Clarence Darrow Quotes

The ruling ideas of each age have always been the ideas of the ruling class.

The more a ruling class is able to assimilate the most prominent men of a ruled class, the more solid and dangerous its rule.

These people—the employed, the somewhat privileged—are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls.

The ruling class is smarter than you, and they're more creative. And if you forget that lesson, you go down the drain. Because if they weren't, they wouldn't be around as long as they have been and as strong as they have been.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.

Every man who repeats the dogma of Mill that one country is no fit to rule another country must admit that one class is not fit to rule another class.

Subordinate classes have usually pushed for democracy, dominant classes nearly always have resisted it.

The courts, over time, have always responded to the dominant classes in our society.

One of the most constant laws of history is … immediately [if] any one class becomes preponderant—nobles, clergy, army, or the people—it speedily tends to enslave others.

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

Ultimately the views of the ruling class become embodied in the law.

The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist, and its power is employed above all to enforce this claim. It is modest only on this one point, however, because this officially nonexistent bureaucracy simultaneously attributes the crowning achievements of history to its own infallible leadership. Though its existence is everywhere in evidence, the bureaucracy must be invisible as a class. As a result, all social life becomes insane.

As Brooks Adams put it, the sole problem of our ruling class is whether to coerce or to bribe the powerless majority.

The state is the executive committee of the ruling class.

The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist.

The rich experience of history teaches that up to now not a single class has voluntarily made way for another class.

You who have read the history of nations, from Moses down to our last election, where have you ever seen one class looking after the interests of another?

That's the choice they allow you - now the outlet is being a pop star, which is really what I'm saying on the album in 'Working class hero'. As I told Rolling Stone, it's the same people who have the power, the class system didn't change one little bit.

Aristocrats fear the people, and wish to transfer all power to the higher classes of society.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

The middle has not enough class that I think about the middle class.

Who are the rabble and who are the ruled?

The slaves of today will become the tyrants of tomorrow--the proletariat overthrows the hegemon to become the hegemon itself, only to be eventually overthrown by a proto-hegemon that will in turn lose its position. It is this dizzying cycle that keeps humanity chasing the tail it lost millennia ago

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.

Because you look at it, you know, and there's basically one set of rules that protect that industrial ruling class. That's what the governments do, that's what the religions do. They protect the interests of that industrial ruling class.