Suzanne Collins Quotes

I think that the thing that is really strong with 'The Hunger Games' is just that it comes from a very strong idea.

'The Hunger Games' takes place in Panem, a country which is part of America. It's post-apocalyptic. There's been a global war. The Panem country is what remains of this hugely destructive war.

Americans should be ashamed of how aflutter they get about Downton Abbey - it's unpatriotic. I seem to remember we fought a revolution so as not to put up with this nonsense, where notions of station are so unforgiving that upper and lower echelons are practically different species.

Man has set man against man, Washed against unwashed.

We have two American flags always; one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it, it means that things are under control; when the poor fly it, it means danger, revolution.

I wanted to make the world of 'The Last Book in the Universe' as real as possible, so I spent a lot of time thinking about it. I decided the world would be a very different place, but people would be pretty much the same.

Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.

It is impossible for one class to appreciate the wrongs of another.

The rich stick together; the poor and the marginalised are thrown together.

For me, any fiction of nobles and swords necessarily has to be a story of corruption, injustice and savagely violent conflict - because any other treatment is going to have all the heft and realistic honesty of a bedtime fairy tale for five year olds.

All history has been a history of class struggles between dominated classes at various stages of social development.

Watching people just look out for themselves, I think, is extremely interesting. It goes right back to something like 'The Beggar's Opera' - the underbelly of society, how it operates, and how that reflects their so-called betters.

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.

If the French noblesse had been capable of playing cricket with their peasants, their chateaux would never have been burnt.

Autocracy is a government of the few from above; Bolshevism is a government of the few from below.

Victorian values meant brutalizing people who were often poor.

You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It's not if, it's when.

As people get more desperate, history suggests that they're not going to rise in a mighty proletarian tidal wave and wash away their oppressors. They're gonna turn on each other.

It is the doctrine of the oligarchy that there is nothing that we hold in common, that the commonwealth is a myth, that it is even a sign of softheadedness and weakness. The oligarchical power feeds on the sense that we are all individuals, struggling on our own, and ennobled by the effort.

With 'Hunger Games,' it's about people rising up to fight against a corrupt government that controls them.

The way everyone in London is right up against each other makes it very real to you growing up, the fact that people have different lives to you. And that causes problems; of course it does.

Those who sit at the feast will continue to enjoy themselves even though the veil that separates them from the world of toiling reality below has been lifted by mass revolts and critics.

Similarly, the Marquis is presented in this film as someone who would disturb the status quo and therefore must be kept imprisoned.

If we were in India now, there would be servants standing in the corners of this room and I wouldn't notice them. That is what my society is like, that is what the divide is like.

Social inequality … divides society into two classes -- the wage-slaves and the grabbers of capital