Will Durant Quotes

Class structures are a luxury that we cannot afford.

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

Poor men's words have little weight.

The Reformation has been called in a biting epigram "a rising of the rich against the poor."

So long as there are nobles and commoners, the wealthy and the poor, those with power will be heard, and those without ignored. That's the world.

And understand: class differences will not save you.

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

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

To understand the Left, one must understand that in its view the greatest evil is material inequality. The Left is more troubled by economic inequality than by evil as humanity has generally understood the term.

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.

Elites always tell poor people, “Work hard and play by the rules.”

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.

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

The lower middle classes as well as the peasants, … always side with the strongest

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 First Law of Class Warfare: Once inequalities develop, the upper classes can, with relative ease, drastically reduce the probability of success for any equalizing challenges to the system.

We can have a democracy or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.

… in the old days there were one thousand castes and destinies in India. These days, there are just two castes: Men with Big Bellies and Men with Small Bellies. And only two destinies: eat – or get eaten up

The rich don’t need to rely on government … -- they can buy … things for themselves. In the process, they become more distant from ordinary people, losing whatever empathy they may have once had. They also worry about strong government: one that could use its powers to … take some of their wealth, and invest it for the common good.

If the upper classes, through their political representatives, pass legislation that diminishes the income of the middle class and reduces services to the poor and further enrich the affluent, this is not class warfare. But if the middle class and the poor, and their representatives, complain that this is unfair, that is class warfare. So say some of our politicians who oppose class warfare.

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.

After thirty years of a collapsing middle class,” he writes, “after thirty years of an economy designed to stack the deck in favor of the big guys; after thirty years of a political and constitutional system increasingly rigged to work for economic elites — after all this, the people revolted.

We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well.

You are not going to lift everybody out of poverty through the kindness of wealthy people.

When conservatives talk about opportunity, they mean opportunities for the rich to get richer, for the powerful to get more powerful.