Gordon S. Wood Quotes

We have been taught by experience the danger of the levelling spirit.

All great revolutions are led by aristocrats.

In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement.

… the process of social change was not merely a matter of new inventions pressing on old institutions: it was a matter of new classes displacing old.

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

You cannot sift out the poor from the community. The poor are indispensable to the rich.

You may be the most liberal, Liberal Englishman, and yet you cannot fail to see the categorical difference between the responsible and the irresponsible classes.

Revolutions break out when opposite parties, the rich and the poor, are equally balanced, and there is little or nothing between them.

We have two American flags always; one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it, it means that things are under control; when the poor fly it, it means danger, revolution.

This contempt for money is a trick developed by the rich to keep the poor without it.

In a superior civilization, as, for example, that of the Indo-Aryans, the being who is without a characteristic form or caste... would emerge as a pariah. In this respect America is a society of pariahs. There is a role for pariahs. It is to be subjected to beings whose form and internal laws are precisely defined. Instead the modern pariahs seek to become dominant themselves and to exercise their dominion over all the world.

… an army of Gatsbys wanting not to overturn the social order but only to belong to the upper crust.

The oligarchic character of the modern English commonwealth does not rest, like many oligarchies, on the cruelty of the rich to the poor. It does not even rest on the kindness of the rich to the poor. It rests on the perennial and unfailing kindness of the poor to the rich.

When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.

All history has been a history of class struggles between dominated classes at various stages of social development.

And understand: class differences will not save you.

Class is real. It can't be faked.

Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.

Between richer and poorer classes in a free country a mutually respecting antagonism is much healthier than pity on the one hand and dependence on the other, as is, perhaps, the next best thing to fraternal feeling.

Class structures are a luxury that we cannot afford.

I think there's really strong social stratification in South Asia.

Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.

I don't mind the rich getting richer, but the poor shouldn't be getting poorer, and there should be more people moving into the middle class.

The Sixties was a time of breaking down class barriers, although I think class still exists today in some areas.

Political institutions are a superstructure resting on an economic foundation.