Napoleon Bonaparte Quotes

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

Traditional autocrats leave in place existing allocations of wealth, power, status, and other re-sources which in most traditional societies favor an affluent few and maintain masses in poverty. But they worship traditional gods and observe traditional taboos. They do not disturb the habitual rhythms of work and leisure, habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of family and personal relations.

The very idea that there should be a certain class of people who give orders by virtue of their ownership of wealth and another huge class who take on orders and follow them because of their lack of access to wealth and power, that's unacceptable. So, sure it should be abolished.

Luxury may possibly contribute to give bread to the poor; but if there were no luxury, there would be no poor.

Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.

A communist is a man who has nothing and wishes to share it with the world.

The social order we have built recognizes no exploitation of man by man. In our country there are no rich people to live at the expense of the workers and peasants. Just as there are no poor people living on the charity of others.

You will be put under the heel of a majority which, if greater than you in numbers, is most undoubtedly inferior to you in political knowledge and experience …. You the wealthy, the orderly, the industrious, the enterprising portion of Ireland are to supply money for the that part of Ireland which is less orderly, less industrious, less enterprising and less law-abiding …

All down history, nine-tenths of mankind have been grinding corn for the remaining one-tenth, been paid with the husks, and bidden to thank God they had the husks.

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.

In a superior civilization, as, for example, that of the Indo-Aryans, the being who is without a characteristic form or caste... would emerge as a pariah. In this respect America is a society of pariahs. There is a role for pariahs. It is to be subjected to beings whose form and internal laws are precisely defined. Instead the modern pariahs seek to become dominant themselves and to exercise their dominion over all the world.

No true and perfect human society can be conceived which is not governed by some supreme authority…. Do the sheep when they are all assembled together rule and guide the shepherd?

The dirty truth is that the rich are the great cause of poverty.

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.

Since the third century Christianity has always served simultaneously those who supported the social order and those who wished to overthrow it... .

Not the number of noses, but the magnitude of interests, should furnish the elements by which the proportion of representation should be computed...The classes that represent civilization, the holders of accumulated capital and accumulated thought have a right to require securities to protect them from being overwhelmed by hordes who have neither knowledge to guide them nor stake in the Commonwealth to control them.

Our nation’s political spectrum is not left to right, but top to bottom. People can locate themselves on this rich-to-poor pole for this is not a theoretical positioning: It’s based on our actual experience with money and power.

There seem to be some persons who do not believe in freedom — for others. They fear that if the common people were free then they would not work for us, or obey us, or do as we think they ought to do. They are even called "lazy". Unhappily it is too true that we have many strains that seem to have become entirely exhausted, perhaps because of the over-work or the dissipation, or both, of their forbears. These people are literally "born tired".

Mankind has been and is divided into three parts: the Haves, the Have-Nots, and the Have-a-Little, Want Mores.

There happened in the Middle Ages what has happened so often since then. Those who were the beneficiaries of the established order were bent on defending it, not so much, perhaps, because it guaranteed their interests, as because it seemed to them indispensable to the preservation of society.

As long as men are men, a poor society cannot be too poor to find a right order of life, nor a rich society too rich to have need to seek it.

The patience and forbearance of the poor are among the strongest bulwarks of the rich.

A “fraternity” is the antithesis offraternity. The first (that is, the order or organization) is predicated on the idea of exclusion; the second (that is, the abstract thing) is based on a feeling of total equality.

The French Revolution gave us three... powerful ideas, or concepts - liberty, equality and fraternity. But these ideas... are not only right in themselves, but they are so because they come in the proper order. You cannot have equality without liberty, and you certainly cannot have fraternity without equality. The importance of this I learnt from music, because music evolves in time, and therefore the order inevitably determines the content.

Communism was a great system for making people equally poor - in fact, there was no better system in the world for that than communism. Capitalism made people unequally rich.