Michael Parenti Quotes

Choose equality …. Inequality has the natural and necessary effect … of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.

Abstraction and luxury are the guard dogs of the upper class.

The essence of a class system is not that the privileged are conscious of their privileges, but that the deprived are conscious of their deprivations.

One of the most considerable advantages the great have over their inferiors is to have servants as good as themselves.

I'm not posh or common, I'm in between.

I'm just a regular upper-middle-class guy who happens to be a billionaire.

I'm ashamed to say that I'm from a very privileged background.

There isn't much discussion of ruling class in America even in Boston, probably one of the most class-conscious cities in the country?

Everything is about class in England, whether it's upper, lower or middle. Why should that be?

Bums are the well-to-do of this day. They didn't have as far to fall.

I'm not a bourgeois person, never will be.

Of course the lower classes have always felt downtrodden and aspired to a better life. But there is this theory that people respond to a class structure in England - there was a time when people knew who they were and knew whom they served and as long as management wasn't abusive, it was a good life for people.

Rich is not better.

For somebody in my neighborhood to aspire or revere a person from the upper class, that is the most ugly and pathetic behavior you could exhibit.

The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.

Class is more important than a game.

In all my novels, a sense of place - not just geographic but social - is a critical element. I have always been drawn to the novels of Edith Wharton, among others, where social dynamics are crucial. Wharton's class consciousness fascinates me, and some of the tension in my books stems from that.

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.

Poor men's words have little weight.

One of the primary tests of the mood of a society at any given time is whether its comfortable people tend to identify, psychologically, with the power and achievements of the very successful or with the needs and sufferings of the underprivileged.

The ignorance of the working class and the superior intelligence of the privileged class are superstitions fostered by ... universities and churches, and by all the centers of privilege.

The higher classes constitute the mind of the single large whole of humanity; the lower classes constitute its limbs;

The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich.

BRAZILIFICATION:The widening gulf between the rich and the poor and the accompanying disappearance of the middle classes.

There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.