Charles Barkley Quotes

No feature of the Obama presidency has been sadder than its constant efforts to divide us, to curry favor with some Americans by castigating others.

The history of the Republican Party is marked by vacillation between its founding principle of opportunity and its domination by the wealthy elite.

The thing is, and Americans are starting to realize this now, that while street gangs are violent, the Democrats and Republicans are worse. They are worse because their decisions affect your life.

I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half.

Social issues have been used to distract Americans from their own self interests since Nixon's southern strategy, and now people are paying the price.

We're seeing quite a lot of people who really would like a return to class-based politics.

The enmity of such a party towards Socialism does not mean that the members are only prejudiced against it because they do not know it; it means that they are possessed of bourgeois ideas, and wish to determine their policy accordingly.

Our greatest political disease -- the disease of thinking that the community is divided into the relatively rich and the relatively idle, and the laborious poor, and that every social and political controversy can be resolved into the question: What side are you on?

The struggle, begun this morning upon the hustings of your old town, is not a struggle between two men—it is a struggle between two countries. On the one side, the side of the Whig candidate, hangs the red banner beneath which your senate has been sacked, your commerce has been wrecked, your nobility has been dishonored, your peasants have been starved. On the other side … floats the green flag beneath which your senate sat, your commerce thrived, your nobility honored, your peasants prospered.

The political tendencies of the various social classes are based on a correct practical instinct.

The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don’t acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.

Partly, identity politics is a result of economic failure.

The Democratic Party has become the party of the coastal elite, and the Republican Party is the party of the working class and that average American citizen who's been struggling over the past eight years with Obama in the White House.

Politicians are dividing us based on caste lines.

There are two forms of populism, left-wing populism and right-wing populism. Right-wing populism requires the denigration of an "Other." Left-wing populism tends to be about the haves and have-nots.

The culture war is between the winners and those who think they're losers who want to become winners. The losers think the only way they can become winners is by banding together all the losers and them empowering a leader of the losers to make things right for them.

I think the identity politics that have been played, particularly the class-warfare version of identity politics that has been played, has put America into a class-based society - more so than at any point in my lifetime.

I feel that we're dividing along class lines for the first time in our history. Now one thing that has happened in this reaction to globalization is that the elites are not respectful of the values of those who are ordinary citizens, so we seem to be dividing ourselves into ever-smaller identity groups, each with its own narrative, each with its own grievance, and that's a problem.

I've always believed in challenging Republicans where they think they are strongest.

'Be faithful to your roots' is the liberal version of 'Stay in your ghetto.'

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

There is a process of social and of political differentiation going on in the real working class all the time.

And understand: class differences will not save you.

Let me put it this way: I think Republicans tend to keep the ball in play, Democrats go for broke.

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