Quotes about class
page 9

“I personally believe that economics is fun and valuable. People who say they found it a nightmare in college just didn't have a good teacher-professor. I became a good teacher-professor as a result of tenacious mentors during my graduate study at UCLA. Professor Armen Alchian, a very distinguished economist, used to give me a hard time in class. But one day, we were having a friendly chat during our department's weekly faculty/graduate student coffee hour, and he said, "Williams, the true test of whether someone understands his subject is whether he can explain it to someone who doesn't know a darn thing about it."”

Walter E. Williams (1936) American economist, commentator, and academic

That's a challenge I love: making economics fun and understandable.
1970s, Economics for the Citizen (1978)

Love, People, Coffee, Understanding

“For the continuing worldwide oppression of class, nation and race, the incalculable waste and untold misery, the unending destruction and preparation for destruction and the permanent threat to democratic order that characterize the rule of capitalism in this, its most technically advanced, most "enlightened" and most materially wealthy era now threaten human survival itself. In the age of atomic weapons and intercontinental missiles, the predatory system of imperialist rivalry and global exploitation, of military intervention and counterrevolutionary war, faces mankind with the prospect of the ultimate barbarism.”

David Horowitz (1939) Neoconservative activist, writer

from the 1969 book Empire and Revolution.
1960s

War, Age

“Humanism does not exist in itself, just as man taken in himself and for himself does not exist. Only concrete man exists, man set in a particular age, living in a particular country, belonging to a particular social class, representing a particular tradition and particular personal ideals.”

Adam Schaff (1913–2006) Polish Marxist philosopher and theorist

Adam Schaff (1947), cited in: Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio (2007) "Adam Schaff: from Semantics to Political Semiotics." 9th World Congress of IASS/AIS. 2007.

Age, Personality, Country

“There is not only a close analogy between the operations of the mind in general reasoning and its operations in the particular science of Algebra, but there is to a considerable extent an exact agreement in the laws by which the two classes of operations are conducted.”

George Boole (1815–1864) English mathematician, philosopher and logician

Source: 1850s, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854), p. 6; As cited in: Leandro N. De Castro, Fernando J. Von Zuben, Recent Developments in Biologically Inspired Computing, Idea Group Inc (IGI), 2005 p. 236

Law, Science

“In advanced capitalism it expresses the fundamental contradiction between, on the one hand, the increasing socialisation of consumption, and on the other hand, the capitalist logic of the production and distribution of its means of consumption, the outcome of which is a deepening crisis in this sector at the same time as popular protest demands an amelioration of the collective material conditions of daily existence. In an attempt to resolve these contradictions and their resulting conflicts, the state increasingly intervenes in the city; but, as an expression of a class society, the state in practice acts according to the relations of force between classes and social groups, generally in favour of the hegemonic fraction of the dominant classes.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: City, Class and Power, 1978, p. 3

Time

“The free exchange of opinion and information is the very lifeblood of the society to which you owe everything you have. It's the oxygen that gives us clarity and strength. Restricting it is like closing down synapses in the collective brain. It's an act of sabotage and nobody has the right to do it any more than they have the right to arbitrarily ration water or air. No judge, no politician, no police officer and certainly no braying mob of sanctimonious, privileged, middle-class, left-wing, students who think they know best for everyone.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"A word to left-wing students" (11 July 11 2013) https://youtube.com/watch?v=85q6BOnwIAQ <br class="br">2013

Thinking, Water

“I had cut a typing class because I hated to type, and I still don't know how to type, but [now] I can afford to have people type for me.”

Lana Turner (1921–1995) American actress

On her being discovered at a soda shop while skipping school, quoted in interview with Bryant Grumbel (1982). [Euq-IkmMMWE].
On her career

Hate, People

“I often think to myself that it's not I but someone else who is P. M. and is the recipient of those continuous marks of respect and affection from the general public who called in Downing Street or at the station to take off their hats and cheer. And then I go back to the House of Commons and listen to the unending stream of abuse of the P. M., his faithlessness, his weakness, his wickedness, his innate sympathy with Fascism and his obstinate hatred of the working classes.”

Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to Hilda Chamberlain (28 May 1939), quoted in Maurice Cowling, The Impact of Hitler. British Politics and British Policy. 1933-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 293.
Prime Minister

Thinking, Housing

“Length of course depends on the stupidity of the class…”

John Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher (1841–1920) Royal Navy admiral of the fleet

Fisher's notes in the front cover of his own copy of A Short Treatise on Electricity and the Management of Electric Torpedoes (1868)
Fisher of Kilverstone (1973), Ruddock F. Mackay, Clarendon Press, p. 48.

Stupidity, Dependency

“For the majority, I take it, who live all their lives with such obtuse faculties of thinking, it is a difficult thing to perform this feat of mental analysis and of discriminating the material vehicle from the immanent beauty, … Owing to this men give up all search after the true Beauty. Some slide into mere sensuality. Others incline in their desires to dead metallic coin. Others limit their imagination of the beautiful to worldly honours, fame, and power. There is another class which is enthusiastic about art and science. The most debased make their gluttony the test of what is good. But he who turns from all grosser thoughts and all passionate longings after what is seeming, and explores the nature of the beauty which is simple, immaterial, formless, would never make a mistake like that when he has to choose between all the objects of desire; he would never be so misled by these attractions as not to see the transient character of their pleasures and not to win his way to an utter contempt for every one of them. This, then, is the path to lead us to the discovery of the Beautiful. All other objects that attract men's love, be they never so fashionable, be they prized never so much and embraced never so eagerly, must be left below us, as too low, too fleeting, to employ the powers of loving which we possess; not indeed that those powers are to be locked up within us unused and motionless; but only that they must first be cleansed from all lower longings; then we must lift them to that height to which sense can never reach.”

Gregory of Nyssa (335–395) bishop of Nyssa

On Virginity, Chapter 11

Love, Men, Pleasure, Beauty

“You see, when you're middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile; all sadnesses go unpitied.”

Douglas Coupland (1961) Canadian novelist, short story writer, playwright, and graphic designer

Generation X (1991)

Happiness, Sadness, Feeling, History

“The crucial and monumental development in the art music of our century has been the qualitative change in the foundational premises of our musical language--the change from a highly chromaticized tonality whose principle functions and operations are still based on a limited selection, the seven notes of the diatonic scale, from the universal set of twelve pitch classes to a scale that comprehends the total pitch-class content of that universal set. We can point to the moment of that change with some precision. It occurs most obviously in the music of Scriabin and the Vienna circle, Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg, in 1909-1910, and very soon afterwards, though less obviously, in the music of Bartok and Stravinsky. I think it is safe to say that nothing of comparable significance for music has ever occurred, because the closing of the circle of fifths gives us a symmetrical collection of all twelve pitch classes that eliminates the special structural function of the perfect fifth itself, which has been the basis of every real musical system that we have hitherto known.”

George Perle (1915–2009) American composer

Pages 42-43
The Listening Composer

Art, Music, Thinking, Universe

“Many many heartfelt thanks for your letter of September 25. Though it filled me with shame and remorse, I was grateful for the Christian impulse which moved you to stretch out a hand to me in my wretchedness. You say "We become that with which we busy our mind." Too true! Alas, too true! I recall that as a boy the school chaplain said to my class, "If you tell dirty jokes you will grow to look like a dirty joke!" This is been my hapless destiny…. Would you do me a favour? Will you send me a photograph of yourself, so that I may behold a countenance suffused with Christian love, and perhaps even repent?”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

To a woman in Manitoba, who sent a letter reproaching Davies for writing "barnyard pornography" in The Rebel Angels (1981), quoted in For Your Eye Alone : Letters 1976-1995 (1999).

Love, School, Boy, Business

“The church of Jesus needs to wake up from the exile of passivity and embrace liminality and adventure or continue to remain a religious ghetto for culturally co-opted, fearful, middle-class folk.”

Alan Hirsch (1959) South African missionary

Source: The Faith of Leap (2011), p. 92

Fear

“When nature removes a great man, people explore the horizon for a successor; but none comes, and none will. His class is extinguished with him. In some other and quite different field the next man will appear.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Uses of Great Men
1850s, Representative Men (1850)

People, Nature, Appearance

“In the middle classes the gifted son of a family is always the poorest—usually a writer or artist with no sense for speculation—and in a family of peasants, where the average comfort is just over penury, the gifted son sinks also, and is soon a tramp on the roadside.”

John Millington Synge (1871–1909) Irish playwright, poet, prose writer, and collector of folklore

The Vagrants of Wicklow, written 1901-1902, first published in The Shanachie (Dublin, autumn 1906).

Family, Sense

“I repudiate these attacks on him…a German of the Germans…his honour so assailed. Who made this infamous attack upon our friend? Men who till now have been looked upon as Germans, but who henceforth are unworthy of that name. And these men come from the Reich's working classes, who owe so infinite a debt of gratitude to Krupp!”

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

Speech at the funeral of Friedrich Alfred Krupp (27 November 1902), quoted in William Manchester, The Arms of Krupp 1587-1968 (London: Michael Joseph, 1968), p. 275
1900s

Men, Gratitude

“The so-called natural sentiments of the average man are mostly the inherited prejudices of the once suppressed classes. The emphasis upon natural goodness is, psychologically speaking, unwillingness to submit such prejudices to wholesome self-criticism. Hence the democratic government tends to support each crowd in its delusion of infallibility. The crowd rationalizes its will to rule in terms of narrow and parochial ideas of righteousness and seeks to force conformity to such ideas upon all. The imagined vindication of the common man's notions of goodness is regarded as the ultimate triumph of righteousness. Hence democracy has always manifested a certain crusading spirit, and the democratic Utopia is envisaged as a sort of Roman peace with "righteousness" established by force rather than assent.”

Everett Dean Martin (1880–1941)

Source: The Conflict of the Individual and the Mass in the Modern World (1932), p. 22

Peace, Democracy, Imagination, Idea

“In Part II I argue that the Prison is institutionalized by the "monolithic mode of production" which creates effective monopolies not for its brands but for its products … institutionalized medicine; the universal, compulsory school; compulsory heterosexuality; … In Part III … I propose a class analysis that sees us not as ruling-class, bourgeois or proletarian, but as life-, thing- or death-oriented. In Part IV … I suggest that the new worldview implies four "primary" New Age ethics – the self-development, ecology, self reliance-cooperation and nonviolence ethics. … In Part V I try to suggest what "New Age society" might be like. … It would foster "localization" – community and regional decentralization (to whatever extent the various communities wished). And it would foster "planetization"”

Mark Satin (1946) American political theorist, author, and newsletter publisher

planetary cooperation and sharing. ... In Pat VII ... I argue for a strategy that would involve ... (a) healing self, and (b) healing society.
Pages 7–8.
New Age Politics: Healing Self and Society (1978)

Life, Death, Age, School

“Our homeland's enemies, the enemies of the working class movement all over the world are trying to penetrate into the PDPA leadership and above all woo the working class party leader but the people of Afghanistan and the PDPA both take great pride in the fact that the PDPA and its General-Secretary enjoys a great personality which render him impossible to woo.”

Hafizullah Amin (1929–1979) politician, former Afghan head of state (1979)

As quoted in Beverley Male (1982) Revolutionary Afghanistan: A Reappraisal, page 167

People, World, Personality

“I consequently tried it in such cases, and where there has not been destruction, or irreparable organic injury to the auditory apparatus, I can confidently say, I know of no means equal to hypnotism, for benefiting such cases. Of course, it cannot suit all cases, but I am satisfied it will succeed in a numerous class of cases, and in some which bid defiance to all other known modes of treatment.”

James Braid (1795–1860) Scottish surgeon, hypnotist, and hypnotherapist

The case of treating deafness by hypnotizing, in in “Neurypnology; or, The rationale of nervous sleep, considered in relation ...”, p. 223.

Confidence

“I think that puts a spotlight on the need to have policy proposals to address concerns that people have, including and especially the voters who have been supporting Donald Trump. I think the solution to that to those who share that concern is to have more conservative proposals, more proposals for reform that involve constitutionally limited government, that involve economic and social conservatism. If we can offer up proposals that address the concerns that are driving people in that direction I think we'd be better off for it. A lot of people feel left out by a government that taxes too much and regulates them too heavily and seems to result in a set of circumstances where economic and political incumbents benefit at everybody else's expense. You have six of the ten wealthiest counties in America surround Washington, D. C., and the poor and middle class are getting squeezed while people at the top and people with influence in government seem always to be doing better.”

Mike Lee (U.S. politician) (1971) American politician

Exclusive interview with Mike Lee: Why I want to join Senate leadership http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/exclusive-interview-with-mike-lee-why-i-want-to-join-senate-leadership/article/2588278 (April 12, 2016)

People, Feeling, Support, Thinking

“We resist hegemonic dominance of feminist thought by insisting that it is a theory in the making, that we must necessarily criticize, question, re-examine, and explore new possibilities. My persistent critique has been informed by my status as a member of an oppressed group, experience of sexist exploitation and discrimination, and the sense that prevailing feminist analysis has not been the force shaping my feminist consciousness. This is true for many women. There are white women who had never considered resisting male dominance until the feminist movement created an awareness that they could and should. My awareness of feminist struggle was stimulated by social circumstance. Growing up in a Southern, black, father-dominated, working class household, I experienced (as did my mother, my sisters, and my brother) varying degrees of patriarchal tyranny and it made me angry-it made us all angry. Anger led me to question the politics of male dominance and enabled me to resist sexist socialization. Frequently, white feminists act as if black women did not know sexist oppression existed until they voiced feminist sentiment. They believe they are providing black women with "the" analysis and "the" program for liberation. They do not understand, cannot even imagine, that black women, as well as other groups of women who live daily in oppressive situations, often acquire an awareness of patriarchal politics from their lived experience, just as they develop strategies of resistance (even though they may not resist on a sustained or organized basis). These black women observed white feminist focus on male tyranny and women's oppression as if it were a "new" revelation and felt such a focus had little impact on their lives. To them it was just another indication of the privileged living conditions of middle and upper class white women that they would need a theory to inform them that they were "oppressed." The implication being that people who are truly oppressed know it even though they may not be engaged in organized resistance or are unable to articulate in written form the nature of their oppression. These black women saw nothing liberatory in party line analyses of women's oppression. Neither the fact that black women have not organized collectively in huge numbers around the issues of "feminism" (many of us do not know or use the term) nor the fact that we have not had access to the machinery of power that would allow us to share our analyses or theories about gender with the American public negate its presence in our lives or place us in a position of dependency in relationship to those white and non-white feminists who address a larger audience.”

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

Source: (1984), Chapter 1: Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory, p. 10.

Women, People, Imagination, Understanding

“What then do we propose? We propose the establishment, after the thorough defeat of the Japanese aggressors, of a state system which we call New Democracy, namely, a united-front democratic alliance based on the overwhelming majority of the people, under the leadership of the working class.”

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

On Coalition Government (1945)

People, Democracy

“My mother was convinced, and on this head I have retained her firm belief, that to kill animals for the purpose of feeding on their flesh is one of the most deplorable and shameful infirmities of the human state; that it is one of those curses cast upon man either by his fall, or by the obduracy of his own perversity. She believed, and I am of the same belief, that these habits of hard-heartedness towards the gentlest animals, our companions, our auxiliaries, our brethren in toil and even in affection here below; that these immolations, these sanguinary appetites, this sight of palpitating flesh, are calculated to brutalize the instincts of the heart and make them ferocious. She believed, and I am of the same belief, that this nurture, which is seemingly much more succulent and much more energetic, contains in itself active causes of irritation and putridity, which sour the blood and shorten the days of mankind. In support of these ideas of abstinence, she quoted the innumerable gentle and pious tribes of India who deny themselves all that has had life; and the strong and healthy races of the shepherds and even of the laboring classes of our fields.”

Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869) French writer, poet, and politician

Book IV, Note VIII, p. 60
Les confidences (1849)

Life, Quotes, Idea, Support

“One of the most popular superstitions consists in the belief that every man is endowed with definite qualities—that some men are kind, some wicked; some wise, some foolish; some energetic, some apathetic, etc. This is not true. We may say of a man that he is oftener kind than wicked; oftener wise than foolish; oftener energetic than apathetic, and vice versa. But it would not be true to say of one man that he is always kind or wise, and of another that he is always wicked or foolish. And yet we thus divide people. This is erroneous. Men are like rivers—the water in all of them, and at every point, is the same, but every one of them is now narrow, now swift, now wide, now calm, now clear, now cold, now muddy, now warm. So it is with men. Every man bears within him the germs of all human qualities, sometimes manifesting one quality, sometimes another; and often does not resemble himself at all, manifesting no change. With some people these changes are particularly sharp. And to this class Nekhludoff belonged.”

Leo Tolstoy book Resurrection

Source: Resurrection (1899), Ch. 57

Men, People, Water, Change

“As the entire middle class, the bourgeois and petty bourgeois intelligentsia, boycotted the Soviet government for months after the October Revolution and crippled the railroad, post and telegraph, and educational and administrative apparatus, and, in this fashion, opposed the workers government, naturally all measures of pressure were exerted against it. These included the deprivation of political rights, of economic means of existence, etc., in order to break their resistance with an iron fist. It was precisely in this way that the socialist dictatorship expressed itself, for it cannot shrink from any use of force to secure or prevent certain measures involving the interests of the whole.”

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

The Russian Revolution (1918)

Education, Way, Fashion, Nature

“As an advocate of birth control I wish … to point out that the unbalance between the birth rate of the 'unfit' and the 'fit,' admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes. In this matter, the example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken classes, should not be held up for emulation…. On the contrary, the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.”

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

"The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda", October 1921, page 5.
Birth Control Review, 1918-32

Birth, Problem

“The eighteenth century is full of contradictions. It is not only that its philosophical attitude wavers between rationalism and anti-rationalism, but its artistic aims are also dominated by two 122 opposite tendencies and at some times approach a strictly classicistic, at others a more unrestrained pictorial conception. And like the rationalism of the period, its classicism is also difficult to define and open to various sociological interpretations, since it is sustained alternately by courtly-aristocratic and middle-class strata of society and ends by developing into the representative artistic style of the revolutionary bourgeoisie.”

Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian

Source: The Social History of Art, Volume III. Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism, 1999, Chapter 5. Revolution and Art

Time

“With Darwinist-materialist education communism advances and the people would be ruined. It is not enough to put religion classes in the schools. The state needs to stop Darwinist-materialist education.”

Harun Yahya (1956) Turkish author

25 April 2013.
A9 TV addresses, 2013

People, Education, School, Religion

“At one time, tips were given only for things you logically would want to have done efficiently and promptly, and they served to supplement a lower payscale for certain classes of employment. This was understood, accepted. It was tourism, back in the century of my birth, cluing in the underdeveloped countries to the fact that all tourists are marks, that set the precedent, which then spread to all countries, even back to the tourists’ own, of the benefits which might be gained by those who wear uniforms and render the undesired and the unrequested with a smile. This is the army that conquered the world. After their quiet revolution in the twentieth century, we all became tourists the minute we set foot outside our front doors, second-class citizens, to be ruthlessly exploited by the smiling legions who had taken over, slyly, completely.”

Roger Zelazny Isle of the Dead

Source: Isle of the Dead (1969), Chapter 2 (p. 45)

World, Smile, Birth, Time

“Abstraction and luxury are the guard dogs of the upper class. The upper class wants people to have ambition and gumption because, if you do, you will participate and you'll move through society into a different class structure.”

Jeff Koons (1955) American artist

"From Full Phantom Five," 1988

People, Dogs

“And so I am not concerned to justify the perpetrators of violence but to enquire into the function of the violence of the working classes in contemporary socialism.”

Georges Sorel book Reflections on Violence

Source: Reflections on Violence (1908), p. 42

“The problem of dealing with the armed forces of the Crown is the most difficult one we will have to face when we do get into power. The Labour Party will have to face the fact that it is a class Party…It has to be prepared to take steps more forceful than even the steps taken at the time of the Ulster Rebellion.”

Stafford Cripps (1889–1952) British politician

The Manchester Guardian (28 May 1934), quoted in Hugh Dalton, The Fateful Years. Memoirs 1931-1945 (London: Frederick Muller Ltd, 1957), p. 150.

Problem, Time

“To make psychology into experimental epistemology is to attempt to understand the embodiment of mind. Here we are confronted by what seem to be three questions, although they may ultimately be only one. The three exist as categorically disperate desiderata.
The first is at the logical level: We lack an adequate, appropriate calculus for triadic relations.
The second is the psychological level: We do not know how we generate hypotheses that are natural and simple.
The third is that the physiological level: we have no circuit theory for the reticular formation that marshals our abductions.
Logically, the problem is far from simple. To be exact, no proposed theory of relations yields a calculus to handle our problem. When I was growing up, only the Aristotelian logic of classes was ever taught, and that badly. The Organon itself contains only a clumsy description of the apagoge - perhaps from the notes of some students who have not understand his master…”

Warren S. McCulloch (1898–1969) American neuroscientist

Source: Embodiments of Mind, (1965), p. 389, Chapter " What's in the brain that ink may character http://vordenker.de/ggphilosophy/mcculloch_whats-in-the-brain.pdf"

Understanding, Question, Nature, Problem

“I have, perhaps, too professional a point of view where deaths are concerned. They are divided, in my mind, into two classes — deaths which are my affair and deaths which are not my affair — and though the latter class is infinitely more numerous — nevertheless whenever I come in contact with death I am like the dog who lifts his head and sniffs the scent.”

Agatha Christie book Death in the Clouds

Death in the Clouds (1935)

Death, Dogs

“[Permitting discussions in the Indian Council seems to me] an unmeaning mimicry of the forms of popular institutions where the reality is impossible. What is called public opinion in India is frequently the opinion of a clique, and presents none of the guarantees for sound judgment possessed by a public opinion which represents the combined views of a large mass of different interests and classes. I have the smallest possible belief in 'Councils' possessing any other than consultative functions.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Source: Letter to Lord Northbrook (12 June 1874), quoted in S. Gopal, British Policy in India, 1858-1905 (Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 104.

Reality

“Cellular automata are discrete dynamical systems with simple construction but complex self-organizing behaviour. Evidence is presented that all one-dimensional cellular automata fall into four distinct universality classes. Characterizations of the structures generated in these classes are discussed. Three classes exhibit behaviour analogous to limit points, limit cycles and chaotic attractors. The fourth class is probably capable of universal computation, so that properties of its infinite time behaviour are undecidable.”

Stephen Wolfram (1959) British-American computer scientist, mathematician, physicist, writer and businessman

[10, 1–2, January 1984, 1–35, Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, Universality and complexity in cellular automata, 10.1016/0167-2789(84)90245-8]

Universe, Time

“The traveler to the United States will do well, however, to prepare himself for the class-consciousness of the natives. This differs from the already familiar English version in being more extreme and based more firmly on the conviction that the class to which the speaker belongs is inherently superior to all others.”

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) American economist and diplomat

The United States (1971)

Travel

“To Bring political knowledge to the workers the Social-Democratss must go among all classes of the population, must dispatch units of their army in all directions”

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

Source: What is to be Done? (1902), Chapter Three, Section D, Essential Works of Lenin (1966)

Knowledge

“If we sit with Negroes at our tables, if we attend social functions with them as our social equals, if we disregard segregation in all other relations, is it then possible that we maintain it fixedly in the marriage of the South's Saxon sons and daughters? The answer must be "No." By the absolute denial of social equality to the Negro, the barriers between the races are firm and strong. But if the middle wall of the social partition should be broken down, then the mingling of the tides of life would surely begin. It would be a slow process, but the result would be the same. And though the process be gradual, it would be none the less irresistible and inevitable. The lower strata of the white population would probably feel the first effects, and within the foreseeable future the middle and upper classes would be invaded. Then, the Southern White race, the Southern Caucasian, would be irretrievably doomed.”

Theodore G. Bilbo (1877–1947) American politician

Source: Take Your Choice, Separation or Mongrelization (1946), Chapter 4: Southern Segregation and the Color Line.

Life, Marriage, Feeling, Strong

“So 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your 'ome in the Soudan;
You're a pore benighted 'eathen but a first-class fightin' man.”

Rudyard Kipling book Barrack-Room Ballads

Fuzzy-Wuzzy, Stanza 1.
Barrack-Room Ballads (1892, 1896)

“Every man who repeats the dogma of Mill that one country is not fit to rule another country must admit that a class is not fit to rule another class.”

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) Father of republic India, champion of human rights, father of India's Constitution, polymath, revolutionary…

Political Science for Civil Services Main Examination (2010)

Country

“The principle of inorganic equality was for them crucial. Men of the stamp of Jahn and Arndt had no notion that it was Equality that had first sounded the cry of "Vive la nation" in the September massacres of 1792.
They forgot, too, one basic fact. The Romanticism of their Volkslieder sang only the heroism of the common soldier, but the inner worth of these armies (at first amateurs in the calling of arms), their spirit, their discipline, and their training, depended upon the quality of the officer‑ corps, whose adequacy was due entirely to eighteenth-century traditions. With the Jacobins also a body of soldiers was morally worth precisely as much as its officer, who had trained it by his example. Napoleon confessed at St. Helena that he would not have been beaten had he had for his superb fighting material a corps of officers like the Austrian, a corps in which chivalrous traditions of loyalty, honour, and silent self-discipline still survived. Once the command wavers in its intentions and its attitude—or itself abdicates, as in 1918—the bravest regiment becomes on the spot a cowardly and helpless herd. …
All young sects are at bottom hostile to State and property, class and rank, and are attracted to universal equality.”

Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) German historian and philosopher

The Hour of Decision (1933)

Men, Hostility, Universe, Fight

“Ignore for a moment the obviously sound national financial strategy behind having a competent and productive populace trained in fact-based knowledge as opposed to baseless belief with no practical application. All attempts to rid science from the lessons, to revise history, and corrupt other classes for the sake of promoting Christianity –will only serve to empower Muslims too. The very laws and customs enabling Christians to oppress others today will also give Islam power to oppress Christians tomorrow. You can’t have freedom *of* religion without freedom *from* religion, and that means keeping it out of government. So if Christians are really concerned about “Islamification”, then they ought to do the very opposite of everything they’re currently doing, and rally with the atheists to stay secular.”

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

Patheos, Muslim Demographics http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2013/06/08/muslim-demographics/ (June 8, 2013)

Religion, Law, History, Knowledge

“Pro-slavery impulse still governs the Democratic Party, the party of government sinecures. It is the party that wants to use political power to tax us not for any common good, but to eat while we work. Consider the Great Society and its legacy. In the fall of 1964, I was on the speech-writing staff of the Goldwater campaign. In September and October I went on a number of forays to college campuses, where I debated spokesmen for our opponents. My argument always started from here. In 1964 the economy, thanks to the Kennedy tax cuts, was growing at the remarkable annual rate of four percent. But federal revenues were growing at 20 percent; five times as fast. The real issue in the election, I said, was what was to happen to that cornucopia of revenue. Barry Goldwater would use it to reduce the deficit and to further reduce taxes; Lyndon Johnson would use it to start vast new federal programs. At that point I could not say what programs, but I knew that the real purpose of them would be to create a new class of dependents upon the Democratic Party. The ink was hardly dry on the election returns before Johnson invented the war on poverty; and proved my prediction correct. One did not need to be cynical to see that the poor were not a reason for the expansion of bureaucracy; the expansion of bureaucracy was a reason for the poor. Every failure to reduce poverty was always represented as another reason to increase expenditures on the poor. The ultimate beneficiary was the Democratic Party. Every federal bureaucrat became in effect a precinct captain, delivering the votes of his constituents. His job was to enlarge the pool of constituents. But every increase in that pool meant a diminution of our property and our freedom.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

1990s, The Party of Lincoln vs. The Party of Bureaucrats (1996)

War, Failure, Freedom, Time

“Marrying her to prove I do not subscribe to an outdated convention of class would be just as foolish as refusing to marry her because I did.”

Jo Walton book Tooth and Claw

Source: Tooth and Claw (2003), Chapter 9, section 33 (p. 142)

“Theories of the postmodern - whether celebratory or couched in the language of moral revulsion and denunciation - bear a strong family resemblance to all those more ambitious sociological generalizations which, at much the same time, bring us the news of the arrival and inauguration of a whole new type of society, most famously baptized "postindustrial society"(Daniel Bell) but often also designated consumer society, media society, information society, electronic society, or high tech and the like. Such theories have the obvious ideological mission of demonstrating, to their own relief, that the new social formation in question no longer obeys the laws of classical capitalism, namely, the primacy of industrial production and the omnipresence of class struggle.”

Fredric Jameson (1934) American academic

Source: Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Chapter 1: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Family, Law, Question, Strong

“If Americans are the most efficient workers on earth and work longer hours than almost any other advanced nation, why are we getting our clocks cleaned? Answer: While American workers are world-class, our elites are mentally challenged. So rhapsodic are they about the Global Economy they have forgotten their own country. Europeans, Japanese, Canadians and Chinese sell us so much more than they buy from us because they have rigged the rules of world trade.”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

"How to Bring Manufacturing Back Home" http://buchanan.org/blog/pjb-how-to-bring-manufacturing-back-home-109 (September 29, 2006), Patrick J. Buchanan <br class="br">2000s

World, Country

“The main point of Flying Down to Rio is the screen promise of Fred Astaire…. He's assuredly a bet after this one, for he's distinctly likeable on the screen, the mike is kind to his voice and as a dancer he remains in a class by himself. The latter observation will be no news to the professsion, which has long admitted that Astaire starts dancing where the others stop hoofing.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

Variety. Flying Down to Rio, December 26, 1933. (M).

Dance, Flying

“The Party is carried on though the Soviets, which embrace the working masses, irrespective of occupation. The district congresses of Soviet are democratic institutions, the like of which even the best of the democratic republics of the bourgeois world have never known; through these con tresses, as well as by continually appointing class-conscious workers to various posts in the rural districts, the proletariat exercises its role of leader of the peasantry, gives effect to the dictatorship of the urban proletariat, wages, a systematic struggle against the rich, bourgeois, exploiting and profiteering peasantry, etc.”

Vladimir Lenin book "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder

CH 5, "Left Wing Communism in Germany. The Leaders, the Party, the Class, the Mass"
"Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)

World, Exercises

“I think the English people are at heart and in practice the kindest people in the world…there is in England a profound sympathy for the under-dog. There is a brotherly and a neighbourly feeling which we see to a remarkable extent through all classes. There is a way of facing misfortunes with a cheerful face. It was shown to a marvellous degree in the war.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech at the annual dinner of The Royal Society of St. George (6 May 1924), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), pp. 4-5.
1924

War, People, World, Dogs

“It is the slow, but steady movement of the lower classes along the scale of the class system. But it has been very very slow. It took 2000 years. But it is something which is going on, and something which is almost spectacular in certain sectors today -assertion of the backward classes, of scheduled castes, of women.”

K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) 9th Vice President and the 10th President of India

Shri K. R. Narayanan President of India in Conversation with N. Ram on Doordarshan and All India Radio

Women

“There are men in the House of Commons, who profess in a special sense to be the representatives of Labour, who would not allow me, who represent a great working-class constituency…to claim to represent you. In order to do so I must be a man who did some work 30 years ago and never did any since. (Loud laughter.) It is these men who are at the present time blackening the characters of those who are upholding the British dominion and British honour throughout the world…They have no ear of sympathy for the men who suffered for the Imperial cause. The other day some officers, British soldiers, were murdered with savage brutality for no reason or provocation. They had no sympathy with those officers or the families that they left behind them, their only idea was to shield the assassins from the proper penalty of their crime. ("Traitors.")…But one thing I will say, and I say it in your name; these men at any rate do not represent the working classes of England (loud cheering), and never yet in our history or in the history of the British race has a great democracy been unpatriotic.”

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

Hear, hear.
On the Labour Party (7 July 1906), quoted in ‘The Chamberlain Celebration In Birmingham.’, The Times (10 July 1906), p. 11.
1900s

Men, World, Family, Penalty

“Labor is a commodity, like any other, and its price is therefore determined by exactly the same laws that apply to other commodities. In a regime of big industry or of free competition – as we shall see, the two come to the same thing – the price of a commodity is, on the average, always equal to its cost of production. Hence, the price of labor is also equal to the cost of production of labor. But, the costs of production of labor consist of precisely the quantity of means of subsistence necessary to enable the worker to continue working, and to prevent the working class from dying out. The worker will therefore get no more for his labor than is necessary for this purpose; the price of labor, or the wage, will, in other words, be the lowest, the minimum, required for the maintenance of life.”

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

(1847)

Life, Law

“A is for audition sense, knowing what to prepare for auditions and finding your niche; B is for business sense, submitting through Back Stage, reading Ross Reports, allocating funds every week for materials; C is for common sense, knowing how to weed out scam artists and follow your instincts, not your ego D is for driving sense, performing regularly, taking classes, practicing your craft; and E is for exit sense, which, he says, means know when to leave an audition; exit your emotions. Look for and enter the next audition fresh and enthusiastic.”

Carson Grant (1950) American actor

Davis, Leesa, "Who Got the Part: Carson Grant", Backstage, November 9, 2006, p. 18.
About his ABC's audition philosophy printed in 2006 Backstage.

Business, Sense, Reading

“To speak for labor; to plead the cause of the men and women and children who toil; to serve the working class, has always been to me a high privilege; a duty of love.”

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) American labor and political leader

The Canton, Ohio Speech, Anti-War Speech (1918)

Love, Women, Men, Children

“The small triumph of "The Graduate" was to have domesticated alienation and the difficulty of communication, by making what Benjamin is alienated from a middle-class comic strip and making it absurdly evident that he has nothing to communicate — which is just what makes him an acceptable hero for the large movie audience. If he said anything or had any ideas, the audience would probably hate him.”

Pauline Kael book Going Steady

Going Steady (1969), Trash, Art and the Movies (February 1969)

Hate, Communication, Idea

“Though Latin long held sway in Court and bureaucratic circles, the cultural cement of the empire’s core populations was Greek and its education was in the Greek classics and tongue. Imperial tradition, Christian Orthodoxy and Greek culture became even more the bases of Byzantium and her Hellenic community, after she had lost most of her western and Asiatic possessions in the seventh century — to Visigoths and then Arabs m Spain and North Africa, to the Lombards in much of Italy, to the Slavs in the Balkans and to Muslim armies in Egypt and the Near East. Political circumstances, and the resilience of Greek culture and Greek education, made her predominantly Greek in speech and character. After the sack of Constantinople in 1204 and the establishment of a Latin empire under Venetian auspices, the rivalry of the Greek empires based on Nicaea, Epirus and Trebizond to realize the patriotic Hellenic dream of recapturing the former capital further stimulated Greek ethnic sentiment against Latin usurpation. W1cn in the face of Turkith threats, the fifteenth-century Byzantine emperor, Michael Palaeologus, tried to place the Orthodox Church under the Papacy and hence Western protection; an inflamed Greek sentiment vigorously opposed his policy. The city’s populace in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, their Hellenic sentiments fanned by monks, priests and the Orthodox party against the Latin policies of the government, actually preferred the Turkish turban to the Latin mitre and attacked the urban wealthy classes. But the Turkish conquest and the demise of Byzantium did not spell the end of the Orthodox Greek community and its ethnic sentiment. tinder its Church and Patriarch, and organized as a recognized milliet of the Ottoman empire, the Greek community flourished in exile, the upper classes of its Diaspora assuming privileged economic and bureaucratic positions in the empire. So Byzantine bureaucratic incorporation had paradoxical effects: as in Egypt, it helped to sunder the mass of the Greek community from the state and its Court and bureaucratic imperial myths and culture in favour of a more demotic Greek Orthodoxy; but, unlike Egypt, the demise of the state served to strengthen that Orthodoxy and reattach to it the old dynastic Messianic symbolism of a restored Byzantine empire in opposition to Turkish oppression.”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

The Ethnic Origins of Nations (1987)

Education, Dreams, Communication, Help

“If the defenders of privilege desire to exclude from this country the opponents of privilege, they should see to it that Congress omits the taking of the eleventh census. For the eleventh census, if taken, will undoubtedly emphasize these two lessons of the tenth: first, that foreign immigration does not increase dishonesty and violence among us, but does increase the love of liberty; second, that the population of the world is gradually dividing into two classes, Anarchists and criminals.”

Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (1854–1939) American journalist and anarchist

Individual Liberty (1926), Anarchism and Crime

Love, World, Country

“Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great. One English critic took me to task for not saying that Genet was "afraid of intimacy" all his life because he'd been abandoned by his mother at the age of seven months. All the evidence needed to make such an interpretation is in my book, but I don't myself draw the vulgar conclusion. Since most literary biographies ignore the work except for potted plot summaries, they strip the biographee of everything redeeming and leave his or her subject to this spiteful revenge, this half-baked Freudian-Christian-bourgeois moralizing.”

Edmund White (1940) American novelist and LGBT essayist

Self-interview, Dalkey Archive Press (1994).
Articles and Interviews

Life, People, Books, Age

“Just as economic pressure from the base … is able to modify the production of surplus value, so pressure grounded in spatial practice is alone capable of modifying the apportionment of that surplus value — i. e. the distribution of the portion of social surplus production allotted to society's collective 'interests', to so-called social services. Such grass-roots pressure, if it is to be effective in this regard, cannot be confined to attacking the state qua guardian of the 'general interest'. For this state, born of the hegemony of a class, has as one of its functions — and a more and more significant function — the organization of space, the regularization of its flows, the control of its networks. It devotes to these purposes a considerable part of global surplus value, of the surplus production assigned to the running of society.”

Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) French philosopher

Henri Lefebvre (1974) The Production of Space. Translated to English in 1991 by Donald Nicholson-Smith; As cited in: "Henri Lefebvre on Governance and Space" on thepolisblog.org 2012.10
Other quotes

Grass, Parting

“[On yoga] Once you've completed a wonderful class, you get a sense of the deepest, purest part of yourself. You feel like you are connected to everybody else in the world.”

Jennifer Beals (1963) American actress and a former teen model

Jennifer Beals on yoga (Date unknown) http://jennifer-beals.com/media/press/yoga.html.

World, Feeling, Sense, Parting

“The United States has never had the tradition of a military class. The President of the United States is the Commander in Chief of the Armed Services, and the officers and enlisted men of the Army, Navy, and Air Force are drawn from all classes of American life and must be trained from scratch.”

Ernest King (1878–1956) United States Navy admiral, Chief of Naval Operations

Source: Introduction, p. viii note: 1950s, Fleet Admiral King: A Naval Record (1952)

Life, Men, Training

“What should a society be, so that in his last years a man might still be a man?
The answer is simple: he would always have to have been treated as a man. By the fate that it allots to its members who can no longer work, society gives itself away — it has always looked upon them as so much material. Society confesses that as far as it is concerned, profit is the only thing that counts, and that its "humanism" is mere window-dressing. In the nineteenth century the ruling classes explicitly equated the proletariat with barbarism. The struggles of the workers succeeded in making the proletariat part of mankind once more. But only in so far as it is productive. Society turns away from the aged worker as though he belonged to another species. That is why the whole question is buried in a conspiracy of silence.”

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist

Conclusion, p. 542
The Coming of Age (1970)

Fate, Age, Question, Silence

“A subsystem is a set of classes (and possibly other subsystems) collaborating to fulfill a set of responsibilities. Although subsystems do not exist as the software executes, they are useful conceptual entities.”

Rebecca Wirfs-Brock (1953) American software engineer

Source: Object-oriented design: a responsibility-driven approach (1989), p. 30

“During the nine years that Calcutta was my home, I lived a life which would now be seen as thoroughly politically incorrect. From our youngest days, we were never allowed to forget that we were different - we were English, not Indian. We had an English nanny who saw to that. She supervised us 24x7 and once, finding me learning to count from our driver, she cuffed my head, saying "that's the servants' language, not yours". Inevitably, we were not allowed to play with Indian children. There were even class barriers to the European children we were allowed to play with. My nanny would not allow us to play with children who only had Indian or Anglo-Indian nannies because their parents couldn't afford a "proper nanny", as she saw herself. European society in the Calcutta of those days was divided by a strict class system, not dissimilar to the caste system. Members of the ICS, were considered the Brahmins (the elite caste), while the members of the Indian army were regarded as the Rajputs (the warrior caste). As a businessman, my father was a Vaisya (trading caste), dismissed by the snooty ICS and army as a mere "boxwallah".”

Mark Tully (1935) British journalist

Why Mark Tully needs a Calcutta birth certificate at 78, 2013

Life, Children, Home, Parent

“My family were of good English peasant class from St. John's Wood. My father dealt in stocks and shares and my mother also had a lot of time on her hands.”

Hermione Gingold (1897–1987) English actress

The World is Square [her autobiography], Pt. I. Pub. 1945 by Home & Van Thal Ltd.

Family, Time

“In every country the intellectual class is the most influential class. This is the class which can foresee, advise and lead. In no country does the mass of the people live the life for intelligent thought and action. It is largely imitative and follows the intellectual class. There is no exaggeration in saying that the entire destination of the country depends upon its intellectual class. If the intellectual class is honest and independent, it can be trusted to take the initiative and give a proper lead when a crisis arises. It is true that the intellect by itself is no virtue. It is only a means and the use of a means depends upon the ends which an intellectual person pursues. An intellectual man can be a good man but he may easily be a rogue. Similarly an intellectual class may be a band of high-souled persons, ready to help, ready to emancipate erring humanity or it may easily be a gang of crooks or a body of advocates of narrow clique from which it draws its support.”

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) Father of republic India, champion of human rights, father of India's Constitution, polymath, revolutionary…

Speech delivered to the Bombay Presidency Mahar Conference (31 May 1936) http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00ambedkar/txt_ambedkar_salvation.html

Life, People, Soul, Intelligence

“Yeah, the good news about the move to abolish the death tax, the tax where they come and look at how much money you've got when you die, how much gold is in your teeth and they want half of it, is that — you're right, there's an exemption for — I don't know — maybe a million dollars now, and it's scheduled to go up a little bit. However, 70 percent of the American people want to abolish that tax. Congress, the House and Senate, have three times voted to abolish it. The president supports abolishing it, so that tax is going to be abolished. I think it speaks very much to the health of the nation that 70-plus percent of Americans want to abolish the death tax, because they see it as fundamentally unjust. The argument that some who played at the politics of hate and envy and class division will say, 'Yes, well, that's only 2 percent,' or as people get richer 5 percent in the near future of Americans likely to have to pay that tax. I mean, that's the morality of the Holocaust. 'Well, it's only a small percentage,' you know. 'I mean, it's not you, it's somebody else.' And this country, people who may not make earning a lot of money the centerpiece of their lives, they may have other things to focus on, they just say it's not just. If you've paid taxes on your income once, the government should leave you alone. Shouldn't come back and try and tax you again.”

Grover Norquist (1956) Conservative Lobbyist

interview with NPR's Terry Gross on the program Fresh Air, October 2, 2003.
2003

Death, Money, Hate, People

“Virginia was in fact a landowning aristocracy, without nobility or merchant class, or any considerable small peasant farming class; and the other Southern colonies, except North Carolina, were on the whole similar to Virginia in these respects.”

Carl L. Becker (1873–1945) American historian

The United States: An Experiment in Democracy (1920)

“It is no exaggeration to say that the main aim of upper-class existence is to enjoy the filthiest of amusements.”

Octave Mirbeau (1848–1917) French journalist, art critic, travel writer, pamphleteer, novelist, and playwright

Garden of Tortures

“I believe it is a mistake for Marxists to lose sight of the value of the Black feminist tradition--including the concept of intersectionality, both in its contribution to combatting the oppression of women of color, working-class women and the ways in which it can help to advance Marxist theory and practice.”

Sharon Smith (writer) (1956) American historian

A Marxist Case For Intersectionality (2017)

Women, Color, Way, Help

“What is scurrilously called ragtime is an invention that is here to stay. That is now conceded by all classes of musicians.”

Scott Joplin (1868–1917) American composer, musician, and pianist

"School of Ragtime" (1908)

“"Global Warming" represents the last gasp of so-called "scientific progressivism", a mass of pitifully transparent falsehoods being employed to justify reducing mankind under the absolute despotism of "experts", the obvious implication being that we can’t even breathe responsibly. Environmentalism, Gaianism, is a religion on the basis of which — illegally under the First Amendment — public policy is being generated. Exhaling carbon dioxide is Original Sin, a reliable source of unlimited power and wealth to a Parasitic Class of politicians, bureaucrats, and cops with which our civilization now finds itself infested.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Wanna Buy a Future?"

Religion, Wealth

“We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom here at home, but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other that this is a land of the free except for the Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes; that we have no class or caste system, no ghettoes, no master race except with respect to Negroes?”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1963, Civil Rights Address

World, Home, Freedom

“Object-oriented analysis is a method of analysis that examines requirements from the perspective of the classes and objects found in the vocabulary of the problem domain.”

Grady Booch (1955) American software engineer

Source: Object-oriented design: With Applications, (1991), p. 37

Problem

“We must not forget that it is not our [computing scientists'] business to make programs, it is our business to design classes of computations that will display a desired behaviour.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

1970s, The Humble Programmer (1972)

Business, Forgetting

“I have retained a belief that it is the popular sporty kids at school who grow up to have the least interesting lives, and the unhappy young souls who develop into the most extraordinary adults. Whoever heard of a creative genius being understood as a child and well loved by his class mates? Who like to imagine an artist who emerged into adulthood content with his lot? And, conversely, how satisfying to hear that almost without exception, the untroubled, popular kids at school have ended up blandly as accountants, solicitors or ‘in IT’. Hold on, misfits, your day will come.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

Books, Confessions of a Conjuror (2010)

Love, School, Soul, Imagination

“There must be a co-education of the different social classes as well as of the two sexes. I might have founded a school giving lessons gratuitously; but a school for poor children only would not be a rational school, since, if they were not taught submission and credulity as in the old type of school, they would have been strongly disposed to rebel, and would instinctively cherish sentiments of hatred.”

Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia (1859–1909) Spanish anarchist

The Origin and Ideals of the Modern School (1908)

Children, Education, School, Sex

“I feel that "man-hating" is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them. And although there are exceptions (as in everything), i. e., men who are trying to be traitors to their own male class, most men cheerfully affirm their deadly class privileges and power. And I hate that class.”

Robin Morgan (1941) American feminist writer

"Lesbianism and Feminism: Synonyms or Contradictions?", spring 1973, keynote address to West Coast Lesbian Feminist Conference, printed in Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist, p 178.

Men, Hate, Feeling

“Such is my outlook. I look forward to a time when man shall progress upon something worthier and higher than his stomach, when there will be a finer incentive to impel men to action than the incentive of to-day, which is the incentive of the stomach. I retain my belief in the nobility and excellence of the human. I believe that spiritual sweetness and unselfishness will conquer the gross gluttony of to-day. And last of all, my faith is in the working-class. As some Frenchman has said, "The stairway of time is ever echoing with the wooden shoe going up, the polished boot descending."”

Jack London (1876–1916) American author, journalist, and social activist

What Life Means to Me (1905), in Revolution and Other Essays (Macmillan, 1909)

Men, Faith, Shoe, Time

“The difference in class and experience between my opponent and me was obviously huge. But this is a final so I had to expect a fierce fight from my opponent and that’s exactly what happened”

Stanislav Pozdniakov (1973) Russian fencer

Speaking on the Moscow Sabre Men's Final against fellow Russian, the 21 year old Nikolay Kovalev. http://russiatoday.ru/sports/news/21035 Russia Today

Fight

“Models of bounded rationality describe how a judgement or decision is reached (that is, the heuristic processes or proximal mechanisms) rather than merely the outcome of the decision, and they describe the class of environments in which these heuristics will succeed or fail.”

Gerd Gigerenzer (1947) German psychologist

Gerd Gigerenzer and Reinhard Selten eds. Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox. MIT Press, Cambridge MA. (2001), p. 4.

Decision

“So David outside of gay and lesbian issues, first of all no one should get fired because they are gay or lesbian period. But when you set these laws up my experience with these laws are you create a protected class. And I speak as someone who started a one man handyman business in Albuquerque in 1974 and grew it to over a thousand employees… I’ll tell you because of our laws that we passed on safety issues that this whole notion of whistle blower legislation it sounds great but the reality is… employees that were horrible declared themselves to be whistle blowers in the safety category or they declared themselves an alcoholic because of legislation [feedback] the American for Disabilities Act… I want that person who breaks a window breaks a windshield with a rock prosecuted on the basis that they threw a rock through a windshield not because they were motivated by hate.”

Gary Johnson (1953) American politician, businessman, and 29th Governor of New Mexico

Statement made to representatives of the Pagan Newswire Collective (PNC)
2011-10-16
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/paganswithdisabilities/2011/10/full-transcript-of-qa-with-presidential-candidate-gary-johnson/
2012-02-24
Sound Government

Hate, Alcohol, Law, Motivation

“What some of the revolutionary syndicalists proceed to do was to identify the ‘communality’ of man not will class, but with the nation. The first intimations of a ‘revolutionary nationalism’ made their appearance among the most radical Marxists.”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

Source: Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism, (2001), p. 55

Communication, Appearance

“The reason for not attempting to purify the nominal systems is that no amount of cleansing would make the unconsecrated mass of "Christendom" and their organizations, civil and ecclesiastical, suitable to the Lord's work, now to be commenced on this earth. During the past eighteen centuries he has been selecting the truly consecrated, the worthy ones, and now all that remains to be done is to select from among the living those of the same class - and they are but few - as only a few are lacking to complete the fore-ordained number of members in the body of Christ.
The reason for discarding all human organizations, and not reforming the least objectionable one and calling out of all others into it, now, is shown by our Lord's treatment of the various Jewish sects in the harvest or close of their dispensation; for then, as now, all were rejected, and the "Israelites indeed" were called out of all, into freedom and taught the will and plan of God by various chosen vessels of God's own selection.”

Charles Taze Russell (1852–1916) Founder of the Bible Student Movement

Source: Milennial Dawn, Vol. III: Thy Kingdom Come (1891), p. 159.

God, Freedom, Past, Christ

“If democracy, in essence, means the abolition of class domination, then why should not a socialist minister charm the whole bourgeois world by orations on class collaboration?”

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

What is to be Done? (1902)

World, Democracy

“I can tell you I'm pretty middle-class.”

John Prescott (1938) Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1997–2007)

BBC Radio 4 Today program interview (12 April 1996)

“When I ask the classes I teach, “How many of you can cook a better hamburger than McDonald’s?” almost all the students raise their hands. I then ask, “So if most of you can cook a better hamburger, how come McDonald’s makes more money than you?” The answer is obvious: McDonald’s is excellent at business systems. The reason so many talented people are poor is because they focus on building a better hamburger and know little to nothing about business systems.”

Robert T. Kiyosaki (1947) American finance author , investor

Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money-That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not!

Money, People, Business, Cooking

“It seemed too easy to claim that there was nothing new under the sun, that … our spear-wielding ancestors had been as wise and good as ourselves and that the onward march of rational thought had brought with it nothing but tragedy. Did any of these arguments take into account Ariane’s profile on her way up? Did they credit the impeccable logic of her hydraulic systems? And most of all, did not such bromides merely betray the resentment of a defeated and unimaginative class? I felt my allegiances shift to the engineers and technicians around me, these new medicine men who often sported baseball caps, and had a tendency towards unsophisticated humour. What astonishing creatures they were! What extraordinary horizons they had opened up!”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

[describing his sentiments after the launch of the rocket Ariane] pp. 163-164.
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009)

Men, Way, Sport, Sun

“It was always something of a puzzle to observers of Australia to explain the high standing of working men and the prevalence of their values in the culture. The easy answer was to say the middle-class was numerically weak. But in a capitalist society their values should be predominant whatever their numbers. So was it that they lacked the will to rule? I have suggested here that convict origins help to explain this puzzle. The bourgeoisie, sharing the shame of the nation, looked for respectability through White Australia and military prowess, and the forms these took had a strong proletarian cast; the working man was elevated by one and was the most notable embodiment of the other.”

John Hirst (1942–2016) Australian historian

"An Oddity from the Start" https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2008/july/1277335186/john-hirst/oddity-start, The Monthly, July 2008.

Men, Strong, Help

“Governments in capitalist society are but committees of the rich to manage the affairs of the capitalist class.”

James Connolly (1868–1916) Irish republican and socialist leader

The Irish Worker, 29 August, 1915. Reprinted in P. Beresford Ellis (ed.), James Connolly - Selected Writings, p. 248

“I had started to become interested in the punk scene and started to dress differently than a lot of the kids in Grand Rapids, Michigan were dressing. And I got my nose pierced and I started to shave my head and dye my hair and wear a lot of black. And so I looked like somebody that might be arrested… I was a bit of a class clown, usually the one that people would get to do the things that they were afraid to get in trouble for… On graduation night, I was arrested… I had a boyfriend at the time who was a couple centuries older than I was and I'd convinced him that we should go and glue the locks of the school so that people couldn't get in the morning. And lo and behold, they had a security guard because it was graduation night and they were concerned that idiots like me might try and do something like that.”

Gillian Anderson (1968) American-British film, television and theatre actress, activist and writer

On her teenage punk years and being arrested on graduation night — NPR "Gillian Anderson On 'The Fall' And Getting Arrested In High School" http://www.npr.org/2013/12/07/249240231/gillian-anderson-on-the-fall-and-getting-arrested-in-high-school/ (December 7, 2013) <br class="br">2010s

People, School, Time, Night

“If I could give advice to the planet, it would be; don't marry for looks alone, going either way, and I'll tell you why. In a few years, if Barbara's boobs start to sag too much, there's a place you can go where they can just lift 'em right back up to where they were. And they can point the nipple wherever they want 'em. You can actually go to a titty bar, pick out a set of titties and say, "I want those titties on that woman right there." If her belly gets too big and she don't wanna work it off, you can go get a tummy tuck- they'll give you a belly that looks like a cheerleader. You know, if your eyes start to go bad, you can have Lasik surgery and they can give you 20/20 vision at any age. If your hearing starts to fail, they can put a device in your ear that'll make you able to hear as good as you could the day you were born. But let me tell you something, folks… you can't fix stupid. There's not a pill you can take, there's not a class you can go to. Stupid is fo-evah.”

Ron White (1956) American comedian

You Can't Fix Stupid

Age, Stupidity, Way

“And for me, it's pretty clear-cut that until we learn some better explanation for how life began, there is a God who always existed and created the heavens and the earth. And until somebody gives me a better explanation, I'll go for it. And it doesn't scare me at all when scientists say, "Oh, but that can't be proved," because neither can any of the Darwinian hypotheses about how life began be proved. Anyway, I couldn't give a [profanity] whether a person calls himself a scientist. It doesn't earn any extra respect from me, because it's not as if science has covered itself with glory, morally, in my time. Scientists were the people in Germany telling Hitler that it was a good idea to kill all the Jews. Scientists were telling Stalin it was a good idea to wipe out the middle-class peasants. Scientists were telling Mao Tse-Tung it was fine to kill 50 million people in order to further the revolution.”

Ben Stein (1944) actor, writer, commentator, lawyer, teacher, humorist

Interviews: Ben Stein is Expelled! Christianity Today Movies, Christianity Today Movies: Interview with Ben Stein, 15 April 2008, 2008-04-18 http://www.christianitytoday.com/movies/interviews/benstein.html,

Life, God, People, Idea