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

“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 perspiration of kings is just froth of the decanter. But the pawis of peasants dries up, becomes lead that weighs them down the ages. The master wears a necktie; the slave, a grindstone. Between them no relationship is possible except that which exists between mill and grist. And what is private property without public toil? Yet the world perpetuates only the pyramids, only their pharaohs. Nobody remembers or even likes to admit that both came into existence only through brawn and blood that issued from millions upon millions of nameless serfs. You weep over sunken armadas but not over their galleon slaves. You weep over fallen crowns, not for those beheaded. This must stop! We shall stop you! Labor has a face, labor has a name! You don’t romanticize it. . . you feed its belly . . . heal its sores and sons. All written history glorifies the power of men, not the sweat of man. . . . All this feudal nonsense about lilac-strewn palaces and Cleopatra’s bath! Well, the new chronicle will smell as the tao smells. It shall be carpenter over architect, farmer over agrarianist, citizen over president....”
― Wilfrido D. Nolledo, But for the Lovers

“What I don’t understand is why no one in the Remains seems to bat an eye at the fact that Innovators chose not to participate.”
“Rich people have options. We don’t,” Tee screeched.
“Don’t seem fair.”
“A lot of things ain’t fair. You ain’t no baby, Jax. You know that already.”
“I know that, but I figured that in the Remains there was supposed to be,” he paused, thinking of the right words. Jax twisted his lips on his face. “Fairness.”
“You ain’t that stupid,” Tee laughed.
“What you mean?”
“Ain’t nothing fair,” Tee pointed out. “We live in the Remains and there is a tenth of the world population in space heading for God knows where. They put in plans long before the flash. Right? They are heading toward...trying to terraform planets but we aren’t in the loop. We didn’t get no choice in that. That wasn’t fair. Why ain’t you talking about that?” Tee said, moving her head left to right and poking out her lips.”

Excerpt From
Libro 1
This material may be protected by copyright.”
― Mark T. Sneed, Bully Nation: The Remains: Part One

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggled.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

“All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

“Death by Starvation or Boredom”
Many toil for scraps and cheap wages, surviving one fragile breath at a time— just one more breath...

While others, bloated with excess, labor only to escape boredom, pretending they’re saving a world drowning in the greed they created, and the power they refuse to let go.

The first walks a tightrope between breath and hunger. The second, cushioned by comfort, drifts closer to spiritual starvation, their soul numbed by excess.

And here lies the cruel symmetry— fate, with its blunt hands, levels the field by offering death either way: starvation... or boredom.

But the greatest tragedy belongs to those who die of both.”
― Louis Yako, سرطان في كل مكان [Cancer Everywhere]

“Taxi Driver”
There’s a strange kind of liberation in being just a taxi driver— the freedom tucked inside that word: just.

Because you’re just a driver, no one truly sees you. Yet you see it all— the absurdities, the shallows, the beauty, sorrow, joy, heartbreak—passengers unknowingly exposed.

They grant you a diluted respect, sometimes half-fake, sometimes not at all— because you’re just a taxi driver.

But they leave you be. No one's scheming to steal your seat. They want you in that seat. They ride with you because, for now, it’s a seat they don’t desire.

Still, like all fleeting liberations, this too carries disappointment— a bittersweet sting.

You realize the only reason they leave you alone is because you've escaped into a seat they never wanted in the first place. And that hurts.”
― Louis Yako, سرطان في كل مكان [Cancer Everywhere]

“Person 1: Do you know how America's class system works?
Person 2: America has a class system?
Person 1: Yes, that's how it works.”
― Ingrid Robeyns, Limitarianism The Case Against Extreme Wealth, The Psychology of Management & Get Sh*t Done 3 Books Collection Set

“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