Class Systems Quotes

What did the workers and peasants gain when power passed from the kings and nobles to the bankers and manufacturers?

the plain fact that throughout the world today organized groups of men by monopoly of economic and physical power, legal enactment and intellectual training are limiting with determination and unflagging zeal the development of other groups; and that the concentration of particularly economic power today puts the majority of mankind into slavery to the rest. But one thing is sure and that is that these ancestors of mine and their descendants have had a common history; have suffered a common disaster and have one long memory.

Our enemies are all those in league with imperialism -- the warlords, the bureaucrats, the comprador class, the big landlord class and the reactionary section of the intelligentsia attached to them…. As for the vacillating middle bourgeoisie, their right-wing may become our enemy and their left-wing may become our friend -- but we must be constantly on our guard and not let them create confusion within our ranks.

The lower middle classes as well as the peasants, … always side with the strongest

I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator

We should be lords over them…these are the politics of South Africa.

The enjoyment of civil rights, would be best and soonest obtained if every county in the land were made a little Commonwealth and their chief town a city, where the nobility and chief gentry may build houses or palaces, befitting their quality, may bear part in the government, make their own judicial laws and execute them by their elected judicatures without appeal in all things of civil government between man and man.

Between the working class and the capitalist class, there is an irrepressible conflict, a class struggle for life. No glib-tongued politician can vault over it, no capitalist professor or official statistician can argue it away; no capitalist parson can veil it; no labor faker can straddle it; no “reform” architect can bridge it over. It crops up in all manner of ways

History would have told them [the people] how half-literate priests taught the working people patience and submission to the "authorities appointed by God"; how peasants were made monks by force and monasteries built with their man-power; how the number of "lay parasites" was swollen and brought into being, in which the peasant worked with a plough and his parasite with a spoon. To increase its power and influence over the ignorant people, the church staged flimsy tricks which it called "miracles," from the boyars it created "saints," men of God--all for the benefit of the authorities. The main task of all churches was one and the same: to impress upon the poor serfs that there was no happiness for them on earth; happiness was prepared for them in heaven, and meanwhile back-breaking toil for some other fellow was pleasing in the sight of God.

South African ministers are anxious to deal out fair treatment, but are hampered by public opinion…and a degree of racial prejudice of which they themselves, as individuals, are largely free.

Our ears are saluted from the east and west, north and south alike saying: I like a Negro in his place. But there are no two communities which agree as to his proper place. So they have been trying to fix him in first one place and then in another; but just as soon as public sentiment changed, or he saw an opportunity, he changed to such places as he thought his intelligence, industry, courage and endurance commanded.

Americans sometimes say to me that they have no class system themselves. All human beings have class systems. It can be based on a different thing in a different country, but the thing about breeding is, you can't buy it. You can't buy class.

There is then a universal and forced tendency to reduce to the lowest the workers’ wages, and this law is sufficient to crush all the best intentions of employers, prisoners of the social order, by which, however, they benefit.

The stability of medieval society depended on the fixity of all of its parts, as that of modern society is on their mobility.

… a permanent Council of the ablest men chosen by the people

[There should be a] veracious history of all the atrocities and havoc inflicted on our country by its former masters; it must show all the loathsome hatred felt by the beasts of prey who had had their claws cut and their teeth drawn …. It will convince the good-natured and the soft-hearted that a capitalist is no longer a human being, but a creature in which an insane lust for profit has consumed every vestige of humanity. This history must be a record of all the blood shed by the capitalists for the sole purpose of maintaining their accustomed conditions of life, the comfortable, delightful, thoroughly corrupt life of two-legged beasts fattening themselves on other people's strength.

Social inequality … divides society into two classes -- the wage-slaves and the grabbers of capital

We were asking for a clear mandate to normalize the political process; to negotiate a new constitutional dispensation; to remove racial discrimination; to promote economic effectiveness; to maintain law and order; and to remove mistrust by building bridges between our divided communities.

In the history of the world, slavery has been and still is the normal condition of most men; all the great accumulations of property have been the result of slavery, and civilization was the result of property…. art, literature, science, architecture, beautiful women, and gentlemen of leisure all depend upon the forced labor of masses of ignorant men whom to make free would be a social crime.

The elite interests must not crowd out the interests of the citizens.

Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? … Was it because our predecessors were thick? Does anybody really think that they didn't get what we had because they didn't have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand.

Capitalism is very unfair but it is the only system that works.

It is a gross mistake to suppose that ' abolition' is the cause of dissolution between the north and the south. The Cavaliers, Jacobites, and Huguenots of the south naturally hate, contemn, and despise the Puritans who settled the north. The former are master races, the latter a slave race, the descendants of the Saxon serfs

The old general rule was that educated people did not perform manual labor. They managed to eat their bread, leaving the toil of producing it to the uneducated. This was not an insupportable evil to the working bees, so long as the class of drones remained very small. But now, especially in these free States, nearly all are educated--quite too nearly all, to leave the labor of the uneducated, in any wise adequate to the support of the whole. It follows from this that henceforth educated people must labor. Otherwise, education itself would become a positive and intolerable evil. No country can sustain, in idleness, more than a small percentage of its numbers. The great majority must labor at something productive.

Conservatism, by all means, if there is anything worth conserving, and everything not worth losing. Revolution, if there is nothing worth conserving, and everything worth gaining. These are the class lines upon which the political battle is being fought, and is bound to be fought