletariat classes have become abstractions: the petite-bourgeoisie, in contrast, is everywhere, you can see it everywhere, even in the areas of the bourgeois and the proletariat, what's left of them.