Helen Keller Quotes

I was no Marie Antoinette. I was not born to nobility, but I had a human right to nobility.

Class structures are a luxury that we cannot afford.

The middle class is always a firm champion of equality when it concerns a class above it; but it is its inveterate foe when it concerns elevating a class below it.

Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand them. But every Englishman loves a pedigree.

Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.

And understand: class differences will not save you.

It has always been the aim of royalty and aristocracy to lower the individual liberty and independence of the common people. A baron and a minute-man could not breathe the same air.

I reject absolutely the idea that people should know their place, and know their class.

Class is more important than a game.

It has often been said, that there is but one rank of men in America… we have no artificial distinctions of men into noblemen and commoners among us, but it ought to be remarked, that superior degrees of industry and capacity, and above all, commerce, have introduced inequality of property among us, and these have introduced natural distinctions of rank in Pennsylvania, as certain and general as the artificial distinctions of men in Europe. This will ever be the case while commerce exists in this country.

Every society naturally divides itself into classes. The author of nature has bestowed on some greater capacities than on others--birth, education, talents and wealth, create distinctions among men as visible and of as much influence as titles, stars and garters. In every society, men of this class will command a superior degree of respect--and if the government is so constituted as to admit but few to exercise the powers of it, it will, according to the natural course of things, be in their hands.

Is the great working class oppressed? Yes, undoubtedly it is. God has intended the great to be great and the little to be little.

The defeats and victories for the people at the top aren't defeats and victories for the people at the bottom.

What is the use of your pedigrees?

Let wealth and commerce, laws and learning die, But leave us still our old nobility.

The Left’s essential mental instrument is class analysis, according to which society is best understood in terms of the competing interests of aggregate groups.

In a superior civilization, as, for example, that of the Indo-Aryans, the being who is without a characteristic form or caste... would emerge as a pariah. In this respect America is a society of pariahs. There is a role for pariahs. It is to be subjected to beings whose form and internal laws are precisely defined. Instead the modern pariahs seek to become dominant themselves and to exercise their dominion over all the world.

The landed men are the true owners of our political vessel, the moneyed men are no more than passengers in it.

Any organized social group is always a stratified social body. There has not been and does not exist any permanent social group which is "flat" and in which all members are equal.

Do the adherents of this mad theory [Evolution] realize the disgrace they are bringing on the most respectable families! There is not an aristocracy in Europe or America that can stand it one moment. For aristocracy is based on the greatness of forefathers…. With a monkey in the background, how can even a Hapsburg or a Guelf put on airs of superiority? How must he hide his face in shame to think, that, as his line lengthens into an obscure antiquity, the foreheads of his house slope, and their jaws project; that he has literally been all his life aping aristocracy, instead of being the real thing; and that, when he has reached his true beginning, his only consolation must be found in the fact that his great skulking, hulking, gibbering baboon of an ancestor rejoices, like himself, in the possession of "the third lobe," "the posterior cornu of the lateral ventricle," and "the hippocampus minor.

A Plowman on his knees is higher than a Gentleman on his legs.

What is high birth to him to whom high birth has never been the theme of his contemplation? What is a throne to him who has never dreamed of a throne?

Pride is always a better lever against the nobility than reason.

Meritocracy is a system of segregation.

If the rabble were lopped off at one end and the aristocrats at the other, all would be well with the country.