Karl Marx Quotes

The ideology of a ruling class is of little use unless it is accepted by those being ruled.

The ruling class is smarter than you, and they're more creative. And if you forget that lesson, you go down the drain. Because if they weren't, they wouldn't be around as long as they have been and as strong as they have been.

Aristocrats fear the people, and wish to transfer all power to the higher classes of society.

As Brooks Adams put it, the sole problem of our ruling class is whether to coerce or to bribe the powerless majority.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.

It must always be remembered that all laws are naturally and inevitably evolved by the strongest force in a community, and in the last analysis made for the protection of the dominant class.

The capitalist class rules but does not govern: it contents itself with ruling the government.

There isn't much discussion of ruling class in America even in Boston, probably one of the most class-conscious cities in the country?

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.

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.

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.

Subordinate classes have usually pushed for democracy, dominant classes nearly always have resisted it.

The primary object of every elite, or ruling class, is to maintain its own power and privilege.

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

The ruling ideas of each age have always been the ideas of the ruling class.

One of the most constant laws of history is … immediately [if] any one class becomes preponderant—nobles, clergy, army, or the people—it speedily tends to enslave others.

However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, class, religion or all four.

Ultimately the views of the ruling class become embodied in the law.

To the reactionary ear every whispered criticism of the elite classes has always sounded like the opening shot of an uprising.

The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist, and its power is employed above all to enforce this claim. It is modest only on this one point, however, because this officially nonexistent bureaucracy simultaneously attributes the crowning achievements of history to its own infallible leadership. Though its existence is everywhere in evidence, the bureaucracy must be invisible as a class. As a result, all social life becomes insane.

Those who think must govern those that toil.

Every class is unfit to govern.

Who are the rabble and who are the ruled?

The state is the executive committee of the ruling class.

Because you look at it, you know, and there's basically one set of rules that protect that industrial ruling class. That's what the governments do, that's what the religions do. They protect the interests of that industrial ruling class.