Quotes about class
page 16

“It’s a Catholic idea, actually—that the material world is redeemed; that time is continuous; that one can somehow be redeemed by the faith of an earlier age or a poorer class, if one lives within its shadow or its arrondissement or breathes its sigh.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

Age, World, Faith, Idea

“Whether sociology can ever become a full-fledged "science" (a description of a class of events predictable on the basis of deductions from a constant rationale) depends on whether the terms which sociologists employ to describe events can be analyzed into quantifiable observables.”

Anatol Rapoport (1911–2007) Russian-born American mathematical psychologist

Anatol Rapoport, "Outline of a probabilistic approach to animal sociology: I." The Bulletin of mathematical biophysics 11.3 (1949): p 183
1940s

Science, Dependency

“The competition between chunks of capital is getting fiercer, there is the same old same old desperate need to keep wages down, desperate need to substitute machines for labour (but that costs trillions of investment) and no matter how hard you exploit workers, you still need to sell stuff to them, and if their wages are low, they can't buy the stuff. You can force the poorly paid into borrowing money (credit cards, wonga etc) but there comes a point when that causes a credit crisis: someone somewhere says they want some dosh and a bank somewhere says they haven't got the dosh (Northern Rock, last time). Let's remember, none of this is caused by migrants or left social democrats. This is a crisis entirely born from a system that is locked into competition for markets. So, these fervid rows between squadrons of extremely unpleasant individuals are rows between people who deep down know that they can't control this system of running the making and distribution of the things we need. They are just coming up with fantasies on how to stay in power while the next phase veers from crisis to crisis. It is terrible for millions of people in awful insecure, low paid jobs and/or in insecure, lousy housing, or if they are disabled, or for millions trying to migrate their way out of poverty and despair. We should be alarmed when members of the ruling class start pleading with us to take sides with them against the 'elite': one section of the elite calling for us to oppose the elite.”

Michael Rosen (1946) British children's writer

'Neither Brussels or the City - for the many not the few'. http://michaelrosenblog.blogspot.com/2018/07/neither-brussels-or-city-for-many-not.html (6 July 2018)

Money, People, Way, Time

“In the mind of a young man from a middle-class family, the concept of human life is associated with that of a career, and in early youth the career is that of Napoleon I.”

Italo Svevo book Zeno's Conscience

Nella mente di un giovine di famiglia borghese il concetto di vita umana s'associa a quello della carriera e nella prima gioventù la carriera è quella di Napoleone I.
Source: La coscienza di Zeno (1923), P. 51; p. 61.

Life, Youth, Family

“I'd gone to the Lamaze classes, and the second time I said, 'Breathe!' Sonia said, 'Shut up!' So I said, 'OK, I'll sit at this desk and find something to do.”

Philippe Kahn (1952) Entrepreneur, camera phone creator

USA Today interview January 2007, regarding the birth of the camera phone http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/kevinmaney/2007-01-23-kahn-cellphone-camera_x.htm.

Time

“The teacher should use illustrations for the better teaching of the lesson, and never to fill up time, to amuse the class, or to display his own genius.”

John Heyl Vincent (1832–1920) American theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 572.

Teachers, Time

“In the Autumn semester, 1955, I taught Principles of Economics, and found it a challenge to convey basic microeconomic theory to students. Why/how could any market approximate a competitive equilibrium? I resolved that on the first day of class the following semester, I would try running a market experiment that would give the students an opportunity to experience an actual market, and me the opportunity to observe one in which I knew, but they did not know what were the alleged driving conditions of supply and demand in that market”

Vernon L. Smith (1927) American economist

Vernon L. Smith (2002) in: " Vernon L. Smith - Biographical http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2002/smith-bio.html". Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2013. Web. 13 Jun 2014.

Autumn

“Direct and unconcealed brute force and violence—although clearly persisting in many quarters of society—are today less acceptable to an increasingly sophisticated public, a public significantly remote from the methods of social and economic control common to early America. This is not a statement, however, that there is such increased civility that Americans can no longer tolerate social control of the country's under classes by force of violence; rather, it is an observation that Americans today appear to be more inclined to issue endorsement to agents and agencies of control which carry out the task, while permitting the benefactors of such control to retain a semidignified, clean-hands image of themselves.”

Huey P. Newton (1942–1989) Co-founder of the Black Panther Party

War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America (June 1980)

Appearance, Country

“The defeat of Fascism, and the election of a majority Labour Government in 1945 was only possible because Labour had strong mainstream support among working class voters and organised labour. There was no serious Communist Party in Britain, and no serious fascist party either and the principle reason for this is that both were consistently defeated by Labour who maintained working class loyalty precisely because it was not an ideal or a set of principles, but an organisation that upheld the dignity of work and of working people and insisted that they had a constructive role to play in the governance of the country. Labour did not flirt with the popular front or the unity of progressive forces. It pursued a common good which included labour as an interest and as a source of value.”

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman (1961) British philosopher

Blue Labour, The Profundity of Defeat http://www.bluelabour.org/2013/10/30/285/

People, Support, Strong, Loyalty

“… "folk art" signifies the poetical, musical, and pictorial activities of those strata of the population which are uneducated and not urbanized or industrialized. It is of the essence of this art that those who keep it in being are not only passively receptive, but normally are creative participants in the artistic activities, and yet do not stand out as individuals or claim any personal authorship of the productions. "Popular art" on the other hand is to be understood as artistic or quasi-artistic production for the demand of a half-educated public, generally urban and inclined to mass-behavior. In folk art, producers and consumers are hardly distinguished, and the boundary between them is always fluid; in the case of popular art, we find on the contrary an artistically uncreative, completely passive public, and professional production of artistic goods strictly in response to the demand for them. It is indeed a striking fact that folk art, especially folk-poetry, emerges from the ranks of those who enjoy it, whereas popular songs—the street-ballads and popular "hits"—derive from professionals belonging to and spiritually dependent upon the upper classes.”

Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian

Arnold Hauser (1985). The philosophy of art history. p. 279

Education, Art, Music, Behavior

“Muslim ‘community’ in India had remained sharply divided into two mutually exclusive segments throughout the centuries of Islamic invasions and rule over large parts of the country. On the one hand, there were the descendants of conquerors who came from outside or who identified themselves completely with the conquerors - the Arabs, the Turks, the Iranians, and the Afghans. They glorified themselves as the Ashrãf (high-born, noble) or Ahli-i-Daulat (ruling race) and Ahl-i-Sa‘adat (custodians of religion). On the other hand, there were converts from among the helpless Hindus who were looked down upon by the Ashrãf and described as the Ajlãf (low-born, ignoble) and Arzãl (mean, despicable) depending upon the Hindu castes from which the converts came. The converts were treated as Ahl-i-Murãd (servile people) who were expected to obey the Ahl-i-Daulat and Ahl-i-Sa‘adat abjectly. Shah Waliullah (1703-62) and his son Abdul Aziz (1746-1822) were the first to notice this situation and felt frightened that the comparatively small class of the Ashrãf was most likely to be drowned in the surrounding sea of Hindu Kafirs. … They had to turn to the neo-Muslims. The neo-Muslims, however, had little interest in waging wars for Islam. They had, therefore, to be fully Islamized, that is, alienated completely from their ancestral society and culture. That is why the Tabligh movement was started.”

Shah Waliullah Dehlawi (1703–1762) Indian muslim scholar

Goel, Sita Ram (1995). Muslim separatism: Causes and consequences. ISBN 9788185990262

War, People, Religion, Communication

“…we find and we know that this attempt in Ireland to make the power and influence of the State the means of supporting one creed against another has been the plague and the scourge of the country—has divided man from man, class from class, kingdom from kingdom, and in this great, and ancient, and noble empire has had the effect of now exhibiting us to the world as a divided country—three kingdoms, two of which we are indeed heartily united and associated, but the third of which offers to mankind a spectacle painful and full of schism and destruction within itself, and alienation and estrangement as regards the Throne and Constitution of this realm.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in the assembly-rooms at Wavertree (14 November 1868), quoted in The Times (16 November 1868), p. 5
1860s

Pain, World, Support, Country

“The dominant propaganda systems have appropriated the term "globalization" to refer to the specific version of international economic integration that they favor, which privileges the rights of investors and lenders, those of people being incidental. In accord with this usage, those who favor a different form of international integration, which privileges the rights of human beings, become "anti-globalist." This is simply vulgar propaganda, like the term "anti-Soviet" used by the most disgusting commissars to refer to dissidents. It is not only vulgar, but idiotic. Take the World Social Forum, called "anti-globalization" in the propaganda system -- which happens to include the media, the educated classes, etc., with rare exceptions. The WSF is a paradigm example of globalization. It is a gathering of huge numbers of people from all over the world, from just about every corner of life one can think of, apart from the extremely narrow, highly privileged elites who meet at the competing World Economic Forum, and are called "pro-globalization" by the propaganda system. An observer watching this farce from Mars would collapse in hysterical laughter at the antics of the educated classes.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Interview by Sniježana Matejčić, June 2005 http://www.galerija-rigo.hr/05/chomsky_en_2.htm. Quotes 2000s, 2005

Life, People, World, Education

“If slaves make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong. But they won't make soldiers. As a class they are wanting in every qualification of a soldier. Better by far to yield to the demands of England and France and abolish slavery and thereby purchase their aid, than resort to this policy, which leads as certainly to ruin and subjugation as it is adopted; you want more soldiers, and hence the proposition to take negroes into the Army. Before resorting to it, at least try every reasonable mode of getting white soldiers. I do not entertain a doubt that you can, by the volunteering policy, get more men into the service than you can arm. I have more fears about arms than about men, For Heaven’s sake, try it before you fill with gloom and despondency the hearts of many of our truest and most devoted men, by resort to the suicidal policy of arming our slaves.”

Howell Cobb (1815–1868) American politician

Howell Cobb. "Letter to James A. Seddon", in: Encyclopædia Britannica] (1911), Hugh Chisholm, editor, 11th ed., Cambridge University Press.
Quote regarding suggestions that the Confederates turn their slaves into soldiers. Also quoted as 'You cannot make soldiers of slaves, or slaves of soldiers. The day you make a soldier of them is the beginning of the end of the Revolution. And if slaves seem good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong'.

Men, Fear, Suicide, Heart

“If no one is to be accounted as born into a superior station, if there is to be no ruling class, and if all possess rights which can neither be bartered away nor taken from them by any earthly power, it follows as a matter of course that the practical authority of the Government has to rest on the consent of the governed. While these principles were not altogether new in political action, and were very far from new in political speculation, they had never been assembled before and declared in such a combination. But remarkable as this may be, it is not the chief distinction of the Declaration of Independence. The importance of political speculation is not to be under-estimated, as I shall presently disclose. Until the idea is developed and the plan made there can be no action.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Speech on the Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (1926)

Idea

“In prosperous times the mercantile classes often realize fortunes, which go far towards securing them against the future; but unfortunately the working classes, though they share in the general prosperity, do not share in it so largely as in the general adversity.”

Thomas Robert Malthus Principles of Political Economy

Book II, Chapter I, On The Progress of Wealth, Section X, p. 437
Principles of Political Economy (Second Edition 1836)

Time, Future

“We have among us a class of mammon worshippers, whose one test of conservatism, or radicalism, is the attitude one takes with respect to accumulated wealth. Whatever tends to preserve the wealth of the wealthy is called conservatism, and whatever favors anything else, no matter what, they call socialism.”

Richard T. Ely (1854–1943) United States economist and author

Richard T. Ely, Socialism : an examination of its nature, its strength and its weakness, with suggestions for social reform http://archive.org/details/socialismanexam02goog (1894) As quoted in: Charles Austin Beard and Mary Ritter Beard, basic history of the United States http://books.google.gr/books?id=vaQsAAAAMAAJ&q=A, Doubleday, Doran & company, 1944, p. 395.

Wealth

“A [learning] style is a disposition to adopt one class of learning strategy.”

Gordon Pask (1928–1996) British psychologist

Source: Learning Strategies, Teaching Strategies, and Conceptual or Learning Style (1988), p. 85.

Learning

“In compliance with the Supreme Court ruling on the Disbursement Acceleration Program, a new general provision on the “Meaning of Augmentation” is proposed by your committee in Sec. 69 which states that savings cannot be used to augment a non-existent P/A/P through the use of an appropriation not otherwise authorized by the subject GAA, and that the existence of an appropriation for an allotment class, whether for Personal Services, MOOE, or Capital Outlays, in a P/A/P is necessary for purposes of augmentation.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2014, Speech: Sponsorship Speech for the FY 2015 National Budget

Personality

“every one but an ideot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious:: I do not mean that the poor in England are to be kept like the poor of France; but the state of the country considered, they must be (like all mankind) in poverty, or they will not work.”

Arthur Young (1741–1820) English writer

Arthur Young (1771), The Farmer's Tour through the East of England, v. 4, p. 361 https://archive.org/stream/farmerstourthrou04youn#page/360/mode/2up.

Country

“When we are reproached with having established a dictatorship of one party and, as you have heard, a united socialist front is proposed, we say, "Yes, it is a dictatorship of one party! This is what we stand for and we shall not shift from that position because it is the party that has won, in the course of decades, the position of vanguard of the entire factory and industrial proletariat. This party had won that position even before the revolution of 1905. It is the party that was at the head of the workers in 1905 and which since then — even at the time of the reaction after 1905 when the working-class movement was rehabilitated with such difficulty under the Stolypin Duma — merged with the working class and it alone could lead that class to a profound, fundamental change in the old society.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

“Speech to the First All-Russia Congress of Workers in Education and Socialist Culture” (30 July 1919) http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/aug/05.htm Collected Works, Vol. 29, p. 535. 1910s

Change, Time

“Probably the respect or stigma attaching to particular classes of actions arose from the fact that these classes of actions were—or were thought to be—beneficial or injurious to the society of the time; but it is also clear that this good or bad name once created clings to the action long after the action has ceased in the course of social progress to be beneficial in the one case, or injurious in the other; and indeed long after the thinkers of the race have discovered the discrepancy. And so in a short time arises a great confusion in the popular mind between what is really good or evil for the race and what is reputed to be so—the bolder spirits who try to separate the two having to atone for this confusion by their own martyrdom.”

Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) British poet and academic

Defence of Criminals: A Criticism of Morality (1889)

Evil, Time

“The work that has so far been done has indeed been of the highest value. The growth during the last 50 years, of a feeling of common nationality, based upon common tradition, common disabilities, and common hopes and aspirations, has been most striking. The fact that we are Indians first, and Hindoos, Mahomedans, Parsees, or Christinas afterwards, is being realized in a steadily increasing measure, and the idea of a united and renovated India, marching onwards to a place among the nations of the world worthy of her great past, is no longer a mere idle dream of a few imaginative minds, but is definitely the accepted creed of those who form the brain of the community-the educated classes of the country.”

Gopal Krishna Gokhale (1866–1915) social and political leader during the Indian Independence Movement

Extract from his speech during setting up and defining the charter of the Servants of Scoiety. Page=702
Sources of Indian Tradition

World, Education, Dreams, Hope

“The amazing number of species; their curious forms, so infinitely varied, and yet so nearly and gradually approximating through an endless series of transitions from one species to another; the diversity of structure observable in those parts which afford generic characters, added to the wonderful changes in form which they undergo, with their surprising economy - are circumstances which contribute to render them objects of most curious speculation to the philosopher. And although the study of every class of animals is most indisputably attended with peculiar advantages, yet we shall venture to affirm, that is from a knowledge of the characters, metamorphoses, and various modes of life, this little animals are destined to pursue, that [the natural philosopher] will obtain a more intimate acquaintance with the great laws of nature, and veneration for the Great Creator of all, that can be derived from the contemplation of any other class in nature.”

William Elford Leach (1790–1836) English zoologist and marine biologist

As quoted in Entomology https://archive.org/stream/CUbiodiversity1121039#page/646/mode/2up/search/creator (1816), Volume 8 of the first American edition of Sir David Brewster's Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, p. 646.

Life, Law, Nature, Knowledge

“Not long ago, an American magazine wrote that what was worst about National Socialism was its women. They said that National Socialism did more for women than any other nation. It improved their social position. It began to bring them together in tremendous organizations. It sent the women of the educated classes into the factories so that female workers could go on vacation, and so on. The paper concluded that the democracies could not imitate this.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

As quoted in The Third Reich: A New History by Michael Burleigh, p. 2842
Other remarks

Women, Education, Democracy

“No criticism can be brought against a branch of technical science from outside; no thought fitted out with the knowledge of a period and setting its course by definite historical aims could have anything to say to the specialist. Such thought and the critical, dialectical element it communicates to the process of cognition, thereby maintaining conscious connection between that process and historical life, do not exist for empiricism; nor do the associated categories, such as the distinction between essence and appearance, identity in change, and rationality of ends, indeed, the concept of man, of personality, even of society and class taken in the sense that presupposes specific viewpoints and directions of interest.”

Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) German philosopher and sociologist

Source: "The Latest Attack on Metaphysics" (1937), p. 145.

Life, Communication, Knowledge, Sense

“You can be excellent in every way. You can be first class. There is no need for you to be a scrub. Respect yourself. Do not feel sorry for yourself. Do not dwell on unkind things others may say about you. Polish and refine whatever talents the Lord has given you. Go forward in life with a twinkle in your eye and a smile on your face, but with great and strong purpose in your heart. Love life and look for its opportunities.”

Gordon B. Hinckley (1910–2008) President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

How Can I Become the Woman of Whom I Dream? Ensign, May 2001, 93.

Love, Life, Smile, Way

“No, young man. No jokes here. There's a time and place. When you say something in class they take you seriously. You're the teacher. You say you went out with a sheep and they’re going to swallow every word. They don’t know the mating habits of the Irish.”

Frank McCourt book Teacher Man

Teacher Man (2005)

Teachers, Time

“The career of Marian Anderson, the world-class contralto who was denied permission to sing in Constitution Hall because of her race, symbolizes the achievements of so many black American musicians. Performing instead at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939, she drew an audience of 75,000 and inspired the world not only with her rich musical gifts, but also with her determination and courage.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2001, Black Music (June 2001)

World, Music, Courage, Memory

“The Marxist philosophy of dialectical materialism has two outstanding characteristics. One is its class nature: it openly avows that dialectical materialism is in the service of the proletariat. The other is its practicality: it emphasizes the dependence of theory on practice, emphasizes that theory is based on practice and in turn serves practice.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

On Practice (1937)

Nature, Dependency

“The Universalists think they are very charitable. Why? Because they send all to heaven, whether they are good or evil, saints or sinners. Murderers, drunkards, and all classes of society are to dwell together in heaven. And what a heaven it would be!—Methodists contending against Baptists, and Baptists against Methodists, Presbyterians against Quakers, Roman Catholics against Protestants, and Nothingarians against Sectarians, and Sectarians against Nothingarians; and then add to the whole catalogue of contending sects drunkards, blasphemers, whoremongers, murderers, and every species of wicked beings, all jumbled up together. Oh, what a happy place! Brother Kimball says—"And all of them with a revolver and bowie knife at their sides."”

Orson Pratt (1811–1881) Apostle of the LDS Church

Journal of Discourses 7:88 (Aug. 28, 1859).
Who goes to heaven

Happiness, Thinking, Evil

“The understanding I had by age thirteen of patriarchal politics created in me expectations of the feminist movement that were quite different from those of young, middle class, white women. When I entered my first women's studies class at Stanford University in the early 1970s, white women were revelling in the joy of being together-to them it was an important, momentous occasion. I had not known a life where women had not been together, where women had not helped, protected, and loved one another deeply. I had not known white women who were ignorant of the impact of race and class on their social status and consciousness (Southern white women often have a more realistic perspective on racism and classism than white women in other areas of the United States.) I did not feel sympathetic to white peers who maintained that I could not expect them to have knowledge of or understand the life experiences of black women. Despite my background (living in racially segregated communities) I knew about the lives of white women, and certainly no white women lived in our neighborhood, attended our schools, or worked in our homes When I participated in feminist groups, I found that white women adopted a condescending attitude towards me and other non-white participants. The condescension they directed at black women was one of the means they employed to remind us that the women's movement was "theirs"-that we were able to participate because they allowed it, even encouraged it; after all, we were needed to legitimate the process. They did not see us as equals. And though they expected us to provide first hand accounts of black experience, they felt it was their role to decide if these experiences were authentic. Frequently, college-educated black women (even those from poor and working class backgrounds) were dismissed as mere imitators. Our presence in movement activities did not count, as white women were convinced that "real" blackness meant speaking the patois of poor black people, being uneducated, streetwise, and a variety of other stereotypes. If we dared to criticize the movement or to assume responsibility for reshaping feminist ideas and introducing new ideas, our voices were tuned out, dismissed, silenced. We could be heard only if our statements echoed the sentiments of the dominant discourse.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Source: (1984), Chapter 1: Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory, pp. 11-12.

Love, Life, Women, People

“[The English ruling classes are] Freemasons thoroughly infected by Juda. The British people must be liberated from the Antichrist Juda. We must drive Juda out of England just as he has been chased out of the Continent… Juda's plan has been smashed to pieces and they themselves swept out of the European Continent! [Europe is] consolidating and closing itself off from British influences after the elimination of the British and the Jews!”

Wilhelm II, German Emperor (1859–1941) German Emperor and King of Prussia

Letter to Alwina Grafin von der Goltz (July/August 1940), quoted in John C. G. Röhl, The Kaiser and his Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 211-212
1940s

People

“John Osborne spoke out in a vein of ebullient, free-wheeling rancour that betokened the arrival of something new in the theatre – a sophisticated, articulate lower-class. Most of the critics were offended by Jimmy Porter, but not on account of his anger; a working-class hero is expected to be angry. What nettled them was something quite different: his self-confidence. This was no envious inferior whose insecurity they could pity.”

John Osborne (1929–1994) English playwright

Kenneth Tynan, Tynan Right and Left (1967) p. 13
Criticism

Confidence, Self-confidence, Anger

“Undoubtedly there are bourgeois who from a feeling of justice and humanity place themselves upon the side of the laborers and socialists, but these are only the exceptions; the mass of the bourgeoisie has class consciousness, a consciousness of being the ruling and exploiting class. Indeed, the mass of the bourgeoisie, just because they are a ruling class, have a much sharper and stronger class consciousness than the proletariat.”

Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) German socialist politician

No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

Justice, Feeling

“I'm really calling for major jobs, because the wealthy are going create tremendous jobs. They're going to expand their companies. They're going to do a tremendous job. I'm getting rid of the carried interest provision. And if you really look, it's not a tax -- it's really not a great thing for the wealthy. It's a great thing for the middle class. It's a great thing for companies to expand.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2016, September, First presidential debate (September 26, 2016)

“We have had landlord rule longer, far longer than the life of the oldest man in this vast assembly, and I would ask you to look at the results of that rule. The landowners have had unlimited sway in Parliament and in the provinces. Abroad the history of our country is the history of war and rapine: at home, of debt, taxes, and rapine too. In all the great contests in which we have been engaged we have found that this ruling class have taken all the honours, while the people have taken all the scars. No sooner was the country freed from the horrible contest which was so long carried on with the Powers of Europe, than this law, by their partial legislation, was enacted—far more hostile to British interests than any combination of foreign powers has ever proved. We find them legislating corruptly: they pray daily that in their legislation they may discard all private ends and partial affections, and after prayers they sit down to make a law for the purpose of extorting from all the consumers of food a higher price than it is worth, that the extra price may find its way into the pockets of the proprietors of land, these proprietors being the very men by whom this infamous law is sustained…”

John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech in Covent Garden (19 December 1845), quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), p. 142.
1840s

Life, Men, Hostility, War

“While mere process of thinking is the process of habits, ideals, definitions, investigations, classifications, valuations and behavior, due process of thinking, which is due process of law, is the process of correct habits, right ideals, true definitions, sincere investigation, reasonable classification, reasonable value, and justice; whereas its opposite, undue process, is perverse habit, wrong ideals, double meanings, partial investigation, class legislation, confiscation and injustice.”

John R. Commons (1862–1945) United States institutional economist and labor historian

Source: Legal foundations of capitalism. 1924, p. 351-352

Justice, Law, Behavior, Thinking

“What is the whole problem as it effects the working classes of this country? It is all contained in one word—employment. Cheap food, a higher standard of living, higher wages—all these things, important as they are, are contained in the word employment. If this policy will give you more employment, all the others would be added unto you. If you lose your employment, all the others put together will not compensate you for that loss.”

Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914) British businessman, politician, and statesman

Speech in Liverpool (27 October 1903), quoted in The Times (28 October 1903), p. 6.
1900s

Food, Problem, Loss, Country

“I well remember receiving from one of the most earnest of my seniors the friendly warning that it was waste of time to study variation, for "Darwin had swept the field." Parenthetically we may notice that though scientific opinion in general became rapidly converted to the doctrine of pure selection, there was one remarkable exception. Systematists for the most part kept aloof. Everyone was convinced that natural selection operating in a continuously varying population was a sufficient account of the origin of species except the one class of scientific workers whose labours familiarised them with the phenomenon of specific difference. From that time the systematists became, as they still in great measure remain, a class apart.”

William Bateson (1861–1926) British geneticist and biologist

Introductory Chapter, p. 3
Mendel's Principles of Heredity (1913)

Nature, Study, Time, Parting

“So intimate is the union between Mathematics and Physics that probably by far the larger part of the accessions to our mathematical knowledge have been obtained by the efforts of mathematicians to solve the problems set to them by experiment, and to create for each successive class phenomena a new calculus or a new geometry, as the case might be, which might prove not wholly inadequate to the subtlety of nature. Sometimes the mathematician has been before the physicist, and it has happened that when some great and new question has occurred to the experimentalist or the observer, he has found in the armory of the mathematician the weapons which he needed ready made to his hand. But much oftener, the questions proposed by the physicist have transcended the utmost powers of the mathematics of the time, and a fresh mathematical creation has been needed to supply the logical instrument requisite to interpret the new enigma.”

Henry John Stephen Smith (1826–1883) mathematician

As quoted in The Century: A Popular Quarterly (1874) ed. Richard Watson Gilder, Vol. 7, pp. 508-509, https://books.google.com/books?id=ceYGAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA508 "Relations of Mathematics to Physics". Earlier quote without citation in Nature, Volume 8 (1873), page 450. Also quoted partially in Michael Grossman and Robert Katz, Calculus http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/mb?a=listis;c=216746186|Non-Newtonian (1972) p. iv. ISBN 0912938013.

Mathematics, Question, Nature, Knowledge

“There is something called bilingual education—a scheme proposed in the late 1960s by Hispanic-American social activists, later endorsed by a congressional vote. It is a program that seeks to permit non-English-speaking children, many from lower-class homes, to use their family language as the language of school. (Such is the goal its supporters announce.) I hear them and am forced to say no: It is not possible for a child—any child—ever to use his family’s language in school. Not to understand this is to misunderstand the public uses of schooling and to trivialize the nature of intimate life—a family’s ‘language.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)

Life, Children, Education, School

“I did all the problems a little different from the rest of the class.”

Samuel Abraham Goudsmit (1902–1978) Dutch physicist

in an interview http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4640_1.html by Thomas Samuel Kuhn on December 5, 1963, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD USA

Problem

“The relationship between governments and the press has always been recognized as a matter of large importance. Wherever despotism abounds, the sources of public information are the first to be brought under its control. Whereever the cause of liberty is making its way, one of its highest accomplishments is the guarantee of the freedom of the press. It has always been realized, sometimes instinctively, oftentimes expressly, that truth and freedom are inseparable. An absolutism could never rest upon anything save a perverted and distorted view of human relationships and upon false standards set up and maintained by force. It has always found it necessary to attempt to dominate the entire field of education and instruction. It has thrived on ignorance. While it has sought to train the minds of a few, it has been largely with the purpose of attempting to give them a superior facility for misleading the many. Men have been educated under absolutism, not that they might bear witness to the truth, but that they might be the more ingenious advocates and defenders of false standards and hollow pretenses. This has always been the method of privilege, the method of class and caste, the method of master and slave.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, The Press Under a Free Government (1925)

Men, Truth, Education, Way

“The colonization of the Southern economy by capitalists from the North gave lynching its most vigorous impulse. If Black people, by means of terror and violence, could remain the most brutally exploited group within the swelling ranks of the working class, the capitalists could enjoy a double advantage. Extra profits would result from the superexploitation of Black labor, and white workers’ hostilities toward their employers would be defused. White workers who assented to lynching necessarily assumed a posture of racial solidarity with the white men who were really their oppressors. This was a critical moment in the popularization of racist ideology.”

Angela Davis (1944) American political activist, scholar, and author

Women, Race and Class (1983)

Men, Hostility, People

“In the army, capitalist development leads to the extension of obligatory military service to the reduction of the time of service and consequently to a material approach to a popular militia. But all of this takes place under the form of modern militarism in which the domination of the people by the militarist State and the class character of the State manifest themselves most clearly.”

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary

Source: Reform or Revolution (1899), Ch.8

People, Time

“National-Socialism came to power in Germany in the same year as Roosevelt was elected President... Roosevelt comes from a rich family and belongs to the class whose path is smoothed in the Democracies. I am only the child of a small, poor family and had to fight my way by work and industry. When the Great War came, Roosevelt occupied a position where he got to know only its pleasant consequences, enjoyed by those who do business while others bleed... I shared the fate of millions, and Franklin Roosevelt only the fate of the so-called Upper Ten Thousand... he made profits out of the inflation, out of the misery of others, while I, together with many hundreds of thousands more, lay in hospital.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Speech Declaring War Against the United States http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/hitler-s-speech-declaring-war-against-the-united-states (December 11, 1941) 1940s

Fate, War, Family, Way

“I purpose now, while the impression is more pure and clear within me, to mark down the main things I can recollect of my father. To myself, if I live to after-years, it may be instructive and interesting, as the past grows ever holier the farther we leave it. My mind is calm enough to do it deliberately, and to do it truly. The thought of that pale earnest face which even now lies stiffened into death in that bed at Scotsbrig, with the Infinite all of worlds looking down on it, will certainly impel me. It is good to know how a true spirit will vindicate itself with truth and freedom through what obstructions soever; how the acorn cast carelessly into the wilder-ness will make room for itself and grow to be an oak. This is one of the cases belonging to that class, "the lives of remarkable men," in which it has been said, "paper and ink should least of all be spared." I call a man remarkable who becomes a true workman in this vineyard of the Highest. Be his work that of palace-building and kingdom-founding, or only of delving and ditching, to me it is no matter, or next to none. All human work is transitory, small in itself, contemptible. Only the worker thereof, and the spirit that dwelt in him, is significant. I proceed without order, or almost any forethought, anxious only to save what I have left and mark it as it lies in me.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1880s, Reminiscences (1881)

Death, Men, Truth, World

“Epicurus, the great teacher of happiness, has correctly and finely divided human needs into three classes. First there are the natural and necessary needs which, if they are not satisfied, cause pain. Consequently, they are only victus et amictus [food and clothing] and are easy to satisfy. Then we have those that are natural yet not necessary, that is, the needs for sexual satisfaction. … These needs are more difficult to satisfy. Finally, there are those that are neither natural nor necessary, the needs for luxury, extravagance, pomp, and splendour, which are without end and very difficult to satisfy.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 346
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

Pain, Happiness, Food, Nature

“Now, there is a genuine social justice which proceeds not from the principle of equality, but from the principle: Suum cuique — to each his own. It is true that to deprive the workman of his just wage is not only a sin, but a sin that cries to heaven for vengeance. When one hinders social advance by putting barriers in the way of the diligent and the talented, one not only commits a personal injustice, but damages the common good of the whole nation, which always requires a genuine elite of ability and the contribution of extraordinary brainpower in every walk of life. And it would be socially unjust if a few individuals or certain groups had so much material wealth that, in consequence of this concentration of property and income, other classes had to live not only in povery, but in misery. Whoever lives in real abundance has a Christian duty to assist those living in wrechedness. Before we proceed, however, let us affirm that the notion of misery is different from that of poverty. Péguy has already drawn the distinction between pauvreté and misère. To live in misery means to suffer genuine physical privation: to know cold and hunger, to have no proper dwelling, to be dressed in rags, to be unable to secure medical attention. The poor, by contrast, have the necessities of life, but scarcely any more. They can borrow books, no doubt, but cannot buy them; they can hear music on the radio, but cannot afford a ticket to a concert; they cannot indulge in little extras of food and drink, but should, by self-discipline, be able to save a little. The poor have, therefore, the normal material preconditions for happiness — unless plagued by acquisitiveness or even envy, which has become a political force in the same measure as people have lost their faith. The fact that there are happy poor (alongside unhappy rich people) is beside the point. Demagogues know how to stir up terrible and murderous unrest even among the happy poor, as has been demonstrated clearly by the history of the left from Marat to Marx to Lenin to Hitler.”

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909–1999) Austrian noble and political theorist

Pgs 53-54
The Timeless Christian (1969)

Life, Hunger, Happiness, People

“The friends of peace in bourgeois circles believe that world peace and disarmament can be realised within the frame-work of the present social order, whereas we, who base ourselves on the materialistic conception of history and on scientific socialism, are convinced that militarism can only be abolished from the world with the destruction of the capitalist class state.”

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary

Die Friedensfreunde aus bürgerlichen Kreisen glauben, das sich Weltfriede und Abrüstung im Rahmen der heutigen Gesellschaftsordnung verwirklichen lassen, wir aber, die wir auf dem Boden der materialistischen Geschichtsauffassung und des wissenschaftlichen Sozialismus stehen, sind der Überzeugung, das der Militarismus erst mit dem kapitalistischen Klassenstaate zusammen aus der Welt geschafft werden kann.
Peace Utopias (1911)

World, Peace, History

“Writing in 1944, the year of the Bretton Woods Conference, Polanyi suggested that the extension of the institutions of the market over the course of the nineteenth century aroused a political reaction in the form of associations and lobbies that ultimately undermined the stability of the market system. He gave the gold standard a place of prominence among the institutions of laissez faire in response to which this reaction had taken place. And he suggested that the opening of national economic decision making to parties representing working-class interests had contributed to the downfall of that international monetary system. In a sense, this book asks whether Polanyi’s thesis stands the test of time. Can the international monetary history of the second half of the twentieth century be understood as the further unfolding of Polanyian dynamics, in which democratization again came into conflict with economic liberalization in the form of free capital mobility and fixed exchange rates? Or do recent trends toward floating rates and monetary unification point to ways of reconciling freedom and stability in the two domains?”

Barry Eichengreen Introduction

Source: Globalizing Capital (2008), Chapter 1. Introduction

Books, Way, History, Decision

“From the first I saw no chance of bettering the condition of the freedman until he should cease to be merely a freedman and should become a citizen. I insisted that there was no safety for him or for anybody else in America outside the American government; that to guard, protect, and maintain his liberty the freedman should have the ballot; that the liberties of the American people were dependent upon the ballot-box, the jury-box, and the cartridge-box; that without these no class of people could live and flourish in this country; and this was now the word for the hour with me, and the word to which the people of the North willingly listened when I spoke. Hence, regarding as I did the elective franchise as the one great power by which all civil rights are obtained, enjoyed, and maintained under our form of government, and the one without which freedom to any class is delusive if not impossible, I set myself to work with whatever force and energy I possessed to secure this power for the recently-emancipated millions.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/dougl92/dougl92.html (1892), p. 460. 1890s, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892)

People, Freedom, Chance, Dependency

“The method of successive approximations is often applied to proving existence of solutions to various classes of functional equations; moreover, the proof of convergence of these approximations leans on the fact that the equation under study may be majorised by another equation of a simple kind. Similar proofs may be encountered in the theory of infinitely many simultaneous linear equations and in the theory of integral and differential equations. Consideration ofjkbni semiordered spaces and operations between them enables us to easily develop a complete theory of such functional equations in abstract form.”

Leonid Kantorovich (1912–1986) Russian mathematician

"On one class of functional equations" (1936), as cited in: O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., " Leonid Kantorovich http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Kantorovich.html", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews

Study, Success

“Knowledge is the product of leisure. The members of a very primitive society have no time to amass knowledge; their days are fully occupied with the provision of the bare necessities of life. But as soon as a community begins to accumulate wealth, and so becomes able to support a leisured class (priests, instructors of rich men's children), an opportunity is created for those who desire knowledge to devote their lives to its acquirement. Out of this 'curiosity to know' science is born.”

Edward B. Titchener (1867–1927) American psychologist

Edward B. Titchener, An Outline of Psychology (1916), p. 1.

Life, Men, Children, Communication

“Tell the merchant that he must not rely for one moment on the Home Rulers for any one thing that is wise and good, nor indeed on any political combination of Irishmen. They have never yet done anything for themselves or their country and have never yet as a party shown what ought to be done. The absence of political and economical knowledge in Ireland is remarkable, and what there is of a sensible middle class is apparently crushed or smothered by the extreme men, who are always in pursuit of some phantom and who seem not to know the substance even when they see it.”

John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman

Letter to Mr. O'Donoghue (15 March 1874), quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), p. 445
1870s

Men, Home, Knowledge, Country

“To the Kathakali Man these stories are his children and his childhood. He has grown up within them. They are the house he was raised in, the meadows he played in. They are his windows and his way of seeing. So when he tells a story, he handles it as he would a child of his own. He teases it. He punishes it. He sends it up like a bubble. He wrestles it to the ground and lets it go again. He laughs at it because he loves it. He can fly you across whole worlds in minutes, he can stop for hours to examine a wilting leaf. Or play with a sleeping monkey's tail. He can turn effortlessly from the carnage of war into the felicity of a woman washing her hair in a mountain stream. From the crafty ebullience of a rakshasa with a new idea into a gossipy Malayali with a scandal to spread. From the sensuousness of a woman with a baby at her breast into the seductive mischief of Krishna's smile. He can reveal the nugget of sorrow that happiness contains. The hidden fish of shame in a sea of glory.
He tells stories of the gods, but his yarn is spun from the ungodly, human heart.
The Kathakali Man is the most beautiful of men. Because his body is his soul. His only instrument. From the age of three he has been planed and polished, pared down, harnessed wholly to the task of story-telling. He has magic in him, this man within the painted mark and swirling skirts.
But these days he has become unviable. Unfeasible. Condemned goods. His children deride him. They long to be everything that he is not. He has watched them grow up to become clerks and bus conductors. Class IV non-gazetted officers. With unions of their own.
But he himself, left dangling somewhere between heaven and earth, cannot do what they do. He cannot slide down the aisles of buses, counting change and selling tickets. He cannot answer bells that summon him. He cannot stoop behind trays of tea and Marie biscuits.
In despair he turns to tourism. He enters the market. He hawks the only thing he owns. The stories that his body can tell.
He becomes a Regional Flavour.”

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

page 230-231.
The God of Small Things (1997)

Love, Men, God, War

“Class field theory can be divided into two parts, local and global. In each part it is the study of all the abelian extensions of a certain base field. The underlying philosophy is to describe all abelian extensions in terms of objects residing within, or close to, the base field.”

O. Timothy O'Meara (1928–2018) American mathematician

[Review: The theory of numbers, S. Iyanaga, ed., (translated by K. Iyanaga), Bull. Amer. Math. Soc., 1978, 84, 1, 90–96, http://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1978-84-01/S0002-9904-1978-14417-6/S0002-9904-1978-14417-6.pdf, 10.1090/S0002-9904-1978-14417-6] (quote from p. 92)

Study, Parting

“The fact that atomic war may break out, isn't that class struggle? There is no alternative to class struggle. This is a very serious question. The be-all and end-all is not peaceful coexistence. After all, we have been holding on for some time, and under Stalin we held on to the point where the imperialists felt able to demand point-blank: either surrender such and such positions, or it means war. So far the imperialists haven't renounced that”

Vyacheslav Molotov (1890–1986) Soviet politician and diplomat

Molotov said it in 1976 when he was in active retirement.[Molotov, Vyacheslav; Chuev, Felix; Resis, Albert, Molotov remembers: inside Kremlin politics : conversations with Felix Chuev, I.R. Dee, 1993, 1566630274, 20]

War, Peace, Question, Time

“It is my firm belief that if our plans of education are followed up, there will not be a single idolator among the respectable classes of Bengal thirty years hence.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician

Letter written to his father in 1836. Quoted in Indian Church History Review, December 1973, p. 187. Quoted from Goel, S. R. (2016). History of Hindu-Christian encounters, AD 304 to 1996. Chapter 13. ISBN 9788185990354

Education

“Trotsky's writings and those of his followers were freely published in the middle and late thirties by the Hearst Press in America. His works on his "new kind of Communism" were published by the Franco Press at Salamanca and Burgos. The secret police of the Polish dictatorship were specially educated in Trotskyism in order to facilitate their work of espionage and disruption inside the Polish working-class movement.”

James Klugmann (1912–1977) British writer

From Trotsky to Tito (1951)

Secret, Education, Communication

“By any precise definition, Washington is a city of advanced depravity. There one meets and dines with the truly great killers of the age, but only the quirkily fastidious are offended, for the killers are urbane and learned gentlemen who discuss their work with wit and charm and know which tool to use on the escargots.
On New York's East Side one occasionally meets a person so palpably evil as to be fascinatingly irresistible. There is a smell of power and danger on these people, and one may be horrified, exhilarated, disgusted or mesmerized by the awful possibilities they suggest, but never simply depressed.
Depression comes in the presence of depravity that makes no pretense about itself, a kind of depravity that says, "You and I, we are base, ugly, tasteless, cruel and beastly; let's admit it and have a good wallow."
That is how Times Square speaks. And not only Times Square. Few cities in the country lack the same amenities. Pornography, prostitution, massage parlors, hard-core movies, narcotics dealers — all seem to be inescapable and permanent results of an enlightened view of liberty which has expanded the American's right to choose his own method of shaping a life.
Granted such freedom, it was probably inevitable that many of us would yield to the worst instincts, and many do, and not only in New York. Most cities, however, are able to keep the evidence out of the center of town. Under a rock, as it were. In New York, a concatenation of economics, shifting real estate values and subway lines has worked to turn the rock over and put the show on display in the middle of town.
What used to be called "The Crossroads of the World" is now a sprawling testament to the dreariness which liberty can produce when it permits people with no taste whatever to enjoy the same right to depravity as the elegant classes.”

Russell Baker (1925–2019) writer and satirst from the United States

"Cheesy" (p.231)
So This Is Depravity (1980)

Life, People, Age, World

“By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the Earth, and especially the civilized peoples, into such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the others. Further, it has co-ordinated the social development of the civilized countries to such an extent that, in all of them, bourgeoisie and proletariat have become the decisive classes, and the struggle between them the great struggle of the day. It follows that the communist revolution will not merely be a national phenomenon but must take place simultaneously in all civilized countries.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

(1847)

People, World, Decision, Country

“We must always remember that the police are recruited from the criminal classes.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

As quoted by Dick Cavett, in "The Swimmers" http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/books/review/Cavett-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin, The New York Times (3 June 2007) 2000s

“Class instinct is subjective and spontaneous. … To arrive at proletarian class positions, the class instinct of proletarians only needs to be educated; the class instinct of the petty bourgeoisie, and hence of intellectuals, has, on the contrary, to be revolutionized.”

Louis Althusser book Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays

Source: Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (1968), "Philosophy as a Revolutionary Weapon", p. 2

Education

“In object-oriented analysis, we seek to model the world by identifying the classes and objects that form the vocabulary of the problem domain, and in object-oriented design, we invent the abstractions and mechanisms that provide the behavior that this model requires.”

Grady Booch (1955) American software engineer

Source: Object-oriented design: With Applications, (1991), p. 141

World, Behavior, Problem

“The unhappiness of our life; patch up our false way of life as we will, propping it up by the aid of the sciences and arts - that life becomes feebler, sicklier, and more tormenting every year; every year the number of suicides and the avoidance of motherhood increases; every year the people of that class become feebler; every year we feel the increasing gloom of our lives. Evidently salvation is not to be found by increasing the comforts and pleasures of life, medical treatments, artificial teeth and hair, breathing exercises, massage, and so forth;…It is impossible to remedy this by any amusements, comforts, or powders - it can only be remedied by a change of life.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

What then must we do? (1886)

Life, People, Pleasure, Art

“To the Working Men of Rochdale: A deep sympathy with you in your present circumstances induces me to address you. Listen and reflect, even though you may not approve. Your are suffering—you have long suffered. Your wages have for many years declined, and your position has gradually and steadily become worse. Your sufferings have naturally produced discontent, and you have turned eagerly to almost any scheme which gave hope of relief. Many of you know full well that neither an act of Parliament nor the act of a multitude can keep up wages. You know that trade has long been bad, and that with a bad trade wages cannot rise. If you are resolved to compel an advance of wages, you cannot compel manufacturers to give you employment. Trade must yield a profit, or it will not long be carried on…The aristocracy are powerful and determined; and, unhappily, the middle classes are not yet intelligent enough to see the safety of extending political power to the whole people. The working classes can never gain it of themselves. Physical force you wisely repudiate. It is immoral, and you have no arms, and little organisations…Your first step to entire freedom must be commercial freedom—freedom of industry. We must put an end to the partial famine which is destroying trade, and demand for your labor, your wages, your comforts, and your independence. The aristocracy regard the Anti-Corn Law League as their greatest enemy. That which is the greatest enemy of the remorseless aristocracy of Britain must almost of necessity be your firmest friend. Every man who tells you to support the Corn Law is your enemy—every man who hastens, by a single hour, the abolition of the Corn Law, shortens by so much the duration of your sufferings. Whilst the inhuman law exists, your wages must decline. When it is abolished, and not till then, they will rise.”

John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman

Address (17 August 1842), quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), pp, 81-82.
1840s

Men, People, Law, Hope

“Legislative reform and revolution are not different methods of historic development that can be picked out at the pleasure from the counter of history, just as one chooses hot or cold sausages. Legislative reform and revolution are different factors in the development of class society. They condition and complement each other, and are at the same time reciprocally exclusive, as are the north and south poles, the bourgeoisie and proletariat.”

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary

Source: Reform or Revolution (1899), Ch. 8

Pleasure, History, Time

“The kind of middle-class mentality which actuates both those responsible for strategy and government has little knowledge of the new psychology and organizing ability of the totalitarian States. The forces we are fighting are governed neither by the old strategy nor follow the old tactics.”

Ernest Bevin (1881–1951) British labour leader, politician, and statesman

"Complacent Conduct of the War", The Times, 3 May 1940, p. 3.
Speech at Stoke-on-Trent, 1 May 1940.

Knowledge, Fight

“Introversion — along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness — is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology.”

Susan Cain (1968) self-help writer

"Revenge of the introverts: It's often assumed extroverts do best in life, but a new book reveals quite the opposite... ," The Daily Mail, March 25, 2012.

Disappointment, Personality

“The proper form of economy must be observed in building houses for each and every class.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book I, Chapter II, Sec. 9

Housing

“Our Republican Party platform is opposed to all methods of birth control, both preventative contraception and the morning after pill. Remember that in Texas they oppose any sex education other than abstinence until marriage. That's why our state has the highest rate of repeat teen pregnancies of the country. So they're creating a welfare dependent populace, but they also want to abolish all social welfare programs that these struggling kids will need. This will not only create unnecessarily stressful conditions for both parents and children, it will also ultimately eliminate the middle class. Our republicans want to do away with all government sponsored programs that deal with early childhood development, and they include pre-school and kindergarten in that list, but they don't stop there. They also want to abolish the Department of Education, because why would a religious organization want people to be educated? The real reason is because our secular government (which this country still is) will not permit state-funded schools to promote one religion over any other, and that is exactly what Texas republicans want to do.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Youtube, Other, Republican Theocracy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSjNg7nQvB0 (November 4, 2012)

Marriage, Children, People, Education

“Militant leftism in politics appears to have its roots in broadly analogous sentiments. Every labour politician has observed that the most indignant members of his local Party are not usually the poorest, or the slum-dwellers, or those with most to gain from further economic change, but the younger, more self-conscious element, earning good incomes and living comfortably in neat new council houses: skilled engineering workers, electrical workers, draughtsmen, technicians, and the lower clerical grades. (Similarly the most militant local parties are not in the old industrial areas, but either in the newer high-wage engineering areas or in middle-class towns; Coventry or Margate are the characteristic strongholds.) Now it is people such as these who naturally resent the fact that despite their high economic status, often so much higher than their parents’, and their undoubted skill at work, they have no right to participate in the decisions of their firm, no influence over policy, and far fewer non-pecuniary privileges than the managerial grades; and outside their work they are conscious of a conspicuous educational handicap, of a style of life which is still looked down on by middle-class people often earning little if any more, of differences in accent, and generally of an inferior class position.”

Anthony Crosland book The Future of Socialism

The Future of Socialism by Anthony Crosland
The Future of Socialism (1956)

Life, People, Education, Nature

“We, the Great-Russian proletarians, who defend no privileges whatever, do not defend this privilege either. We are fighting on the ground of a definite state; we unite the workers of all nations living in this state; we cannot vouch for any particular path of national development, for we are marching to our class goal along all possible paths.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

"Right of Nations to Self-Determination", (1904), The Lenin Anthology
1910s

Fight

“Paul was undeniably sincere. He believed that in reinterpreting the Christian faith so as to make it acceptable to the Romans he was doing that faith a service. His make-up was imperial rather than democratic. Both by birth and training he was unfitted to enter into the working-class consciousness of Galileans. He was in culture a Hellenist, in religion a Pharisee, in citizenship a Roman. From the first strain, Hellenism, he received a bias in the direction of philosophy rather than economics; from the second, his Pharisaism, he received a bias toward aloofness, otherworldliness; and from the third, his Romanism, he received a bias toward political acquiescence and the preservation of the status quo.”

Bouck White (1874–1951) American author and novelist

Source: The Call of the Carpenter (1914), p. 227

Faith, Religion, Birth, Sincerity

“When one of Feuerbach’s friends attempts to get him an academic position, Feuerbach writes to him: “The more people make of me, the less I am, and vice versa. I am … something only so long as I am nothing.” Hegel felt himself free in the midst of bourgeois restriction. For him, it was by no means impossible as an ordinary official … to be something and at the same time be himself. … In the third epoch of the spirit, that is, since the beginning of the “modern” world, he says … philosophers no longer comprise a separate class; they are what they are, in perfectly ordinary relationship to the state: officially appointed teachers of philosophy. Hegel interprets this transformation as the “reconciliation of the worldly principle with itself.” It is open to each and every one to construct his own “inner world” independent of the force of circumstances which has materialized. The philosopher can now entrust the “external” side of his existence to the “order,” just as the modern man allows fashion to dictate the way he will dress. … The important thing, Hegel concludes, is “to remain true to one’s purpose” within the context of the normal life of a citizen. To be free for truth and at the same time dependent on the state—to him, these two things seemed quite consistent with each other.”

Karl Löwith book From Hegel to Nietzsche

From Hegel to Nietzsche, D. Green, trans. (1964), pp. 68-69.

Life, People, Truth, World

“When your young and hungry and nobody's ever really accepted you because of your color and class, the hurt of your own family having cast you out in the first place still inside you somewhere, you dance hard because there is no other way to live, and when opportunity knocks its more of an abduction than a housecall.”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

From Her Books, I Have Chosen To Stay And Fight, FOLLOWING YOUR DREAMS

Family, Color, Way, Dance

“We, as licensed protectors of the species and members in good standing of the master-class of the race, by the power invested in us by those who wish to survive and reproduce, vow to enforce the fiction that life is worth having and worth living come hell or irreparable brain damage.”

Thomas Ligotti (1953) American horror author

The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (2010)

Life, Hell

“…the principles of political economy have elevated the working class above the place they ever filled before.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech at Rochdale (23 November 1864), quoted in John Bright and J. E. Thorold Rogers (eds.), Speeches on Questions of Public Policy by Richard Cobden, M.P. Volume II (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1908), p. 496.
1860s

“It was ironical that Communism (at least the Dictatorship of the proletariat) should first come to Russia - a nation which in economic matters was one of the least developed among all the countries in Europe. Furthermore, Communism came as a coup in Russia, not through any class struggle on the part of the workers. It came through the conspiratorial intrigue of V. I. Lenin, who was encouraged by the German High Command to go into Russia during the closing months of World War I and use a small, hard core of revolutionaries to seize the provisional government which had but recently forced the Tzar to abdicate and was at the moment representing the working class, as much as anyone else, in setting up a democratic constitution. Communism therefore did not come to Russia as the natural outcome of class struggle but like any other dictatorship - by the military might of a small minority.”

W. Cleon Skousen book The Naked Communist

The Naked Communist (1958)

War, World, Communication, Nature

“Why is it after a century of socialist disasters, and an intellectual legacy that has been time and again exploded, the left-wing position remains, as it were, the default position to which thinking people gravitate when called upon for a comprehensive philosophy? Why are “right-wingers” marginalised in the educational system, denounced in the media and regarded by our political class as untouchable, fit only to clean up after the orgies of luxurious nonsense indulged in by their moral superiors?”

Roger Scruton (1944–2020) English philosopher

Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (2015)

People, Education, Thinking, Time

“Democracy and slavery are inseparable. Why. Democracy as it existed among the ancients was no more than government by a number of men large enough to be called the people. But this designation is false. The true people, in such a state, the greatest number, the majority belong to the class of slaves, and slavery inevitably develops in a country governed this way, because it is impossible that those who spend their time making laws can make shoes and clothes, plant crops, work fields, etc.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

Men, People, Law, Shoe

“He [Tolstoy] saw and deplored the beginning of a class struggle which has ended as we now know in Bolshevism. Class hatred and strife appeared to Tolstoy as frightfully immoral and unchristian and he pled fervently with the rich to change their manner of living.”

Robert Hunter (author) (1874–1942) American sociologist, author, golf course architect

Source: Why We Fail as Christians (1919), p. 71

Appearance, Change

“One of the most amazing and perplexing features of mainstream Christianity is that seminarians who learn the historical-critical method in their Bible classes appear to forget all about it when it comes time for them to be pastors. They are taught critical approaches to Scripture, they learn about the discrepancies and contradictions, they discover all sorts of historical errors and mistakes, they come to realize that it is difficult to know whether Moses existed or what Jesus actually said and did, they find that there are other books that were at one time considered canonical but that ultimately did not become part of Scripture (for example, other Gospels and Apocalypses), they come to recognize that a good number of the books of the Bible are pseudonymous (for example, written in the name of an apostle by someone else), that in fact we don't have the original copies of any of the biblical books but only copies made centuries later, all of which have been altered. They learn all this, and yet when they enter church ministry they appear to put it back on the shelf.”

Bart D. Ehrman book Jesus, Interrupted

Source: Jesus, Interrupted (2009), Ch. 1: 'A Historical Assault on Faith'

Books, Error, Learning, Appearance

“And yet, none of this is accidental. As we have seen in the texts that we have surveyed in this book, it is all part of a line. India turns out to be a recent construct. It turns out to be neither a country nor a nation. Hinduism turns out to be an invention – surprised at the word? You won’t be a few pages hence – of the British in the late nineteenth century. Simultaneously, it has always been inherently intolerant. Pre-Islamic India was a den of iniquity, of oppression. Islamic rule liberated the oppressed. It was in this period that the Ganga-Jamuna culture, the ‘composite culture’ of India was formed, with Amir Khusro as the great exponent of it, and the Sufi savants as the founts. The sense of nationhood did not develop even in that period. It developed only in response to British rule, and because of ideas that came to us from the West. But even this – the sense of being a country, of being a nation, such as it was – remained confined to the upper crust of Indians. It is the communists who awakened the masses to awareness and spread these ideas among them.
In a word, India is not real – only the parts are real. Class is real. Religion is real – not the threads in it that are common and special to our religions but the aspects of religion that divide us, and thus ensure that we are not a nation, a country, those elements are real. Caste is real. Region is real. Language is real – actually, that is wrong: the line is that languages other than Sanskrit are real; Sanskrit is dead and gone; in any case, it was not, the averments in the great scholar, Horace Wilson to the House of Commons Select Committee notwithstanding, that it was the very basis, the living basis of other languages of the country; rather, it was the preserve of the upper layer, the instrument of domination and oppression; one of the vehicles of perpetuating false consciousness among the hapless masses.”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud

Books, Religion, Idea, Sense

“Betraying her class and origin with the heartbreaking openness Joelle's always viewed as either terribly stupid or terribly brave”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest (1996)

Stupidity

“Object-oriented programming is a method of implementation in which programs are organized as cooperative collections of objects, each of which represents an instance of some class, and whose classes are all members of a hierarchy of classes united via inheritance relationships.”

Grady Booch (1955) American software engineer

Source: Object-oriented design: With Applications, (1991), p. 35

“We come more and more frequently into momentary unions, or momentary relations with other parties. But these momentary relations must never become momentary alliances. We must never bind the party. We must always keep our hand free; exploit the conditions; let our opponents do the dirty work for us; and with the goal of the party firmly in mind, keep in the middle of the road, and go our own way, only going along with opposing parties when our way happens to be the same as theirs. That we are a party of the class struggle, who have nothing in common with any other party, and who have to fight and conquer all other parties, in order to attain our goal, is something which we must never for a moment lose sight of.”

Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) German socialist politician

No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

Way, Fight

“Curiously enough he found in senior year that he had acquired a position in his class. He learned that he was looked upon as a rather romantic figure, a scholar, a recluse, a tower of erudition. This amused him but secretly pleased him — he began going out, at first a little and then a great deal.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Quoted, The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

Learning

“The social conditions of the British people in the early years of the twentieth century cannot be contemplated without deep anxiety. … We are at the cross-ways. If we stand on the old happy-go-lucky way, the richer classes ever growing in wealth and in number, and ever declining in responsibility, the very poor remaining plunged or plunging even deeper into helpless, hopeless misery, then I think there is nothing before us but savage strife between class and class, with an increasing disorganization, with an increasing destruction of human strength and human virtue—nothing, in fact, but that dual degeneration which comes from the simultaneous waste of extreme wealth and of extreme want.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

The People's Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 138-139
Early career years (1898–1929)

Happiness, People, Way, Thinking

“He (Gauis Gracchus) was a political incendiary. Not only was the hundred years' revolution which dates from him, so far as it was one man's work, the work of Gaius Gracchus, but he was above all the true founder of that terrible civic proletariat flattered and paid by the classes above it, which was through it aggregation in the capital - the natural consequence of the largesses of corn - at once utterly demoralized and made conscious of its power, and which - with its pretensions, sometimes stupid, sometimes knavish, and its talk of the sovereignty of the people - lay like an incubus for five hundred years upon the Roman commonwealth and only perished along with it. And yet again, this greatest of political transgressors was the regenerator of his country. There is scarce a fruitful idea in Roman monarchy, which is not traceable to Gaius Gracchus.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

The History of Rome - Volume 3

People, Stupidity, Idea, Nature

“The [Communist] Party has one objective: the creation of a socialist economy; and one means: the utilization of the class struggle.”

Jean Paul Sartre Dirty Hands

Hugo, Act 5, sc. 3
Dirty Hands (1948)

“I don't believe government should take over the grocery store down the street or own the means of production, but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a decent standard of living and that their incomes should go up, not down. I do believe in private companies that thrive and invest and grow in America, companies that create jobs here, rather than companies that are shutting down in America and increasing their profits by exploiting low-wage labor abroad.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

"Bernie Sanders Speech On Democratic Socialism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_8R6PgGcTw, (19 November 2015). 2010s, 2015

Family, Wealth

“It would be hard to find a single example in history in which a group that cast more than 50 percent of the vote got away with calling itself the victim… Women are the only 'oppressed' group to share the same parents as the 'oppressor'; to be born into the middle class and upper class as frequently as the 'oppressor'; to own more of the culture's luxury items than the 'oppressor'…”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part 1: The Myth of Male Power, p. 40.

Women, History, Parent

“The produce of the earth - all that is derived from its surface by the united application of labour, machinery, and capital, is divided among three classes of the community, namely, the proprietor of the land, the owner of the stock or capital necessary for its cultivation, and the labourers by whose industry it is cultivated.”

David Ricardo (1772–1823) British political economist, broker and politician

Original Preface, p. 1
The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1821) (Third Edition)

Communication

“As to the allegation of the Communist that religion makes men passive, we have only to observe that the dynamic power of religious convictions is precisely what prevents a soundly religious person from accepting Communist oppression and Communist mandates. A person practicing the teachings of the Judaic-Christian philosophy will not lie or steal on command. He will not shed innocent blood. He will not participate in the diabolical Communist practice of genocide - the systematic extermination of entire nations or classes. It is clearly evident from the numerous Communist writings that what they fear in religion is not that it makes religious people passive to the dominant class but that it prevents them from becoming passive to Communist discipline. Deep spiritual convictions stand like a wall of resistance to challenge the teachings and practices of Communism. Furthermore, the Communist sees in the dynamic ideology of Judaic-Christian teachings a force for peace which cuts through the vitals of Communism's campaign for world-wide revolution.”

W. Cleon Skousen book The Naked Communist

The Naked Communist (1958)

Men, People, Lie, World

“In the same way that the Soviets' Sputnik satellite woke up the country to the need for math and science education, the outsourcing conversation cries out for a constructive, long-term solution that ensures Americans have world-class education, a world-class workforce and the ability to remain a competitive global leader.”

Ken Kay

2004
"High Tech, Strangled By the Beltway", The Washington Post, 13 March 2004
The context of this quote was an article on the offshoring of American labor.

World, Education, Way, Science

“Take the National Organization for Women — please! They've embarrassed me enough over the years, and now I'm going to give them a taste of their own medicine. They were always so holier-than-thou, systematically getting rid of everyone who wasn't just like them: white, upper-middle class, straight (or closeted), sex-phobic Democratic party apologists. As you can imagine, that's not a huge group anymore — but they still manage to hang onto a name that insists that they represent half the population!
Well, it's all over, sweethearts. I'm taking away your library card, I'm stripping badges and I'm not returning phone calls. Calling NOW feminists is like calling the People's Republic of China communist: Marx and Emma Goldman are both rolling in their graves.”

Susie Bright (1958) American writer and feminist

" This shameless hussy ballbuster Clinton scandals http://www.salon.com/health/sex/col/brig/1998/03/13/nc_13brig/index.html", Salon, March 13, 1998.

Women, People, Sex, Imagination

“After the fascists have succeeded in crushing the vanguard elements and the threat they pose is removed, the ruling class goes on about the business of making profits as usual. The significance of the “new fascist arrangement" lies in the fact that this business-as-usual is accompanied by concessions to the degenerate segment of the working class, with the aim of creating a buffer zone between the ruling class and the still potentially revolutionary segments of the lower classes.”

George Jackson (activist) (1941–1971) activist, Marxist, author, member of the Black Panther Party, and co-founder of the Black Guerrilla Family

Source: Blood in My Eye (1971), p. 119

Business

Quotes about class page 16

Quotes about class
page 16