Class Struggle Quotes

“When the rich wage war it's the poor who die.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Le diable et le bon dieu

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

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.”
― Karl Marx, The German Ideology / Theses on Feuerbach / Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy

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

“The poor were born survivors, but their equity was bound to the land—dwelling, farm, animals.”
― Isham Cook, The Tao of Poison

“Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“‎The party that leans upon the workers but serves the bourgeoisie, in the period of the greatest sharpening of the class struggle, cannot but sense the smells wafted from the waiting grave.”
― Leon Trotsky

“Had you but seen it, I promise you, your high-minded principles would have melted like candle wax. Never would you have wished such beauty away.”
― Jennifer Donnelly, Revolution

“Always, it is the poor people who pay. And always, it is the poor people's women who pay the most.”
― David Mitchell, Ghostwritten

“The 'Manifesto' being our joint production, I consider myself bound to state that the fundamental proposition which forms its nucleus belongs to Marx. That proposition is: that in every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; that the history of these class struggles forms a series of evolution in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and the oppressed class—the proletariat—cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class—the bourgeoisie—without, at the same time, and once for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions and class struggles.

This proposition, which, in my opinion, is destined to do for history what Darwin's theory has done for biology, we, both of us, had been gradually approaching for some years before 1845.”
― Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto

“It’s easier for me to make sense of it that way than it is for me to face the other way—reality. And yet, those evil spirits that were unleashed—be they fake entities from a stupid carnival ride, or cruel malevolencies from dark spiritual chasms of our universe—have stayed with me all these years”
― Tim Cummings, Orphans

“Take a little thought experiment. Imagine all the rampage school shooters in Littleton, Colorado; Pearl, Mississippi; Paducah, Kentucky; Springfield, Oregon; and Jonesboro, Arkansas; now imagine they were black girls from poor families who lived instead in Chicago, New Haven, Newark, Philadelphia, or Providence. Can you picture the national debate, the headlines, the hand-wringing? There is no doubt we’d be having a national debate about inner-city poor black girls. The entire focus would be on race, class, and gender. The media would doubtless invent a new term for their behavior, as with wilding two decades ago. We’d hear about the culture of poverty, about how living in the city breeds crime and violence. We’d hear some pundits proclaim some putative natural tendency among blacks toward violence. Someone would likely even blame feminism for causing girls to become violent in a vain imitation of boys.

Yet the obvious fact that virtually all the rampage school shooters were middle-class white boys barely broke a ripple in the torrent of public discussion. This uniformity cut across all other differences among the shooters: some came from intact families, others from single-parent homes; some boys had acted violently in the past, and others were quiet and unassuming; some boys also expressed rage at their parents (two killed their parents the same morning), and others seemed to live in happy families.”
― Michael S. Kimmel, Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era

“Suffering engenders passion; and while the prosperous blind themselves, or go to sleep, the hatred of the unfortunate classes kindles its torch at some sullen or ill-constituted mind, which is dreaming in a corner, and sets to work to examine society. The examination of hatred is a terrible thing.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“I leave the kitchen table to bathe, and to dress for church. If only my closet held on its shelves an array of faces I could wear rather than dresses, I would know which face to put on today. As for the dresses, I haven't a clue.”
― Tim Cummings, Orphans

“Listen, we’ll come visit you. Okay? I’ll dress up as William Shakespeare, Lucent as Emily Dickinson, and beautiful ‘Ray’ as someone dashing and manly like Jules Verne or Ernest Hemingway...and we’ll write on your white-room walls. We’ll write you out of your supposed insanity. I love you, Micky Affias.

-James (from "Descendants of the Eminent")”
― Tim Cummings

“Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.”
― George Orwell

“Right now, we are in a peak cycle. There’s tremendous energy out there, directed against the state. It’s not all focused, but it’s there, and it’s building. Maybe this will be sufficient to accomplish what we must accomplish over the fairly short run. We’ll see, and we can certainly hope that this is the case. But perhaps not. We must be prepared to wage a long struggle. If this is the case then we’ll probably see a different cycle, one in which the revolutionary energy of the people seems to have dispersed, run out of steam. But – and this is important- such cycles are deceptive. Things appear to be at low ebb, but actually what’s happening is a period of regroupment, a period in which we step back and learn from the mistakes made during the preceding cycle.”
― George L. Jackson

“Why, godamit, why did they insist upon confusing the class struggle with the ass struggle, debasing both us and them—all human motives?”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“What was achieved under Nazi-fascism through bloody terror against the organized workers’ movement and the people is to be achieved again today in West Europe through the “information society”
― Red Army Faction

“A class struggling to assert itself, to discover its true shape, which lies hidden, as does the statue in the marble, in the hard, resisting material of life itself, be different from the same class when chisel and mallet have been laid aside, and it has actually become what it had so long been struggling to be.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“Reform as such is inherently reactionary and perpetuates
psychological dependence on
the enemy,while confusing
the true class contradictions
between ourselves and the enemy.”
― Black Liberation Army Co-Ordinating Committee, Message To The Black Movement: A Political Statement From The Black Underground

“El error más grave que han cometido los parias, a lo largo de la historia, ha sido confiar en los hijos de papá.”
― Lorenzo Silva, La niebla y la doncella

“The modern proletariat was not led by the social-democracy into class struggle. On the contrary, the international social-democratic movement was called into being by the class struggle to bring a conscious aim and unity into the various local and scattered fragments of the class struggle.”
― Rosa Luxemburg, The Crisis in the German Social-Democracy

“Have private property, capitalist exploitation and class rule ceased to exist? Or, have the propertied classes in a spell of patriotic fervour declared: in view of the needs of the war we hereby turn over the means of production, the earth, the factories and the mills thereon, into the possession of the people? Have they relinquished the right to make profits out of these possessions? Have they set aside all political privileges, will they sacrifice them upon the altar of the fatherland, now that it is in danger? It is, to say the least, a rather naive hypothesis, and sounds almost like a story from a kindergarten primer. And yet the declaration of our official leaders, that the class struggle has been suspended, permits no other interpretation.”
― Rosa Luxemburg, The Crisis in the German Social-Democracy

“I liked Terry more than anyone I'd met for a long time, and we talked everyday. But he did believe the working class - which he referred to as if it were a single-willed-person - would do somewhat unlikely things. 'The working class will take care of those bastards very easily,' he said, referring to racist organisations.”
― Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia

“Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“He didn't look back, the cold-blooded little prick. That's when I realized what I should have realized years ago: that there were people in this world who either had no conscience or just severe memory deficits, tailored to their convenience. I could see the advantage of either one immediately. Yet both ideas were abhorrent to me. Either you didn't care, or you chose not to care. The way I see it, you've got to be accountable, or you're nothing. Without personal accountability, you can talk yourself into anything. You can leave rubble in your wake and never look back. That could mean wars. Genocides. Ecological disasters. And what for? What was the advantage?”
― Jonathan Evison, Lawn Boy

“... that with the defeat of the revolutionary workers, Europe finally fell back into its old double slavery, into Anglo-Russian slavery. The June struggle in Paris, the fall of Vienna, the tragicomedy of Berlin in November 1848, the desperate efforts of Poland, Italy, and Hungary, the starvation of Ireland—these were the main moments in which the European class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the working class came to a head, in which we proved that every revolutionary uprising, no matter how distant its goal may seem from the class struggle, must fail until the revolutionary working class wins, that every social reform remains a utopia until the proletarian revolution and the feudal counterrevolution clash in a world war.
In our account, as in reality, Belgium and Switzerland were tragicomic caricatures in the great historical tableau, one a model state of bourgeois monarchy, the other a model state of bourgeois republic, both states imagining themselves to be as independent of the class struggle as they were of the European revolution.”
― Karl Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital

“Nowhere do “politicians” form a more distinct and powerful segment of the nation than in North America. Here, each of the two major parties, which take turns in power, is itself governed by people who treat politics as a business, who speculate on seats in the legislative assemblies of both the federal government and the individual states, or who make a living by campaigning for their party and are rewarded with positions after its victory. It is well known how Americans have been trying for 30 years to shake off this yoke, which has become unbearable, and how, despite all this, they are sinking ever deeper into this quagmire of corruption. It is precisely in America that we can best see how this separation of state power from society—of which it was originally intended to be merely an instrument—is taking place. Here there is no dynasty, no nobility, no standing army—except for the few men guarding the Indians—and no bureaucracy with permanent positions or pension entitlements. And yet we have here two large gangs of political speculators who take turns seizing state power and exploiting it through the most corrupt means and for the most corrupt purposes—and the nation is powerless against these two large cartels of politicians, who supposedly serve it but in reality dominate and plunder it.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)”
― Friedrich Engels, Der Bürgerkrieg in Frankreich: Adresse des Generalraths der Internationalen Arbeiter-Association. Dritte deutsche Auflage

“The ruling class is opposed to the lower class—that is, ‘closed’ to the outside—insofar as it ‘excludes, restricts, or makes admission conditional.’ It denies the lower class access to the ‘monopolized opportunities’ that positive law grants it—‘opportunities for the satisfaction of internal or external interests.’ When these opportunities are appropriated, they are called ‘rights,’ and when they are appropriated by inheritance, they are called ‘property.’ In other words: the concept of domination encompasses not only legal inequality but also economic exploitation based on ‘monopolized’ property rights.”

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)”
― Franz Oppenheimer