Marge Piercy Quotes

Farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing élite set itself above the disease-ridden masses.

You have six of the ten wealthiest counties in America surround Washington, D.C., and the poor and middle class are getting squeezed while people at the top and people with influence in government seem always to be doing better.

Charity has always been a expression of the guilty consciences of a ruling class.

The interesting thing about class warfare is that it's only class warfare if it's up, not down. If you talk about welfare cheats or something, that's not class warfare because it's down; you have to talk about rich people before it's class warfare.

The American oligarchy increasingly has less in common with the American people than it does with the equivalent oligarchies in Germany or Mexico or Japan.

God, I love the "fine morality" of the wealthy and powerful. You'll spill tears over your own, in a heartbeat. And then never even look twice at people below you, whose very lives are ground under every day, day after day, year after year.

There is only one class of men, the privileged class

It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.

Bums are the well-to-do of this day. They didn't have as far to fall.

The Occupy movement has drawn attention to how too many in the 1 percent get to play by their own rules while exploiting the 99 percent.

We need wealthy dogs off the seats of power. They're taking us back to feudalism and I really don't want that. But I'm very far from being a socialist.

One must denounce the economic, financial, and social mechanisms and structures that are manipulated by the rich and powerful for their own benefit at the expense of the poor

History shows that when you have continuing income inequality it is an invitation to class conflict.

Choose equality …. Inequality has the natural and necessary effect … of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.

Mankind is divided into rich and poor, into property owners and exploited; and to abstract oneself from this fundamental division, and from the antagonism between poor and rich, means abstracting oneself from fundamental facts.

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.

That certain groups do much better in America than others—as measured by income, occupational status, test scores and so on – is difficult to talk about.

I'm here to speak for those who say the American Dream isn't working for them, because I know it isn't. I'm here to say it's not your fault: the ruling class... has failed you.

Some members of the ruling class are making a concerted effort to expand the wealth gap.

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

The extremely wealthy have disproportionate influence on policies that impact us all. This corrupts our politics and leads to poorer people being denied the economic opportunity to flourish in life.

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

The ruling class is the rich. . . . And those people are so able to manipulate our democracy that they really control the democracy.

There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.

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