Nancy Isenberg Quotes

Class defines how real people live. They don’t live the myth. They don’t live the dream. Politics is always about more than what is stated, or what looms before the eye. Even when it’s denied, politicians engage in class issues. The Civil War was a struggle to shore up both a racial and a class hierarchy. The Confederacy was afraid that poor whites would be drawn in by Union appeals and would vote to end slavery—because slavery was principally a reflection of the wealthy planters’ self-interest. Today as well we have a large unbalanced electorate that is regularly convinced to vote against its collective self-interest. These people are told that East Coast college professors brainwash the young and that Hollywood liberals make fun of them and have nothing in common with them and hate America and wish to impose an abhorrent, godless lifestyle. The deceivers offer essentially the same fear-laden message that the majority of southern whites heard when secession was being weighed. Moved by the need for control, for an unchallenged top tier, the power elite in American history has thrived by placating the vulnerable and creating for them a false sense of identification—denying real class differences wherever possible.

What we really need to be understanding is that all of these things matter and they all stem from the fact that certain people live with power and authority and they want to maintain it.

The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.

The paradox of American democracy has been that its slogan of equal opportunity has meant, often, equal opportunity to get power over your fellows.

The primary object of every elite, or ruling class, is to maintain its own power and privilege.

Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for suppressing another.

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.

Inequality [is] a social control mechanism supported by financial interests’ belief in the desirability of oligarchy.

People who are divided are easier to control.

The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.

The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both.

Knowledge has always flowed upwards to bishops and kings, not down to serfs and slaves.

Through the wholesale destruction of the representatives of a class that from the beginning of history had been the directing and creative force in civilization, a process began which was almost mechanical.

Power doesn't just exist. It is threaded through different mechanisms of control. I'm interested in those complexities. But I want to address that in very forthright language and sometimes with images.

Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.

I remember being taught my place.

The distinctions separating the social classes are false, in the last analysis they rest on force.

If there are no superior people to look after a population, the common people have no security.

The reactionaries are in possession of force, in not only the army and police, but in the press and schools.

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.

The belief in the power of charms for good or evil produces not only honesty, but a great amount of gentle dealing. The powerful are often restrained in their despotism from a fear that the weak and helpless may injure them.

A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will.

If there is a class war—and there is—it is important that it should be handled with subtlety and skill. ... it is not freedom that Conservatives want; what they want is the sort of freedom that will maintain existing inequalities or restore lost ones.

However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, class, religion or all four.

Sex and race, because they are easy, visible differences, have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups, and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends.