“The landlord owes his riches to the poverty of the peasants, and the wealth of the capitalist comes from the same source.”
Source: The Conquest of Bread (1892), Ch. 4 : Expropriation
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Peter Kropotkin141
Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scie… 1842–1921Related quotes
Jodie Foster (1962) American actor, film director and producer
Incorrectly attributed to Foster, according to snopes.com https://www.snopes.com/attacking-the-rich/ <br class="br">Misattributed
“The Landlord is a gentleman … who does not earn his wealth.”
David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Speech in Limehouse, East London (30 July 1909), quoted in Better Times: Speeches by the Right Hon. D. Lloyd George, M.P., Chancellor of the Exchequer (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1910), pp. 150-151.
Chancellor of the Exchequer
Context: Who is the landlord? The Landlord is a gentleman … who does not earn his wealth. He does not even take the trouble to receive his wealth. He has a host of agents and clerks that receive it for him. He does not even take the trouble to spend his wealth. He has a host of people around him to do the actual spending for him. He never sees it until he comes to enjoy it. His sole function, his chief pride is stately consumption of wealth produced by others.
“The richness I achieve comes from nature, the source of my inspiration.”
Claude Monet (1840–1926) French impressionist painter
“If either wealth or poverty are come by honesty, there is no shame.”
Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher
Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution
Source: The State and Revolution (1917), Ch. 5
Context: Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich – that is the democracy of capitalist society. If we look more closely into the machinery of capitalist democracy, we see everywhere, in the "petty" – supposedly petty – details of the suffrage (residential qualifications, exclusion of women, etc.), in the technique of the representative institutions, in the actual obstacles to the right of assembly (public buildings are not for "paupers"!), in the purely capitalist organization of the daily press, etc., etc., – we see restriction after restriction upon democracy. These restrictions, exceptions, exclusions, obstacles for the poor seem slight, especially in the eyes of one who has never known want himself and has never been in close contact with the oppressed classes in their mass life (and nine out of 10, if not 99 out of 100, bourgeois publicists and politicians come under this category); but in their sum total these restrictions exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics, from active participation in democracy.
Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist
Simon, H. A. (1971) "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World" in: Martin Greenberger, Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, Baltimore. MD: The Johns Hopkins Press. pp. 40–41.
1960s-1970s
Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist
Vol. I, Ch. 15 (last sentence), pg. 556.
(Buch I) (1867)
“Wealth owes its existence to labour, not labour to wealth.”
Leon MacLaren (1910–1994) British philosopher
Leon MacLaren, Nature of Society and Other Essays