Peter Abrahams Quotes

Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with.

Sexism, like racism, goes with us into the next century. I see class warfare as overshadowing both.

If mankind were to continue in other than the present barbarism, a new path must be found, a new civilization based on some other method than technology.

The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.

I'm interested in illuminating the enormous disparity between vast poverty and the tiny upper class... This vast inequity is unfair by definition, and I am interested in illuminating that and, where possible, changing that.

The historical method is often deemed conservative, because it traces the gradual and stately growth of our venerable institutions; but it may exercise a precisely opposite influence by showing the gross injustice which was blindly perpetrated during this growth. The historical method is supposed to prove that economic changes have been the inevitable outcome of natural laws. It just as often proves them to have been brought about by the self-seeking action of dominant classes.

The history of all hither-to-existing society is the history of class struggles.

… modern civilization … enables us to cure sickness on a huge scale and to destroy each other on a huge scale. It enables us to liberate each other on a huge scale and to tyrannize each other on a huge scale…. There is no evidence of any continuous upward line of social progress

The clash of communism and capitalism sterilized rather than stimulated research on capital and inequality by historians, economists, and even philosophers.

I used to be obsessed with race. I'm more obsessed with class now.

The same way I'm not afraid of calling out systemic discrimination, I'm also not afraid of calling out inequality and the fact that inequality is growing in society and that affects everybody, regardless of race.

What history taught me is that societies are not static and that the straight line of progressive ideals - this thinking we have that a society will just magically become more egalitarian over time - is patently false.

We cannot effect meaningful change if we become complacent, if we become comfortable with our own positions in the status quo.

We live in a time where it's very much in vogue, constant search for pure utopian equality, and which, on one level, is quite amusingly silly but also on another probably very important.

The reversion of American society to a nation of the superrich and the rest... is straining the country in ways that go way beyond economics.

The precariat is the first class in history to be losing acquired rights - cultural, civil, social, economic, and political.

I love talking about space, our society, and what the future holds for us as a civilization.

There is no room any more for the divisive agenda which has been sought to be foisted on the common man.

I should not romanticize the simplicity of a village. For instance, the place from where I used to buy a packet of glucose biscuits in my village is now selling cellphones.

'Munmun' happened because the human world's dizzying inequality - of wealth and of power - had begun to send me over the edge, and I had to write something to try to help myself understand it a little better.

I think class is still an issue in this country.

Marxism is a success because it fuses the two inconsistent strains in Western thought - moral skepticism and moral indignation - and makes them complements in the attack against existing society.

I'd like to change the world. Eradicate poverty, racism, and sexism... all the usual things.

Justice has its anger, my lord Bishop, and the wrath of justice is an element of progress. Whatever else may be said of it, the French Revolution was the greatest step forward by mankind since the coming of Christ. It was unfinished, I agree, but still it was sublime. It released the untapped springs of society; it softened hearts, appeased, tranquilized, enlightened, and set flowing through the world the tides of civilization. It was good. The French Revolution was the anointing of humanity.

We have before us the glorious opportunity to inject a new dimension of love into the veins of our civilization.