Class quotes
4.3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"It would be extremely naive to expect the dominant classes to develop a type of education that would enable subordinate classes to perceive social injustices critically."
"All history has been a history of class struggles, of struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social development."
"What is Communism? Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat. What is the proletariat? The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor."
"You must want to be first-class ...meaning the best, the very best you are capable of becoming. If you deliberately plan to be less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you'll be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life. You will be evading your own capacities, your own possibilities."
"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."
"Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don't mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network."
"There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning."
"The more I see of the moneyed classes, the more I understand the guillotine."
"The bourgeoisie, which far surpasses the proletariat in the completeness and irreconcilibility of its class consciousness, is vitally interested in imposing its moral philosophy upon the exploited masses. It is exactly for this purpose that the concrete norms of the bourgeois catechism are concealed under moral abstractions...The appeal to abstract norms is not a disinterested philosophic mistake but a necessary element in the mechanics of class deception."
"All classes of people under social pressure are permeated with a common experience; they are emotionally welded as others cannot be. With them, even ordinary living has epic depth and lyric intensity, and this, their material handicap, is their spiritual advantage."
"Bourgeois class domination is undoubtedly an historical necessity, but, so too, the rising of the working class against it. Capital is an historical necessity, but, so too, its grave digger, the socialist proletariat."
"O America, how you've taken necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes."
"Al Gore's performances could be a case study in abnormal-psychology classes."
"Secession belongs to a different class of remedies. It is to be justified upon the basis that the States are Sovereign. There was a time when none denied it. I hope the time may come again, when a better comprehension of the theory of our Government, and the inalienable rights of the people of the States, will prevent any one from denying that each State is a Sovereign, and thus may reclaim the grants which it has made to any agent whomsoever."
"China is now suffering from poverty, not from unequal distribution of wealth. Where there are inequalities of wealth, the methods of Marx can, of course, be used; a class war can be advocated to destroy the inequalities. But in China, where industry is not yet developed, Marx's class war and dictatorship of the proletariat are impracticable."
"I was a class clown. At 12, I was definitely clowning. I was making all the jokes. But I was smart, so the teachers didn't know what to do with me."
"I fired the ball for the purpose of giving those dudes to understand upon what ground I stood, believing that those of this class who believe that there are no women capable of taking care of themselves when young, would inform their friends that they might be in danger of their lives if they approached me."
"If they want to hang me, let them. And on the scaffold I will shout Freedom for the working class!"
"The American elite is almost beyond redemption. . . . Moral relativism has set in so deeply that the gilded classes have become incapable of discerning right from wrong. Everything can be explained away, especially by journalists. Life is one great moral mush--sophistry washed down with Chardonnay. The ordinary citizens, thank goodness, still adhere to absolutes.... It is they who have saved the republic from creeping degradation while their 'betters' were derelict."
"The distinctions separating the social classes are false; in the last analysis they rest on force."
