Peter Bergen Quotes

A person born in the middle class, as I was, educated in bourgeois institutions, … is poorly prepared to take a leading part in revolutionary activity.

The want of education and moral training is the only real barrier that exists between the different classes of men.

People like me who grew up in a working-class town, who don't have a college education, you don't usually hear from us.

The rich don’t want the poor to get ahead of them.

This College system went into practice to draw a line of demarcation between the two classes of society—it separated the children of the rich from the children of the poor.

History teaches us that the great revolutions aren’t started by people who are utterly down and out, without hope and vision. They take place when people begin to live a little better—and when they see how much yet remains to be achieved.

The most disastrous revolutions are produced by the extreme of physical want; the most happy, by wants of a moral kind, physical want being absent.

Poverty gives rise to the desire for change, the desire for action and the desire for revolution.

This country's going to have a revolution if something doesn't happen the haves and have - nots.

I never met a poor person who wanted to soak the rich; they want to get rich.

If you have extremes of haves and have-nots where the gap keeps growing, the have-nots group together and create social disorder, as they can't see a way out of their situation.

In the underdeveloped countries, we have young men and women, many of them of capacity but without opportunity to improve themselves. They cannot do so without help.

There are precedents for what happens when societies allow the divide between rich and poor to get so huge that it stops being funny and starts becoming a sick, blood-boiling joke. If you had a Tardis, you could go back to 1917 and ask the Russian royal family how it was all going.

No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.

It is development, not poverty, that causes upheaval and terrorism.

Ignorant people are apt to overrate the value of what is called education. The sons of the poor, having suffered the privations of poverty, think of wealth as the mother of joy.

The difference between rich and poor is becoming more extreme, and as income inequality widens the wealth gap in major nations, education, health and social mobility are all threatened.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.

If we continue to create a world where there is poverty and disrespect, there will continue to be terrorism.

At Ellis Island, I mean, you didn't go there if you arrived in first class. It was only the poorest, the people in the worst shape.

I went to work in a woman's home in Los Angeles as a mother's helper. I worked there about two years. Went to school with all rich kids. I was the only poor kid in the school, and I was already insecure. But my voice saved me because I sang in school, and I was real popular because of my voice.

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.

An imbalance between the rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.

In the modern world, it is not the poor and the oppressed who have led the great revolutions and/or carried out the worst deeds of violence; rather, it is militant vanguards from among the better educated and more moneyed circles of society.

The revolution... is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters.