Michael Laws Quotes

Class structures are a luxury that we cannot afford.

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 middle class is always a firm champion of equality when it concerns a class above it; but it is its inveterate foe when it concerns elevating a class below it.

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

Colour is not the issue in America; class is.

And understand: class differences will not save you.

The industrial society... recognises nothing except the power to acquire... No other kind of hope or satisfaction or pleasure can any longer be envisaged within the culture of capitalism.

They cannot divide us by saying that you're middle class or you're lower class.

The forces in a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

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

We in England, divide our people commonly into four sorts, as gentlemen, citizens or burgesses, yeomen, and artificers or labourers.

Between the working class and the capitalist class, there is an irrepressible conflict, a class struggle for life. No glib-tongued politician can vault over it, no capitalist professor or official statistician can argue it away; no capitalist parson can veil it; no labor faker can straddle it; no “reform” architect can bridge it over. It crops up in all manner of ways

The complex origins of class cleavage in politics are not easily unraveled

The higher classes constitute the mind of the single large whole of humanity; the lower classes constitute its limbs;

…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..

Any organized social group is always a stratified social body. There has not been and does not exist any permanent social group which is "flat" and in which all members are equal.

There is and always has been in an advanced stage of wealth and civilization, a conflict between labor and capital.

The struggle for power in our day lies not between Crown and people, or between a caste of nobles and a bourgeoisie, but between the classes who have property and the classes who have none.

Our nation’s political spectrum is not left to right, but top to bottom. People can locate themselves on this rich-to-poor pole for this is not a theoretical positioning: It’s based on our actual experience with money and power.

Some writers think that fiction is the space of great neutrality where all humans share the same concerns, and we are all alike. I don't think so. I'm interested in class warfare because I think it's real.

There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.

The most powerful forces in economics are not numbers or facts. They are prejudices and preferences. No amount of evidence will ever change the degree to which many of the rich and powerful prefer themselves to be richer and more powerful and others poorer and weaker.

A permanent division of labor inevitably creates occupational and class inequality and conflict.

Class still matters in Britain today.