Class Quotes

That a peasant may become king does not render the kingdom democratic.

Limousines used to be reserved for the ruling class, or, on special occasions, for the working class. Today, limousines are like taxicabs with the door handles still intact.

Art is a finger up the bourgeoisie ass.

I never really made a choice to live in America, so I should be aware of the social strata outside of the ones that I may live in.

Strip the human race, absolutely naked, and it would be a real democracy. But the introduction of even a rag of tiger skin, or a cowtail, could make a badge of distinction and be the beginning of a monarchy.

I am a brigand: I live by robbing the rich.' 'I am a gentleman: I live by robbing the poor.

The essential point here is that all people with small, insecure incomes are in the same boat and ought to be fighting on the same side. Probably we could do with a little less talk about' capitalist' and 'proletarian' and a little more about the robbers and the robbed.

All privileges based on wealth, and all emnity to honest men merely because they are wealthy, are un-American.

All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are 'enlightened' all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our 'enlightenment,' demands that the robbery shall continue.

When beggars die, there are no comets seen; the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.

...men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them. They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad pottage. They must also be extraordinarily stupid.

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.

This is not class warfare. It’s math.

How superbly brave is the Englishman in the presence of the awfulest forms of danger and death; and how abject in the presence of any and all forms of hereditary rank.

[There are dangers in] the disposition to hunt down rich men as if they were noxious beasts.

Marx's Kapital is not a treatise on socialism; it is a gerrymand against the bourgeoisie. It was supposed to be written for the working class, but the working man respects the bourgeoisie and wants to be a bourgeoisie. Marx never got a hold of him for a moment. It was the revolting sons of the bourgeoisie itself, like myself, that painted the flag red. The middle and upper classes are the revolutionary element in society. The proletariat is the conservative element.

A single woman with a very narrow income must be a ridiculous, disagreeable old maid - the proper sport of boys and girls; but a single woman of good fortune is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as anybody else.

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

Liberty is of small value to the lower third of humanity. They greatly prefer security, which means protection by some class above them. They are always in favor of despots who promise to feed them. The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.

The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else,and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.

The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim-for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives -is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.

Art is rarely intelligible to the criminal classes.

So long as they (the Proles) continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern...Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.

Our society consists exclusively of free working people of cities and villages, workers, peasants, intelligentsia. Each of these strata may have its special interests and express them in numerous existing organizations.

A declaration of war on the masses by higher men is needed! ... Everything that makes soft and effeminate, that serves the end of the people or the feminine, works in favor of universal suffrage, i.e. the domination of the inferior men. But we should take reprisal and bring this whole affair to light and the bar of judgment.

The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's moral perceptions are known and conceded the world over; and a priveleged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name.

Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.

In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.

The whole strength of England lies in the fact that the enormous majority of the English people are snobs.

The rich - they just live in another realm, really.

The capitalists owned everything in the world, and everyone else was their slave. They owned all the land, all the houses, all the factories, and all the money. If anyone disobeyed them they could throw him into prison, or they could take his job away and starve him to death. When any ordinary person spoke to a capitalist he had to cringe and bow to him, and take off his cap and address him as 'Sir'

When rich villains have need of poor ones, poor ones may make what price they will

To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.

The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day's liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. 'Anything,' he thinks, 'any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose.' He does not see that since there is no difference between the mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose. The mob is in fact loose now, and--in the shape of rich men--is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of boredom, such as 'smart' hotels.

We in the House of Lords are never in touch with public opinion. That makes us a civilised body.

Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

Even the lowest of the Hindus, the Pariah, has less of the brute in him than a Briton in a similar social status.

A Mr. (save, perhaps, some half dozen in the nation,) always needs a note of explanation.

Sane is rich and powerful. Insane is wrong and poor and weak. The rich are free, the poor are put in cages. Res Ipsa Loquitur, amen. Mahalo.

If the individuals who compose the purest circles of aristocracy in Europe, the guarded blood of centuries, should pass in review,in such manner as that we could, at leisure, and critically inspect their behavior, we might find no gentleman, and no lady; for, although excellent specimens of courtesy and high-breeding would gratify us in the assemblage, in the particulars, we should detect offence. Because, elegance comes of no breeding, but of birth.

The great advantage in noble parentage is that enables one to endure poverty more easily.

Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that.

The tendency of advanced capitalism has been to enlarge the middle class and not to wipe it out, as it once seemed likely to do.

I am a great believer in high-priced people. If a thing cost a lot it may not be any better, but it adds a certain amount of class that the cheap thing can never approach; in the long run it's the higher-priced things that are the cheapest.

It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another.

The race of the guardians must be kept pure.

Real power is achieved when the ruling class controls the material essentials of life, granting and withholding them from the masses as if they were privileges.

The city is always recruited from the country. The men in cities who are the centres of energy, the driving-wheels of trade, politics or practical arts, and the women of beauty and genius, are the children or grandchildren of farmers, and are spending the energies which their fathers' hardy, silent life accumulated in frosty furrows in poverty, necessity and darkness.

A poor man who eats too much, as contradistinguished from a gourmand, who is a rich man who ''lives well.''

Let no one try to justify the glaring difference between the classes and the masses, the prince and the pauper, by saying that the former need more.

War is rich old men protecting their property by sending middle class and lower class young men off to die. It always has been.

I never take any notice to what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do.

And, as for what is called improving conversation, that is merely the foolish method by which the still more foolish philanthropist feebly tries to disarm the just rancour of the criminal classes.

As someone from the working class I was always interested in Russia and China and everything that related to the working class, even though I was playing the capitalist game.

Apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99 % of the population exist.

The English country-gentleman galloping after a fox — the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.

Detestation of the high is the involuntary homage of the low.

In the laboratory there are no fustian ranks, no brummagem aristocracies; the domain of Science is a republic, and all its citizens are brothers and equals, its princes of Monaco and its stonemasons of Cromarty meeting, barren of man-made gauds and meretricious decorations, upon the one majestic level!