Class Warfare Quotes

“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”
― Frederick Douglass

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
― Warren Buffett

“In regards to the price of commodities, the rise of wages operates as simple interest does, the rise of profit operates like compound interest.

Our merchants and masters complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price and lessening the sale of goods. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

“What sense would it make to classify a man as handicapped because he is in a wheelchair today, if he is expected to be walking again in a month, and competing in track meets before the year is out? Yet Americans are generally given 'class' labels on the basis of their transient location in the income stream. If most Americans do not stay in the same broad income bracket for even a decade, their repeatedly changing 'class' makes class itself a nebulous concept. Yet the intelligentsia are habituated, if not addicted, to seeing the world in class terms.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy

“We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all — by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians — be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us.

How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.”
― Wendell Berry

“How reprehensible it is when those blessed with commodities insist on ignoring the poor. Better to torment them, force them into indentured servitude, inflict compulsion and blows—this at least produces a connection, fury and a pounding heart, and these too constitute a form of relationship. But to cower in elegant homes behind golden garden gates, fearful lest the breath of warm humankind touch you, unable to indulge in extravagances for fear they might be glimpsed by the embittered oppressed, to oppress and yet lack the courage to show yourself as an oppressor, even to fear the ones you are oppressing, feeling ill at ease in your own wealth and begrudging others their ease, to resort to disagreeable weapons that require neither true audacity nor manly courage, to have money, but only money, without splendor: That’s what things look like in our cities at present”
― Robert Walser, The Tanners

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes “Boots” theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”
― Terry Pratchett

“When Republicans recently charged the President with promoting 'class warfare,' he answered it was 'just math.' But it's more than math. It's a matter of morality.

Republicans have posed the deepest moral question of any society: whether we're all in it together. Their answer is we're not.

President Obama should proclaim, loudly and clearly, we are.”
― Robert B. Reich

“For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace--business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt

“I want to burden the conscience of the affluent with all the suffering and all the hidden, bitter tears.”
― Rosa Luxemburg

“Every man who repeats the dogma of Mill that one country is no fit to rule another country must admit that one class is not fit to rule another class.”
― Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar

“To hell with the rich, they make me sick.”
― Raymond Chandler

“It's great having Bruce Springsteen on my show. We have so much in common! We're both from New Jersey, just from different neighborhoods. Sort of like how Martin Luther King and Margaret Mitchell both came from Atlanta. But from different neighborhoods.”
― Jon Stewart, America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction

“Culture and collars had gone together, to him, and he had been deceived into believing that college educations and mastery were the same things.”
― Jack London, Martin Eden

“The name Atlantis came from an old book Victoria had never read. A lifetime residency in the ASM paradise was rumored to cost anywhere from 15 to 20 million dollars. The rich and powerful lived under the dome because they considered themselves separate and superior. Few of them left the comfort and security of Atlantis. To them the outside world was weak. Second Sector citizens where miscreant dregs of a defunct society. In order to enter the Atlantian dome one first had to be cleared by a resident. Gate security personnel strictly enforced this rule, even when outsiders carried a badge and gun.”
― Benjamin R. Smith, Atlas

“Admit that there is some level that would make even you call yourself the victim of class war.”
― David Brin

“There was another reason why the dollar's hegemony grew: the intentional impoverishment of America's working class.

A cynic will tell you quite accurately that large quantities of money are attracted to countries where the profit rate is higher. For Wall Street to exercise fully its magnetic powers over foreign capital, profit margins in the United States had to catch up with profit rates in Germany and Japan.

A quick and dirty way to do this was to suppress American wages. Cheaper labour makes for lower costs, makes for larger margins. It is no coincidence that, to this day, American working class earnings languish below their 1974 level. It is also no coincidence that union-busting became a thing in the 1970s, culminating in Ronald Reagan's dismissal of every single unionised air traffic controller. A move emulated by Margaret Thatcher in Britain who pulverised whole industries in order to eliminate the trade unions that inhabited them.

And faced with the Minotaur's sucking most of the world's capital into America, the European ruling classes reckoned that they had no alternative but to do the same. Reagan had set the pace. Thatcher had shown the way.

But it was in Germany and later across continental Europe that the new class war - you might call it universal austerity - was waged most effectively.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

“Democracy is popular because of the illusion of choice and participation it provides, but when you live in a society in which most people’s knowledge of the world extends as far as sports, sitcoms, reality shows, and celebrity gossip, democracy becomes a very dangerous idea.

Until people are properly educated and informed, instead of indoctrinated to be ignorant mindless consumers, democracy is nothing more than a clever tool used by the ruling class to subjugate the rest of us.”
― Gavin Nascimento

“We treat politics as a sport, political parties as the teams we root for, and political leaders as our favorite sports stars.

But we forget that politics is not an entertainment sport. In sports, rivalry between fans of opposing teams is "Them vs Us", but in politics such rivalry becomes "Us vs Us". Political outcomes have far greater effect on our life than sports outcomes.

In a democracy, "we, the people" are supposed to be the kings, not the pawns. We are the examiners and watchdogs of the political system, not the fans.

We should step back from our blind loyalty to a party, and start taking an educated stand. Instead of forming our opinions based on hearsay and emotions, we should form our opinions based on hard facts.

The time has come to stop being loyal to any political party, and start being loyal to our country and its betterment.”
― Shon Mehta

“It has become fashionable among the affluent to cosplay adversity without sacrificing comfort.”
― Heather Holmes

“Here's a fact omitted in many article about growing numbers of poor people living on the street: if the U.S. had remained as equitable as it was in 1975 for the next forty-three years through 2018, the bottom 90 percent of Americans would have earned an extra $47 trillion. Instead that money went to people already at the top, who use that money, among other things, to influence the political system and to hoard real estate.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“It’s an interchangeable group of schoolboys who, bafflingly, have found themselves in charge.”
― Sandi Toksvig

“O neguinho continua com a mão estendida. Encaro o rombo preto que reside no lugar do olho esquerdo dele, entro naquele buraco e vejo meu passado, presente e futuro. Abaixo a janela e entrego cinco reais na mão dele, ele agradece.”
― Bruno Ribeiro, Porco de Raça

“Everyone comes from somewhere, Twickham—even the lowest chimney sweep could trace his bloody lineage back six hundred years if he had the leisure and money to do so.”
― Minerva Spencer, Phoebe

“The ending of revolutions reduced the drama of social conflict in Western and Central Europe. But revolutions had produced scant benefits for the urban masses that participated in them, often at great sacrifice. Freed from the goad of the worst misery, taught by their experiences in 1848, the working classes stopped fighting a futile battle against industrialization and gradually elaborated the concrete political and economic demands that had begun to emerge in the 1848 revolutions themselves. Each reader must judge whether the methods of protest subsequently developed have been more or less successful than those which produced the wave of revolutions. Each must judge, also, whether conditions may induce a return to the classic revolutionary method in the future. It is clear that the revolutions of 1848 encouraged a reorientation of expectations—or some might argue, a tragic narrowing of hopes—on the part of various classes in Europe. This conditioned the history of Europe for more than a century.”
― Peter N. Stearns, 1848: The Revolutionary Tide in Europe

“The tendency to deal with individual citizens exclusively in terms of the abstractions of their class or condition is to strike at the very foundation of American liberty, which was established to safeguard the possibility and the right of escape from such abstractions—the right to become exceptional.”
― Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House

“JOURNALISM, which shapes, modifies, or subtly suggests public attitudes and states of mind, morbidly attracts the owners of the great fortunes, for whose protection against popular disapproval and action there must be a constantly running defense, direct or implied, specific or general.

The protective maneuvers often take the form, in this plutocratic press, of eloquent editorial assaults upon popular yearnings and ideas.

The journalism of the United States, from top to bottom, is the personal affair bought and paid for by the wealthy families. There is little in American journalism today, good or bad, which does not emanate from the family dynasties.

The press lords of America are actually to be found among the multimillionaire families.”
― Ferdinand Lundberg, America's 60 Families

“The class warfare of the last decades has been fairly successful in weakening popular organizations. People are isolated. (18)”
― Noam Chomsky, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many

“Person 1: Do you know how America's class system works?
Person 2: America has a class system?
Person 1: Yes, that's how it works.”
― Ingrid Robeyns, Limitarianism The Case Against Extreme Wealth, The Psychology of Management & Get Sh*t Done 3 Books Collection Set

“It was built as a prototype to prove to the rich that this was a bunker that could work. If you were careful enough, if you were rich enough, you could buy something just like this and sit in it to comfortably watch the world around you stutter to a stop as it ran out of everything you had bought up just before the end. And it wasn't the end of everything. Only the end of the things they coveted: money power and comfort. P 49”
― Premee Mohamed, We Speak Through the Mountain