Tony Benn Quotes

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

We all like to think of ourselves as a standard, and I can see that it is genuinely difficult for the English middle class to suppose that the working class is not desperately anxious to become just like itself. I am afraid this must be unlearned.

And understand: class differences will not save you.

If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life.

Class structures are a luxury that we cannot afford.

No real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist.

The rich don’t want the poor to get ahead of them.

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.

My job is to raise issues relating to class in Ireland.

A populist is someone who sees politics from an economic perspective rather than an ideological perspective. I’m a populist. The only thing that really matters is who is gets screwed and who is doing the screwing.

The U. S. business class is highly class conscious and its members have long seen themselves as fighting a bitter class war, except that they don’t want anybody to know about it.

One of the basic tenets of the working class is you want to get out of the working class.

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

Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.

A smaller government reflecting the needs of the middle class and poor is superior to a big government reflecting the needs of the privileged and powerful.

What is economics? A science invented by the upper class in order to acquire the fruits of the labor of the underclass

Our society will always remain an unstable and explosive compound as long as political power is vested in the masses and economic power in the classes. In the end one of these powers will rule. Either the plutocracy will buy up the democracy, or the democracy will vote away the plutocracy.

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

The neoliberal programs of the last generation have in fact been, and were intended to be, a pretty serious attack on democracy, but also they've led to stagnation or decline for large parts of the population - the working class, the lower middle class, these people have essentially been cast aside.

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?

In the Conservative Party we have no truck with outmoded Marxist doctrine about class warfare. For us it is not who you are, who your family is or where you come from that matters, but what you are and what you can do for your country that counts.

Capitalism will never fall on its own. It will have to be pushed. The accumulation of capital will never cease. It will have to be stopped. The capitalist class will never willingly surrender its power. It will have to be dispossessed.

There is no alternative to class struggle.

By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.

Social change rarely comes about through the efforts of the disenfranchised. The middle class creates social revolutions.