Eugene V. Debs Quotes

The boycott, which the bourgeoisie regards with sentimental tenderness when directed against the trade of its commercial rival, it considers as a crime when employed by the workers in defense of their livelihood.

Ever greater grows the mass of the proletariat, ever vaster the army of the unemployed, ever sharper the contrast between oppressors and oppressed, ever fiercer that war of classes between bourgeoisie and proletariat which divides modern society into two hostile camps and is the common characteristic of ever industrial country.

In Russia bureaucracy as the ruling class is master of production and produce, and the Russian workers are an exploited class.

Solidarity forever …. We stand outcast and starving from the wonders we have made.

Workers! Leave the Socialist Party. It is your enemy and ours.

The “natural laws of economics” are in fact tools in the hands of the avaricious and the greedy for keeping down and oppressing the laboring classes.

Political economy regards the proletarian like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being. It leaves this to criminal law, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics, and the beadle.

The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.

I am a communist and a worker, and I have lived in a decadent capitalist society where the workers are slaves.

The proletarian woman fights hand in hand with the man of her class against capitalist society.

When we hang the capitalists they will sell us the rope we use.

We have only dented the fortress and the wage slaves are still locked in their cells.

Many workers already realize that the rule of the Socialist or Communist party will be only the concealed form of the rule of the bourgeois class in which the exploitation and suppression of the working class remains.

With the coming of peace, the workers are no longer needed as soldiers; they are no longer comrades, defenders of the fatherland, heroes. Once more they become beasts of burden, objects of exploitation.

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

Overthrow the capitalist class.

It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism.

Harmony? No! Class war! Hatred to the death for the criminal bourgeoisie!

The Socialist Party of the United States is unilaterally opposed to the system of exploitation and class rule which is upheld and strengthened by military power.

Capitalists … can grow rich only where there is an oppressed body of labourers

War between the proletariat and the capitalist for their respective shares in the produce; on one side, wages, on the other, profits; each side exerting itself to carry off a maximum. Man becomes a wolf for his fellow-man. It is a question of eating one’s brother or being eaten by him. War between workers and workers for the sharing of wages. War between capitalists and capitalists for the sharing of profits.

The struggle against imperialism develops ever more into the decisive struggle between capital and labor.

For the laboring class there cannot exist a peace of compromise on the basis of a capitalist regime

In the society of to-day the means of production are a monopoly of the capitalistic class; the dependence of the working classes which results from this is the cause of misery and of servitude in all its forms.

The contest will be between the capitalists and operatives; for into these two classes it must ultimately divide society.