Daniel Bell Quotes

Entire sections of the ruling classes are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.

The modern proletarian class doesn't carry out its struggle according to a plan set out in some book or theory; the modern workers' struggle is a part of history, a part of social progress, and in the middle of history, in the middle of progress, in the middle of the fight, we learn how we must fight...

The working class must be emancipated by the working class., Woman must be given her true place in society by the working class. Child labor must be abolished by the working class. Society must be reconstructed by the working class. The working class must be employed by the working class ., The fruits of labor must be enjoyed by the working class. War, bloody war, must be ended by the working class.

The hope that poverty and ignorance may gradually be extinguished, derives indeed much support from the steady progress of the working classes during the nineteenth century.

The middle-class America of my youth was another country.

Politics can't motivate people. The desire to get rich—that is the only way to mobilize the whole society.

The man who is possessed of wealth, who lolls on his sofa or rolls in his carriage, cannot judge the wants or feelings of the day-laborer.

We've got to keep an eye on the battle that we face - a war on workers. And you see it everywhere. It is the Tea Party. And there's only one way to beat and win that war - the one thing about working people is, we like a good fight.

The General Strike has taught the working class more in four days than years of talking could have done.

As society advances the standard of poverty rises.

The workers of the nation were tired of waiting for corporate industry to right their economic wrongs, to alleviate their social agony and to grant them their political rights. Despairing of fair treatment, they resolved to do something for themselves.

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

We have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.

I belong to the generation of workers who, born in the villages and hamlets of rural Poland, had the opportunity to acquire education and find employment in industry, becoming in the course conscious of their rights and importance in society.

I think you can have a Left that isn't culturally conservative talking about lunch-bucket issues.

The 1970s - I was ten in 1975 - were a bad decade in all sorts of ways but the middle class had comfortable assumptions about the prospects for its children. The middle class was smaller then; it was a much less competitive Britain, less meritocratic.

We would betray Mexicans' hopes for change if we felt satisfied with what we've accomplished so far.

We tend to admire the people in our society who have accumulated such wealth as to seem somehow great. But we shouldn't forget that it was the everyday working class man who made this country great.

We all know from a study of history the progress of the working people from the stage of barbarism to that of slavery, serfdom and later individual freedom... .

However illusionary the beliefs and doctrines of traditional European Socialism, it reflects therefore genuine social and political tensions.

Human society can only adapt to social change at a certain rate.

The Great Society has arrived and the task of our generation is to bring it under control.

You can't find your way to social reform through the forces that made social reform necessary.

Slowly but surely the old establishment is being replaced by a new, larger, more meritocratic middle class—a middle class that will include millions of people who traditionally may see themselves as working class but whose ambitions are far broader than their parents and grandparents.

… mankind will no longer passively submit to crushing poverty with its effects of death, disease, and decline.