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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a State, is no longer necessary.”
― Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

“The form of family corresponding to civilization and coming to definite supremacy with it is monogamy, the domination of the man over the woman, and the single family as the economic unit of society. The central link in civilized society is the state, which in all typical periods is without exception the state of the ruling class, and in all cases continues to be essentially a machine for holding down the oppressed, exploited class.”
― Frederick Engels

“We're not born equal (Bicycle Diaries, 2766)

Astrology is the dumbest superstition of all,
your date of birth has zero effect on your destiny,
but your place of birth, on the other hand,
shapes a great deal of your life and character.

Someone born in Paris demands from their parents,
that they must go on a world tour again this year,
someone born in Palestine asks their parents,
can they have a small doll this year.

Someone growing up in the blackhole of Calcutta,
has to labor 100 times harder to make a name,
than someone from Cambridge or Copenhagen.

Light bends towards gravity,
equality bends towards privilege,
some dream of touring the moon,
some dream of a roof over head.

We're not all born equal, some of us
are born with more than two functioning
brain cells, but no inherited goldmine,
still we chart the cosmos on a bicycle,
while monkeys confuse lamborghini with life.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Nazmahal: Palace of Grace

“Light bends towards gravity,
equality bends towards privilege,
some dream of touring the moon,
some dream of a roof over head.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Nazmahal: Palace of Grace

“We're not all born equal, some of us are born with more than two functioning brain cells, but no inherited goldmine, still we chart the cosmos on a bicycle, while monkeys confuse lamborghini with life.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Nazmahal: Palace of Grace

“Astrology is the dumbest superstition of all, your date of birth has zero effect on your destiny, but your place of birth, on the other hand, shapes a great deal of your life and character. Someone born in Paris demands from their parents, that they must go on a world tour again this year, someone born in Palestine asks their parents, can they have a small doll this year.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Nazmahal: Palace of Grace

“– All strong independent farmers are driven into unbearable conditions. Sooner or later, following the Party’s orders, they will come and eliminate us as a class — within an hour.”
― Володимир Шабля, Камінь. Біографічний роман. Книга друга. Непрості дороги до пекла: Виживання в умовах насильства.

“Famine images remain powerful and salient in modernity because they recall a precarious pre-modern existence that industrialised society has allegedly overcome. Understood as a natural disaster in which there is a crisis of food supply, famine is seen as a symptom of a lack of progress that results in the death of an innocent. It is for this reason that famine images are, more often than not, of individuals, frequently including children, barely clothed, staring passively into the lens, flies flitting across their faces.”
― Fraser McDonald, Observant States: Geopolitics and Visual Culture

“Our guest—Comrade Stebletsov—is not merely speaking about rooting out class enemies from Soviet society; he is doing so in practice!” the homeroom teacher declared grandly. “He is a member of a grain requisition squad and therefore a true executor of the Bolshevik Party’s line to eliminate the kulaks as a class! And today, the best among you, children, are given the opportunity to prove your loyalty to the cause of Lenin and Stalin. Peter! Marusya! Stand up!”
The children rose from their desks in confusion.
“As top students and Young Pioneers, you are entrusted by our school collective with participation in an important state mission!” The teacher’s chest seemed to swell with pride as her chin lifted higher. “You will represent our school as public members of the grain requisition squad. Together with your senior comrades, you are assigned to uncover grain hidden by kulaks and saboteurs. Our class enemy does not sleep—he seeks to sabotage the industrialization of the USSR. He hides grain from the Soviet state, condemning the proletariat to suffering. But we will not allow the vile accomplices of the rich to rob our people! We entrust you with a responsible mission: as part of the requisition squad, you will locate and pour into the granaries of the Motherland the grain illegally concealed by the kulaks!”
— Volodymyr Shablia, Stone. Book Three


Context note:
Set during the Holodomor of 1933, this scene illustrates how Soviet schools became instruments of communist propaganda. Children were mobilized as Young Pioneers and encouraged to participate in grain confiscation campaigns against peasants branded by the regime as “kulaks.” The language of class struggle and industrialization masked the immense human cost of forced collectivization and the state-imposed famine in Ukraine and across the USSR.”
― Володимир Шабля, Камінь. Біографічний роман. Книга третя. Несправджені сподівання.: Все буде Голодомор.