Matthew Arnold Quotes

Agitators are a set of interfering meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them. That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary.

It's kind of interesting and sick that the intellectual culture called the 1960s, "time of troubles," a dangerous period in which a lot of harm was done to the society. And the reason is because we were civilized and that's dangerous. That increased the commitment to democracy, to rights and so on, and this left people much less obedient.

The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing.

The workmen's revolution, with the terrors of destruction and murder, not only threatens us, but we have already been living upon its verge during the last thirty years, and it is only by various cunning devices that we have been postponing the crisis. The hatred and contempt of the oppressed people are increasing, and the physical and moral strength of the richer classes are decreasing: the deceit which supports all this is wearing out, and the rich classes have nothing wherewith to comfort themselves.

[Steven] Lerner said that unions and community organizations are, for all intents and purposes, dead. The only way to achieve their goals, therefore - the redistribution of wealth and the return of '$17 trillion' stolen from the middle class by Wall Street - is to 'destabilize the country.

I've got personal views on the '60s. You can't have freedom without paying the price for it.

The issue of civil rights was too much for the establishment to handle. One of the chapters of history that's least studied by historians is the 300 to 500 riots in the U.S. between 1965 and 1970.

People are pushing against the fabric of society all the time.

In 1962, the smallest things were upsetting to authority. It wasn't the Civil Rights Movement. It wasn't the Anti-war Movement. It was something else, but it was a harbinger of what was to come.

I got interested in politics during the civil rights movement and then Vietnam.

Human agitation, with all the vulgarity of needs small and great, with its flagrant disgust for the police who repress it … that alone determines revolutionary mental forms

Something is stirring in the hearts and minds of the people.

We can also build. It is we the workers who built these palaces and cities here in Spain and in America and everywhere. We, the workers, can build others to take their place. And better ones! We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that.

The real cause of this, as all real popular movements, not stimulated by the aristocracy, … was an apprehension on the part of the people, that their civil rights were invaded.

Social reformers who wish to improve capitalism in order to more easily to preserve it oppose … this formidable diffusion of Marx's thought among the masses.

There were communists in the civil rights movement who played a very helpful role.

Social revolutions are never simple.

Democracy is disruptive... there is no right in a democratic civil society to be free of disruption.

The more riots that come out of our college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow.

The laboring people should unite and should protect themselves against all idlers. You can divide mankind into two classes: the laborers and the idlers, the supporters and the supported, the honest and the dishonest. Every man is dishonest who lives upon the unpaid labor of others, no matter if he occupies a throne. All laborers should be brothers.

Organizing the working class in England or the U.S. or any other advanced capitalist country has been a daunting challenge.

The class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

I've got a fierce passion for politics but I can't stand the smarmy, hypocritical upper-middle-class dictator nation that prevails and has always prevailed in this country. I'm up for petrol bombers, mate, and fighting in the streets.

Every departure from class struggle has fatal results for the destiny of socialism.