Class Oppression Quotes

Everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.

Why not exploit, enslave, or exterminate a class that everybody is taught to regard as inferior?

More pernicious than the power of a dictator is that of a class; the most terrible - the tyranny of a majority.

There are no limits to which powers of privilege will not go to keep the workers in slavery.

Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for suppressing another.

It doesn't dawn on this depraved bourgeois world that this is positively a sin against all reason; that it is criminal lunacy to keep on drilling a born half-ape until people think they have made a lawyer out of him, while millions of members of the highest culture- race must remain in entirely unworthy positions; that it is a sin against the will of the Eternal Creator if His most gifted beings by the hundreds and hundreds of thousands are allowed to degenerate in the present proletarian morass, while Hottentots and Zulu Kaffirs are trained for intellectual professions.

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

All oppressing classes of every description need two social functions to safeguard their domination: the function of a hangman and the function of a priest. The hangman is to quell the protest ... the priest reconciles them to class domination, weans them away from revolutionary actions.

The only difference between the Negro slave of the South, and the white wage slave of the North is, that the one has a master without asking for him, and the other has to beg for the privilege of becoming a slave.... The one is the slave of an individual; the other is the slave of an inexorable class.

The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.

A bourgeois-and-workers' revolution is a betrayal of the working class

We have used the Bible as if it was a mere special constable's handbook — an opium-dose for keeping beasts of burden patient while they were being overloaded — a mere book to keep the poor in order.

Freedom of the press, freedom of association, the inviolability of domicile, and all the rest of the rights of man are respected so long as no one tries to use them against the privileged class. On the day they are launched against privilege they are thrown overboard.

There seem to be some persons who do not believe in freedom — for others. They fear that if the common people were free then they would not work for us, or obey us, or do as we think they ought to do. They are even called "lazy". Unhappily it is too true that we have many strains that seem to have become entirely exhausted, perhaps because of the over-work or the dissipation, or both, of their forbears. These people are literally "born tired".

You discover that the education the Negro gets is designed to keep him subservient. The poor black man is exploited by whites and by educated Negroes, too.

I know no class of my fellowmen, however just, enlightened, and humane, which can be wisely and safely trusted absolutely with the liberties of any other class.

Under capitalism we have a state in the proper sense of the word, that is, a special machine for the suppression of one class by another.

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.

You have the right not to be killed, unless it was done by a policeman or an aristocrat.

The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male.

We have stricken the shackles from 4,000,000 human beings and brought all laborers to a common level, but not so much by the elevation of former slaves as by reducing the whole working population, white and black, to a condition of serfdom. While boasting of our noble deeds, we are careful to conceal the ugly fact that by our iniquitous money system we have manipulated a system of oppression which, though more refined, is no less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery.

Wherever, on the face of the globe or on the page of history, you show me a disfranchised class, I will show you a degraded class of labor.

What made women's labour particularly attractive to the capitalists was not only its lower price but also the greater submissiveness of women. The capitalists speculate on the two following factors: the female worker must be paid as poorly as possible and the competition of female labour must be employed to lower the wages of male workers as much as possible. In the same manner the capitalists use child labour to depress women's wages and the work of machines to depress all human labour.

Aristocracy is always cruel.

The people are drugged with religion; and that's why the elites - who understand that it is just a ritual, and understand the truth of it but won't teach the truth of it to awaken the masses of the people: so, the leaders live in luxury at the expense of the weak, at the expense of the poor.