Louis-Ferdinand Celine Quotes

There is a vulgar persuasion, that the ignorance of women, by favoring their subordination, ensures their utility. 'Tis the same argument employed by the ruling few against the subject many in aristocracies; by the rich against the poor in democracies; by the learned professions against the people in all countries.

If Marxist theory dictates that the personal is always political, the rebuttal of both 'The Americans' and 'House of Cards' is that the political is always personal: the sum total of our collective needs and desires, vows and betrayals.

The most powerful forces in economics are not numbers or facts. They are prejudices and preferences. No amount of evidence will ever change the degree to which many of the rich and powerful prefer themselves to be richer and more powerful and others poorer and weaker.

The state is nothing but an instrument of opression of one class by another - no less so in a democratic republic than in a monarchy.

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

The breath of an aristocrat is the death rattle of freedom.

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.

As equality increases, so does the number of people struggling for predominance.

Being a monarchist, and fawning over those 'above' you, you must naturally despise those 'below' or on the same socioeconomic level as yourself, because that is how hierarchy worship works.

The sharecropper may lower his eyes, but not because he's less of a man. That's just a condition of society that such things exist.

Indeed, the existence of class, of social hierarchy, is as old as man himself. It prevails in the jungle where strength determines hierarchy; among men, it has also been savagely the same, whereby rulers vested with power through personal combat, or through lineal heritage as in the case of royalty, ravage their subjects.

Every man who repeats the dogma of Mill that one country is no fit to rule another country must admit that one class is not fit to rule another class.

The scum of the People are most Tyrannical when they get the Power, and treat their Betters with the greatest Insolence.

If we accept the rule of those who think they are the bosses and lords of Mexico, nothing will change for the people on the bottom.

Democratic institutions are based on a reality of human nature: that those with power, however benign or even noble their intentions, will do what they can to keep it.

'The Magician's Apprentice' was about someone from the low end of society manifesting magical power and how that completely messes up the balance of the whole system.

What are your masses [of humanity] but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?

Private interests often keep up Customs and Privileges, when the reasons of them are ceased

The majority in every society is always the backward. The diligent are no more than thirty percent of the society. It is a natural law that the diligent breed will exploit the backward breed as best they can, like the fish at sea, where the strong eat the weak. It is inconsequential whether the diligent are capitalists and merchants, as in the bourgeois government, or whether the diligent are the managers and supervisors, the intellectuals and the allotters as in the communist government. Ultimately, the diligent will exploit the laboring backward to the best of their ability.

The distinctions separating the social classes are false, in the last analysis they rest on force.

Subordinate classes have usually pushed for democracy, dominant classes nearly always have resisted it.

Inferiors revolt in order that they may be equal and equals that they may be superior. Such is the state of mind which creates revolutions.

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.

The state is no more than a machine for oppression of one class by another. This is as true of democracy as it is of monarchy.