Billy Bragg Quotes

People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.

War is rich old men protecting their property by sending middle class and lower class young men off to die. It always has been.

This is the problem for which revolutionary theory has yet to find the right solution, if there is one. The difficulty is that the economic interests of the two classes are antagonistic.

The wealth of the country, its capital, its credit, must be saved from the predatory poor as well as the predatory rich, but above all from the predatory politician.

These men no longer see the enemy in the bourgeoisie, they see him in the communists. They are afraid of competition; instead of leaders they have become bankers of men in a monopoly situation, and the least hint of competition makes them crazy with terror and despair.

Do the rhetorical quarrels of bourgeois political parties have anything to do with the interests of the humble and downtrodden?

There once was this powerful, both capital and political, class who cared about supporting and affirming a solid middle class in this country.

What you must understand is oppression does not end with the niggers. It does not end with the poor people, it doesn't end with the women, or the pregnant women. It goes on up the line to the executive who has his bag searched in the airport.

If the people at the top think that reaching for a gun will solve the problem, why shouldn't the people at the bottom think the same?

In revolutionary times the rich are always the people who are most afraid.

Poor people have the blues because they're poor and hungry. Rich people can't sleep at night because they're trying to hold on to their money and everything they have.

There is a vulgar persuasion, that the ignorance of women, by favoring their subordination, ensures their utility. 'Tis the same argument employed by the ruling few against the subject many in aristocracies; by the rich against the poor in democracies; by the learned professions against the people in all countries.

Hear me people: We have now to deal with another race - small and feeble when our fathers first met them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is a disease with them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule.

The rich are always afraid.

The rich don't have to kill to eat. They employ people, as they call it. The rich don't do evil themselves. They pay. People do all they can to please them, and everybody's happy.

There is no rest for the humble except in despising the great, whose only thought of the people is inspired by self-interest or sadism.

God, I love the "fine morality" of the wealthy and powerful. You'll spill tears over your own, in a heartbeat. And then never even look twice at people below you, whose very lives are ground under every day, day after day, year after year.

the rich are different only because people treat them as if they were.

In England the rich own the poor and the men own the women.

I was told, continued Egremont, that an impassable gulf divided the Rich from the Poor; I was told that the Privileged and the People formed Two Nations, governed by different laws, influenced by different manners, with no thoughts or sympathies in common; with an innate inability of mutual comprehension.

Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.

Most people have it all wrong about wealth in America. Wealth is not the same as income. If you make a good income each year and spend it all, you are not getting wealthier. You are just living high. Wealth is what you accumulate, not what you spend.

Why certain political classes want purposefully to keep Americans in a state of perpetual debt and uncertainty and why certain people don't want a middle class - because middle class creates a certain happiness. You know what I mean?

If whites would vote their economic interests, not their racial fears, we the people who have the most need for change have the power to bring about that change nonviolently.

The poor yield to the rich, the common people to the upper ten, the servants to their masters, the ignorant to the scholars; but there is nobody who does not imagine that he is really better than others.