Lord Acton Quotes

Every man who repeats the dogma of Mill that one country is no fit to rule another country must admit that one class is not fit to rule another class.

'The Prince' was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. 'Rules for Radicals' is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.

The state is nothing but an instrument of opression of one class by another - no less so in a democratic republic than in a monarchy.

Revolution applies a local anaesthetic to one class of society and operates on the other.

The real problem is that the way that power is given out in our society pits us against each other.

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 Privileged and the People form Two Nations.

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

…to make a commonwealth is to divide it into parties, which setteth them at perpetual variance, the one party endeavouring to preserve their eminence and inequality, and the other to attain their equality.

…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..

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.

In no form of government is there an absolute identity of interest between the people and their rulers

In every revolution, there are winners and losers. Every dystopia is a utopia for somebody else. It just depends where you are. Are you in the class that benefits, or are you in the class that's not?

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

In a change of masters the poor change nothing except their master's name.

As a Londoner I was able to see how the world of power and money cast its shadow on those who failed.

The value systems of those with access to power and of those far removed from such access cannot be the same. The viewpoint of the privileged is unlike that of the underprivileged.

Indeed, the existence of class, of social hierarchy, is as old as man himself. It prevails in the jungle where strength determines hierarchy; among men, it has also been savagely the same, whereby rulers vested with power through personal combat, or through lineal heritage as in the case of royalty, ravage their subjects.

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

It has always seemed to me that those who are without power, who have to create their own in a makeshifit way, know more about life than those who govern.

I've always stood on one fact - that all over the world, there are only two things, the Establishment and the poor people. The poor people are a massive majority and across the world they are exploited in different kinds of ways. The Establishment depends on exploiting raw materials and the poor.

Culturally, I have always been part of the proletariat. I lived side by side with the sons of glassblowers, fishermen and smugglers. The stories they told were shaper satires about the hypocrisy of authority and the middle classes, the two-facedness of teachers and lawyers and politicians. I was born politicized.

Democratic institutions are based on a reality of human nature: that those with power, however benign or even noble their intentions, will do what they can to keep it.

Similarly, the Marquis is presented in this film as someone who would disturb the status quo and therefore must be kept imprisoned.

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