Hilaire Belloc Quotes

In the last recession, 99 percent of us have lost wealth, but did you know that the top 1 percent increased their wealth five times? It tells you they create recessions so they get wealthier.

We need wealthy dogs off the seats of power. They're taking us back to feudalism and I really don't want that. But I'm very far from being a socialist.

The struggle for power in our day lies not between Crown and people, or between a caste of nobles and a bourgeoisie, but between the classes who have property and the classes who have none.

No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far, at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.

No one can become rich by the efforts of only their toil, but only by the discovery of some method of taxing the labor of others.

Everybody in politics claims to want to get everybody out of poverty. What's the opposite? Wealth. And what is often criticized by the left? Wealth.

The market economy is very good at wealth creation but not perfect at all about wealth distribution.

It is impossible for capitalists and laborers to have common interests.

A doctrine of class war seemed to provide a solution to the problem of poverty to people who know nothing about how wealth is created.

In this view, the role of the great majority of Americans is simply to buy the products produced, work happily for their wages, and leave all of the significant economic decisions to the capitalists.

The forces in a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

Socialism appeals to better classes and has far more strength. Attack the state and you excite feelings of loyalty even among the disaffected classes; but attack the industrial system and appeal to the state, and you may have loyalty in your favor.

The failure of Socialism since 1945 is that whilst encouraging us all, the creators of wealth, to produce less through strikes, it has caused us all to demand a higher level of our own product.

Political institutions are a superstructure resting on an economic foundation.

You may be the most liberal, Liberal Englishman, and yet you cannot fail to see the categorical difference between the responsible and the irresponsible classes.

Nor can one class appropriate the produce of the labour of another class, as the capitalists now appropriate and enjoy the wealth which the powers of the working man daily call into existence. It is inequality of exchanges which enables one class to live in luxury and idleness, and dooms another to incessant toil

Support of private ownership does not mean that anyone has the right to unlimited accumulation of wealth

So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings, goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury, and make sharper the contest between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.

There are no great lords who possess everything and a herd of people who have nothing

What did the workers and peasants gain when power passed from the kings and nobles to the bankers and manufacturers?

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.

This contempt for money is a trick developed by the rich to keep the poor without it.

One class did not overthrow another; the poor did not supplant the rich. But social relationships—the way people were connected one to another—were changed and decisively so.

Inequality is an inevitable product of capitalist activity, and expanding equality of opportunity only increases it—because some individuals and communities are simply better able than others to exploit the opportunities for development and advancement that capitalism affords.

It would be well for those interested to reflect whether there now exists, or ever has existed, a wealthy and civilized community in which one portion did not live on the labor of another.... Remember that labor is the only source of wealth, and how small a portion of it, in all old and civilized countries, even the best governed, is left to those by whose labor wealth is created.