Bourgeoisie Quotes

“The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors,' and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous 'cash payment.' It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered forms, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away; all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

“The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

“Everyone who is educated today wants to sit at a comfortable desk under a fan and live in an air-conditioned house surrounded by a garden, coming and going in an American car as wide as the street. If we do not tear out this disease by the roots we shall have with us a bourgeoisie that is in no way connected with the reality of our life...”
― Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North

“And here it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state that it has to feed him instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie; in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.

The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labor. Wage-labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of modern industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

“‎The party that leans upon the workers but serves the bourgeoisie, in the period of the greatest sharpening of the class struggle, cannot but sense the smells wafted from the waiting grave.”
― Leon Trotsky

“Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limitations to its economic expansion. The bourgeoisie turned to politics out of economic necessity; for if it did not want to give up the capitalist system whose inherent law is constant economic growth, it had to impose this law upon its home governments and to proclaim expansion to be an ultimate political goal of foreign policy.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“Little by little the agents have taken over the world. They don't do anything, they don't make anything, they just stand and take their cut.”
― Mœbius

“I need anything, anything that will stop me from living in the kind of death the bourgeois eat, the death called comfort.”
― Kathy Acker, In Memoriam to Identity

“[...] but we know. and have always said, that the bourgeoisie is attached to fascism. The bourgeois and fascism stand in the same relation to each other as do the workers and peasants to the Russian Communist Party.”
― Antonio Gramsci, Selections from political writings: 1921-1926

“Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman dares now shock his greengrocer.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

“One cannot say that the petty bourgeois has never read anything. On the contrary, he has read everything, devoured everything. Only, his brain functions after the fashion of certain elementary types of digestive systems. It filters. And the filter lets through only what can nourish the thick skin of the bourgeois' clear conscience.”
― Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism

“when the proletariat, failing to see the justice of this bourgeois economy, begins to murmur, the policeman’s club is called into active service.”
― Lucy Parsons

“the bourgeoisie must become revolutionaries and stop being the saboteurs”
― Seun Ayilara

“- Jag vet precis vad du önskar av livet. En borgerlig fasad och en kulturell interiör. Ett ställe där du kan hänga dina djävla tavlor och låta dem beundras av vänner och bekanta innan du säljer dem till den impotenta överklassen.”
― Bertil Schütt, En skuggboxares memoarer

“it was Marx who declared that the whole idea of Communism could be summed up in a single formula—the abolition of private property; that the state of the future must take over the centralized management of the means of production, and that the abolition of capital meant the abolition of wage-labour. There was nothing flagrantly illogical in deducing from this that the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and the nationalization of industry and agriculture would bring about the general emancipation of mankind.”
― Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents Of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown

“The bourgeoisie does not dominate, it exploits. It does not need to be master, it prefers to use. Why has nobody seen that the principle of productivity simply replaced the principle of feudal authority? Why has nobody wanted to understand?”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“And with this feeling, I poised in my mind some other questions as to the soundness of beliefs I had long held, based upon copy-book maxims drilled into one generation of American children after another: "Merit wins...Survival of the fittest...You can't change human nature...The best people...The poor you have with you always...and the whole long line of rubber-stamp moral precepts. What were these but glittering emblems set up by the moneyed class to serve its own purposes? Born bourgeois, my brain had been filled from infancy with the nonsense of super-patriotism, with the lily-white virtues of imperialism added in due time. I had harbored these false values because I didn't know any better. I had been a drifter, innocent and sheep-minded long enough.”
― Art Young, The Best of Art Young

“The world of the bourgeois was beginning to look cozy.”
― Soroosh Shahrivar, Tajrish

“The oppressed class, although the ideology of the oppressing class is imposed upon it, nevertheless elaborates religious, ethical and political ideas corresponding to its condition of life; vague and secret at first, they gain in precision and force in proportion as the oppressed class takes definite form and acquires the consciousness of its social utility and of its strength; and the hour of its emancipation is near when its conception of nature and of society opposes itself openly and boldly to that of the ruling class.”
― Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy

“The militant socialists, following the example of the encyclopedists of the eighteenth century, have to make a merciless criticism of the economic, political, historical, philosophical, moral and religious ideas of the capitalist class in order to prepare in all spheres of thought the triumph of the new ideology which the proletariat introduces into the world.”
― Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy

“Under the ancien régime, the laws of the Church guaranteed workers ninety days of rest (fifty-two Sundays and thirty-eight public holidays), during which they were strictly prohibited from working. This was the great crime of Catholicism and the principle cause of irreligion among the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie.... Protestantism, which is the Christian religion adapted to the new industrial and commercial needs of the bourgeoisie, was less concerned with days of rest for the people. It banished the saints from heaven in order to do away with their feast days on earth.”
― Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy

“The Marxist critique of the postulates of bourgeois democracy is in fact based on the definition of the class character of modern society. It demonstrates the theoretical inconsistency and the practical deception of a system which pretends to reconcile political equality with the division of society into social classes determined by the nature of the mode of production.”
― Amadeo Bordiga, The Democratic Principle

“Always capitalist policy consists in dividing the working class by making it adhere to two opposite capitalist parties.”
― Anton Pannekoek, Workers' Councils

“Always remain calm and unruffled, no matter what happens. If your coachman has a heart attack, your carriage crashes, your hat blows off and your drawers fall down, just say: 'Goodness me, such excitement,' and get in a hansom. Remember that the country is better than the town, idleness is superior to work, old is preferable to new and rank is more important than money. Know a little about everything, but never be an expert.”
― Ken Follett, A Dangerous Fortune

“Agriculture is an honorable way to become poor”
― Ken Follett, A Dangerous Fortune

“The real contradiction between Marx's scientific socialism and all bourgeois philosophy and sciences consists entirely in the fact that scientific socialism is the theoretical expression of a revolutionary process, which will end with the total abolition of these bourgeois philosophies and sciences, together with the abolition of the material relations that find their ideological expression in them.”
― Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy

“The bourgeois standpoint has to stop in theory where it has to stop in social practice — as long as it does not want to cease being a 'bourgeois' standpoint altogether, in other words supersede itself.”
― Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy

“Braid Scots is still in most Scottish communities (in one or other Anglicised modification) the speech of bed and board and street and plough, the speech of emotional ecstasy and emotional stress. But it is not genteel. It is to the bourgeoisie of Scotland coarse and low and common and loutish, a matter for laughter, well enough for hinds and the like, but for the genteel to be quoted in vocal inverted commas... But for the truly Scots writer it remains a real and haunting thing, even while he tries his best to forget its existence and to write as a good Englishman.”
― Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Scottish Scene: or, The Intelligent Man's Guide to Albyn

“Il n'y a pas deux sortes de mouvement révolutionnaire, de nature différente, l'un d'espèce bourgeoise et l'autre d'essence prolétarienne; la Révolution tout court, cette vieille taupe, comme disait Marx, poursuit son bonhomme de chemin, d'abord à travers une même crise révolutionnaire, et ensuite de crise révolutionnaire en crise révolutionnaire. Même quand elle paraît assoupie, elle creuse encore. Une crise révolutionnaire n'est que la continuation directe de la crise précédente. Il n'est pas possible de placer quelque part un poteau frontière et d'y inscrire:

REVOLUTION BOURGEOISE ! DEFENSE D'ALLER PLUS LOIN !”
― Daniel Guérin, La Révolution française et nous (Petite collection Maspero ; 172)