Class War Quotes

If there is a class war-and there is-it is important that it should be handled with subtlety and skill ... it is not freedom that Conservatives want; what they want is the sort of freedom that will maintain existing inequalities or restore lost ones. ~ Maurice Cowling

The Class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie. ~ John Maynard Keynes

And so class will some day supplant race in world affairs. Race war will then be merely a side-show to the gigantic class war which will be waged in the big tent we call the world. ~ Ralph Bunche

We don't use the term 'working class' here because it's a taboo term. You're supposed to say 'middle class,' because it helps diminish the understanding that there's a class war going on. ~ Noam Chomsky

THERE'S ALWAYS A CLASS WAR GOING ON ~ Noam Chomsky

The only effective challenge to power is one that is broad enough to make isolation impossible, and intensive enough to cause repression to affect the normal life style of as many members of society as possible. By compromising and playing at class war, we lose. ~ George L. Jackson

Certain opponents of Marxism dismiss it as an outworn economic dogma based upon 19th century prejudices. Marxism never was a dogma. There is no reason why its formulation in the 19th century should make it obsolete and wrong, any more than the discoveries of Gauss, Faraday and Darwin, which have passed into the body of science... The defense generally given is that the Gita and the Upanishads are Indian; that foreign ideas like Marxism are objectionable. This is generally argued in English the foreign language common to educated Indians; and by persons who live under a mode of production (the bourgeois system forcibly introduced by the foreigner into India.) The objection, therefore seems less to the foreign origin than to the ideas themselves which might endanger class privilege. Marxism is said to be based upon violence, upon the class-war in which the very best people do not believe nowadays. They might as well proclaim that meteorology encourages storms by predicting them. No Marxist work contains incitement to war and specious arguments for senseless killing remotely comparable to those in the divine Gita. ~ Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi

I'm more of a warrior than you'll ever be. I believe in the class war. I believe in the battle of the sexes. I believe in my tribe. I believe in the righteous, intelligent clued-up section of the working classes against the brain-dead moronic masses as well as the mediocre, soulless bourgeoisie. ~ Irvine Welsh

The class war is over. ~ Tony Blair

Rome had freed the Greeks, but on condition that both war and class war should end. Freedom without war was a novel and irksome life for the city-states that made up Hellas; the upper classes yearned to play power politics against neighboring cities, and ~ Will Durant

From what I could see, men or women, children or adults, young or aged, rich or poor, war was making everyone equal. ~ Alephonsion Deng

For their holidays: the rich go see the world; the poor go see their parents. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The class war had turned democracy into a contest in legislative looting. ~ Will Durant

Chav-bashing draws on a long, ignoble tradition of class hatred. But it cannot be understood without looking at more recent events. Above all, it is the bastard child of a very British class war. ~ Owen Jones

All terrorism is fake. It is a military deception practiced by the rich upon the poor in an ongoing class war. Their most important weapon in this class war are television presenters. The BBC has actually become The Ministry of Truth of George Orwell's 1984….Why is this happening right now? It's happening because we no longer have an enemy. We have an unprecedented situation in which there is only one super state: the Anglo-American alliance…..The ruling group maintain their position in society by controlling the masses through fear. In order to make us believe that we must live in fear, the rich had to provide us with a new foreign enemy, a "bogeyman" who wants to conquer the world. The moment you have a world at peace, the keystone in the arch of ruling class power is gone. Every year America's oligarchs take three trillion dollars out of America's economy. This is how the rich have rigged the system – so that it benefits them at the expense of everyone else all of the time. To keep this fraud going, the public must be convinced of the need for military expenditure, and this is where all of the phony terror attacks come in. Here is Orwell's definition of totalitarianism: ' A society living by and for continuous warfare in which the ruling caste have ceased to have any real function but succeed in clinging to power through force and fraud. ~ Francis Richard Conolly

She was convinced the country was about to succumb to revolutionary socialism. Her own circumstances encouraged this belief: just on the edge of the really rich country set, she shared their views and opinions but lacked the financial and architechtural insulation from real or imagined political troubles. She found crushed larger cans and cigarette packets in her front garden and interpreted these as menacing signals from the Perthshire proletariat. Every flicker and dim of electric light was a portent of class war. ~ James Robertson

I think this has been a class war waged by the rich against the poor, and I think that they won. And I think the poor are fighting back. ~ Naomi Klein

The lie that happiness is about borrowing money you haven't got to buy crap you don't need," says Ian. "The lie that we live in a democratic state. And the most weaselly lie of all, that there is no class war. ~ David Mitchell

If facts are inconvenient, well, damn those who live and work with facts. ~ David Brin

Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war. ~ Toni Morrison

And still, even from the cells of the condemned, the message was going out: the class war was still on in that supposedly classless society, the United States. ~ Howard Zinn

It is not easy to make the best of both worlds when one of the worlds is preaching a Class War, and the other vigorously practising it.
- Shaw's Preface ~ George Bernard Shaw

A doctrine of class war seemed to provide a solution to the problem of poverty to people who know nothing about how wealth is created. ~ Jeane Kirkpatrick

Crime is fast destroying the moral fabric of South African cities, and is becoming a major threat to South African democracy as well as the prominent manifestation of a "class war" that is largely a continuation of the "race war" of yesterday. ~ Achille Mbembe

To claim for socialism that it is a class war is to do it an injustice and indefinitely postpone its triumph. Socialism offers a platform broad enough for all to stand upon. It makes war upon a system, not upon a class. ~ Keir Hardie

The psychologist George Frankl atributes class structure and conflict and most of the ills of society to the sexual class war based on the Oedipul pattern; that is, murderous phallic conflict between males for the favour of the women, those favours being defined by the men themselves. This system is, as it were, only haunted by women, who cannot in it acheive expression or contribute to society anything of their true nature, and are regarded as a kind of castrated man. ~ Peter Redgrove

Liberty is not about class war, income war, race war, national war, a war between the sexes, or any other conflict apart from the core conflict between individuals and those who would seek power and control over the human spirit. Liberty is the dream that we can all work together, in ways of our choosing and of our own human volition, to realize a better life. ~ Jeffrey Tucker

But there are no criminals here
Just people surviving against all odds
Multi and never ending circumstances
of racial repression
Class war accompanied
with post-traumatic stress
syndrome-like symptoms
Marshal law-like conditions
Magic trick tactics
transforming Brown and Black pearls into perils
with K-9's searching the perimeter
Face filled with hate
abra cadabra cop smiles
with a gun and a badge
The bullet is faster than the eye
Judges able to devour justice
with a single courtroom motion
not missing a crumb
Now you have your freedom
then you don't ~ Jonathan Daniel Gomez

America has been a land of dreams. A land where the aspirations of people from countries cluttered with rich, cumbersome, aristocratic, ideological pasts can reach for what once seemed unattainable. Here they have tried to make dreams come true. Yet now ... we are threatened by a new and particularly American menace. It is not the menace of class war, of ideology, of poverty, of disease, of illiteracy, or demagoguery, or of tyranny, though these now plague most of the world. It is the menace of unreality. ~ Daniel J. Boorstin

If race or class war divides us into hostile camps, changing political argument into blind hate, one side or the other may overturn the hustings with the rule of the sword. If our economy of freedom fails to distribute wealth as ably as it has created it, the road to dictatorship will be open to any man who can persuasively promise security to all; and a martial government, under whatever charming phrases, will engulf the democratic world. ~ Will Durant

It was a new kind of class war
the people as citizens versus the politicians and their clients in the public sector. ~ Irving Kristol

Class war is not the cause of social progress; it is a disease developed in the course of social progress. The cause of the disease is the inability to subsist, and the result of the disease is war. ~ Sun Yat-sen

The Americans invaded a country without understanding what eight years of a war with Iran had meant, how that traumatized Iraq. They didn't appreciate what they support for a decade of sanctions in Iraq had done to Iraq and the bitterness that it created and that it wiped out the middle class. ~ Anthony Shadid

The important part of Marxism was its demand for active, constant, practical, class-war. ~ Francis Parker Yockey

Conservatives say if you don't give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they've lost all incentive because we've given them too much money. ~ George Carlin

America's grossly unfair tax system won't lead to class war. Or, if it does, the war will be brief. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

Corporations with their political allies are waging an unrelenting class war against working people. ~ Noam Chomsky

Modern Australian trade unionism and the unionist that I am doesn't rely on a class war view that somehow that the interests of employees and managers are in two separate spheres and they're irreconcilable. I believe that when people can go to work and be happy, satisfied, engaged, where the employer is getting employees who feel their interests are aligned with the employer, you get productivity. This is the future of Australian workplaces. ~ Bill Shorten

Poor people do not go on holiday; they go home. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Disparities in economic standing drive radical differences in Americans' values, causing a pronounced and antagonistic political ideologically. Americans are progressively viewing members of the domestic opposition party as the greatest threat to their wellbeing. Instead of fearing a war overseas, Americans are increasing distrustful of other Americans. A great American cultural war between the rich and poor is inevitable, unless corporate America and its wealthiest citizens voluntary commence accepting a larger load of taxation and the government implements dramatic steps to shore up the disparity that continues to widen between the people on contrasting economic poles. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We wanted to produce a newspaper which would put (1) class and (2) violence back at the top of the anarchist agenda. It would be big and tabloid brash, lots of short articles and graphics, no long boring shit. It would be fucking funny as fucking fuck. ~ Ian Bone

You know, you can talk about race, you can talk about sex, you can talk about your biopsy. But when you get into class, people kind of clench up. ~ George Saunders

Khaddar delivers the poor from the bonds of the rich and creates a moral and spiritual bond between the classes and the masses. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

We made war on the planet, and the planet fought back. ~ Justin Cronin

This morning there s first a predictable story about Darfur; an expert on African affairs notes that seven thousand African Union troops patrolling a region the size of France have been ineffectual in preventing continued janjaweed terror. Funding for the troops is about to run out, and it seems that no one, including the United States, is ready to put forth more money or come up with new ideas to stop the killing and displacement. This is not surprising to those of us who lived through twenty years of oppression by the hands of Khartoum and its militias. ~ Dave Eggers

In the City Market is the Meet Café. Followers of obsolete, unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, pushers of souped-up harmine, junk reduced to pure habit offering precarious vegetable serenity, liquids to induce Latah, Tithonian longevity serums, black marketeers of World War III, excusers of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, bureaucrats of spectral departments, officials of unconstituted police states, a Lesbian dwarf who has perfected operation Bang-utot, the lung erection that strangles a sleeping enemy, sellers of orgone tanks and relaxing machines, brokers of exquisite dreams and memories tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will, doctors skilled in the treatment of diseases dormant in the black dust of ruined cities, gathering virulence in the white blood of eyeless worms feeling slowly to the surface and the human host, maladies of the ocean floor and the stratosphere, maladies of the laboratory and atomic war... A place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum... Larval entities waiting for a Live One... ~ William S. Burroughs

I am quite confident that in the foreseeable future armed conflict will not take the form of huge land armies facing each other across extended battle lines, as they did in World War I and World War II or, for that matter, as they would have if NATO had faced the Warsaw Pact on the field of battle. ~ Norman Schwarzkopf

History shows that ... (people) can be deflected from their natural tendencies by artful propaganda, bogus crises, or other political trickery. ~ Robert Higgs

I had been conscious of depression and so I voiced to (Sec. Of War Stimson) my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at this very moment, seeking a way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face.' ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

Some liberals think that describing any role that education gaps play in creating income inequality is some sort of sellout - that, in essence, you're telling the middle class, 'Tough luck; you should have stayed in college.' ~ Timothy Noah

War is too important to be left to the generals ~ Georges Clemenceau

We were green; most of us had never left home before (officers as well as men, except the officers carried their greenness better) yet here we were, traveling south up an enemy river past slow creeks and bayous and brooding trees. I thought to myself if this was the country the Rebels wanted to take out of the Union, we ought to say thank you, good riddance ~ Shelby Foote

While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205. ~ Joseph McCarthy

The single combats of the heroes of history or fable amuse our fancy and engage our affections: the skillful evolutions of war may inform the mind, and improve a necessary, though pernicious, science. But in the uniform and odious pictures of a general assault, all is blood, and horror, and confusion ... ~ Edward Gibbon

So often, we're told that women's stories are unimportant. After all, what does it matter what happens in the main room, in the kitchen, or in the bedroom? Who cares about the relationships between mother, daughter, and sister? A baby's illness, the sorrows and pains of childbirth, keeping the family together during war, poverty, or even in the best of days are considered small and insignificant compared with the stories of men, who fight against nature to grow their crops, who wage battles to secure their homelands, who struggle to look inward in search of the perfect man. We're told that men are strong and brave, but I think women know how to endure, accept defeat, and bear physical and mental agony much better than men. The men in my life - my father, Z.G., my husband, my father-in-law, my brother-in-law, and my son - faced, to one degree or another, those great male battles, but their hearts - so fragile - wilted, buckled, crippled, corrupted, broke, or shattered when confronted with the losses women face every day...Our men try to act strong, but it is May, Yen-yen, Joy, and I who must steady them and help them bear their pain, anguish, and shame. ~ Lisa See

The Poverty Tour provided the opportunity to meet many people who had been living paycheck to paycheck even before the economic downturn. To so quickly slide from the great middle into the underworld of the poor validated our suspicions that perhaps these citizens never really were bona fide, middle class Americans. Indeed, some economists assert that the middle class evaporated decades ago. ~ Cornel West

One result of this productive system is that the middle class has grown from being about 15 percent of the population in 1920 to being 86 percent of the population in 2011. While some of the population always seem to live at the poverty line, the vast majority of Americans today are affluent compared to their grandparents. They have the money to buy the products produced by American industry. In the process, the definition of poverty has changed. The majority of Americans who are classified by the government as living at the poverty level have indoor plumbing, color television sets, cell phones, air-conditioning, washers and dryers, microwaves, automobiles, and access to free health care. They are also a significant buying group. ~ Arthur Hughes

I would say that in 2000, we understand as much about how today's system of globalization is going to work as we understood about how the Cold War system was going to work in 1946. ~ Thomas Friedman

War is no place for good men. ~ Joe Abercrombie

Imagine that leader of all the enemy, in that great plain of Babylon, sitting on a sort of throne of smoking flame, a horrible and terrifying sight. Watch him calling together countless devils, to despatch them into different cities till the whole world is covered, forgetting no province or locality, no class or single individual. ~ Ignatius Of Loyola

What ultimately happened is that my country had a war. I think it would be extraordinary, as a writer, not to want to write about that. ~ Aminatta Forna

At war, there's no right or wrong.
Winner's right while loser's wrong. ~ Toba Beta

I usually use quick sketches that I accumulated from the figure drawing classes I once instructed. ~ Frank Bruno

War for the sake of war is sin, but war for the sake of defense is duty. ~ Martin Luther

We're aligning ourselves with Kerry. Our allegiance will be for peace, against war, no more deaths for oil, and for a dialogue between the government of Spain and the new Kerry administration. ~ Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero

Avenia thinks they're battling a king. I doubt they're prepared to fight a boy who thinks childish pranks are practical strategies for war."
"Aren't they? ~ Jennifer A. Nielsen

I'm not going to tell you to get over it.
But you have to get through it.
Just for now. ~ Vicotria Aveyard

So now begins the first war with Cordelia' in which I retreat and thereby teach her to be victorious as she pursues me. I continually fall back, and in this backward movement I teach her to know through me all the powers of erotic love, its turbulent thoughts' its passion, what longing is, and hope, and impatient expectancy. As I perform this set of steps before her' all this will correspondingly in her' It is a triumphant procession in which I am leading her, and I myself am just as much the one who dithyrambically sings praises to her victory as I am the one who shows the way. She will gain courage to believe in erotic love, to believe it is an etemal force, when she sees its dominion over me, sees my movements. She will believe me, partly because I rely on my artistry, and partly because at the bottom of what I am doing there is truth. If that were not the case, she would not believe me. With my every move, she becomes stronger and stronger; love is awakening in her soul; she is being enthroned in her meaning as a woman ~ Søren Kierkegaard

This is what is meant by possession - to be passionately at war for the qualities in one another to contend for the treasures of each other's personalities. But how can such a war be anything but destructive and hopeless? ~ Lawrence Durrell

It has always seemed to me that what I write about is humanity in extremis, pushed to the unendurable, and that it is important to tell people what really happens in wars. ~ Marie Colvin

Shakespeare set a lot of his dramas in a historical perspective or war perspective, or he would study what was going on at that time. ~ Marcia Gay Harden