“I have no more faith in poor men's animalism than in rich men's. And I want no proletarian revolution until the proletariat has demonstrated devotion to reason which the rich, with larger opportunities to cultivate that virtue, have so universally failed to achieve.”
I Think I'll Sit This One Out (1939)
Context: If I believed that force would ever build a better world, I would be a Marxist revolutionary. But I have no more faith in poor men's animalism than in rich men's. And I want no proletarian revolution until the proletariat has demonstrated devotion to reason which the rich, with larger opportunities to cultivate that virtue, have so universally failed to achieve. I favor the underdog against the upperdog, but I favor something better than a dog above both of them.
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Milton Mayer12
American journalist 1908–1986Related quotes
Albert Camus (1913–1960) French author and journalist
Pauvre et libre plutôt que riche et asservi. Bien entendu les hommes veulent être et riches et libres et c’est ce qui les conduit quelquefois à être pauvres et esclaves.
Notebooks (1942–1951)
Johann Most (1846–1906) German-American anarchist politician, newspaper editor, and orator
The Beast of Property (1884)
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist
Source: 1910s, Proposed Roads To Freedom (1918), Ch. V: Government and Law
“Rich men have dreams. Poor men die to make them come true.”
Glen Cook book Water Sleeps
Source: Water Sleeps (1999), Chapter 87 (p. 314)
Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) General secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Anarchism or Socialism (1906)
Theognis of Megara (-570–-485 BC) Greek lyric poet active in approximately the sixth century BC
πολλοί τοι πλουτοῦσι κακοί, ἀγαθοὶ δὲ πένονται:
ἀλλ᾽ ἡμεῖς τούτοις οὐ διαμειψόμεθα
τῆς ἀρετῆς τὸν πλοῦτον, ἐπεὶ τὸ μὲν ἔμπεδον αἰεί,
χρήματα δ᾽ ἀνθρώπων ἄλλοτε ἄλλος ἔχει.
Source: Elegies, Lines 315-318, also attributed to Solon
Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715–1771) French philosopher
De l'esprit or, Essays on the Mind, and Its Several Faculties (1758)
Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution
"Lenin's Hanging Order" (11 August 1918), an order for the execution of kulaks, as translated in The Unknown Lenin : From the Secret Archive (1996) by Richard Pipes, p. 50
Variant translation: Hang (and make sure that the hanging takes place in full view of the people) no fewer than one hundred known landlords, rich men, bloodsuckers. … Do it in such a fashion that for hundreds of kilometres around the people might see, tremble, know, shout: "they are strangling, and will strangle to death, the bloodsucking kulaks".
As translated in Lenin : A Biography (2000) by Robert Service, p. 365.
1910s