John Lancaster Spalding Quotes

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

Actual aristocracy cannot be abolished by any law: all the law can do is decree how it is to be imparted and who is to acquire it.

There is none to tell the rich to go on striving, for a rich man makes the law that hallows and hollows his own life.

Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.

Common sense, in so far as it exists, is all for the bourgeoisie. Nonsense is the privilege of the aristocracy. The worries of the world are for the common people.

One baby is a patient baby, and waits indefinitely until its mother is ready to feed it. The other baby is an impatient baby and cries lustily, screams and kicks and makes everybody unpleasant until it is fed. Well, we know perfectly well which baby is attended to first. That is the whole history of politics.

As equality increases, so does the number of people struggling for predominance.

Class structures are a luxury that we cannot afford.

Shakespeare reveals human nature brilliantly: he shines a light on our instinctive desire to dominate each other.

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

Is the great working class oppressed? Yes, undoubtedly it is. God has intended the great to be great and the little to be little.

The defeats and victories for the people at the top aren't defeats and victories for the people at the bottom.

…in every city are found two diverse humors, and this arises from the fact that the common people desire neither to be commanded nor oppressed by the great, and the powerful men desire to command and oppress the people..

All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.

World events are the work of individuals whose motives are often frivolous, even casual.

Politics and the fate of mankind are shaped by men without ideals and without greatness. Men who have greatness within them don’t go far in politics.

Too many people hold a very narrow view of what motivates us. They believe that the only way to get us moving is with the jab of a stick or the promise of a carrot. But if you look at over 50 years of research on motivation, or simply scrutinize your own behavior, it's pretty clear human beings are more complicated than that.

Every class is unfit to govern.

... I'm much closer to the people at the bottom than the people at the top, and the latter won't forgive me for it.

The idea of man as the dominant mammal of the earth whose whole behaviour tends to be dominated by his own desire for dominance gripped me. It seemed to explain almost everything, and I applied it to everything.

Pride is always a better lever against the nobility than reason.

America is about class. To pretend that it isn't is very ignorant. No society has ever existed without some kind of a ruling class.

The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.

The poor yield to the rich, the common people to the upper ten, the servants to their masters, the ignorant to the scholars; but there is nobody who does not imagine that he is really better than others.

The Superclass tries to promote its values. Ordinary people complain of divine injustice, they envy power, and it pains them to see others having fun. They don’t understand that no one is having fun, that everyone is worried and insecure, and that what the jewels, cars, and fat wallets conceal is a huge inferiority complex.