Keshub Chunder Sen Quotes

… 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

Allow not the abject to rule over and dominate them who are noble and worthy of honour, and suffer not the high-minded to be at the mercy of the contemptible and worthless, for this is what We observed upon Our arrival in the City (Constantinople), and to it We bear witness. We found among its inhabitants some who were possessed of an affluent fortune and lived in the midst of excessive riches, whilst others were in dire want and abject poverty. This ill beseemeth thy sovereignty, and is unworthy of thy rank…. strive thou to rule with equity among men

The central issue of our time remains the fact that the rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer.

What the poor did to the poor was the business of the poor, not the business of the proper people who ran the city.

America is like a melting pot. The people at the bottom get burned, and the scum floats to the top.

Traditionally, Indian society was divided into four main castes. At the top, Brahmins, as priests and teachers; second came the Kshatriyas, the warriors and rulers; third, Vaishyas, who were merchants; last, Shudras, the laborers. And below them all, the Dalits, or untouchables, called Harijans, or “children of God,” by Mahatma Gandhi

In India, cast not class … is what counts most in popular life.

India allows you the luxury of a million inequalities. You can be a schoolboy selling tea to passengers sitting in a state transport bus, but you are royalty when compared to a shirtless, barefoot village boy, from what was traditionally considered an untouchable caste, living on snails and small fish - and sometimes rats.

The Pariahs, our fellow beings, ought to be educated by the higher castes.

I think there's really strong social stratification in South Asia.

The forces in a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

There are huge divorces and divides and chasms in black America between the have-gots and the have-nots, between the monied and the poor, between the educated and the non-educated. And there are huge and growing chasms daily. And I want to say that it's not simply about generation. It's about genre.

Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones or inhabitants of different planets ... the rich and the poor.

If you have more rich people and more poor people and fewer people in the middle, what you lose is democracy.

The wall between rich and poor is a wall of glass which all can see.

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

The division of society into estates or castes means in effect that conceptually and organizationally these ‘natural’ forms are established without their economic basis ever becoming conscious

The class struggle, to which Marx has specially drawn attention, is a real factor, the tokens of which are to be found on every page of history. But the struggle is not confined only to two classes: the proletariat and the capitalist; it occurs between an infinite number of groups with different interests, and above all between the elites contending for power. The existence of these groups may vary in duration, they may be based on permanent or more or less temporary characteristics. In the most savage peoples, and perhaps in all, sex determines two of these groups.

Caste in India is the first and last reality.

There's more poor people in this country than there are rich, and I stick up for the poor people.

There are caste systems in American cities: Many are marginalized to the edges of urban centers due to real estate costs; price tags seem to lurk around human encounters; there's a cult of overwork in the middle class; workers at your local manicurist, your local fast casual restaurant, are exploited.

All the United States, it is a society that is split like to the bottom, that had very poor people in the country that is one of the wealthiest countries.

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

The West remains obsessed by the caste system.

Class still matters in Britain today.