Top 89 Class War Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#4. 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
#6. Corporations with their political allies are waging an unrelenting class war against working people.
Noam Chomsky
#7. It was a new kind of class war
the people as citizens versus the politicians and their clients in the public sector.
Irving Kristol
#8. 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
#9. The class war had turned democracy into a contest in legislative looting.
Will Durant
#10. The war against working people should be understood to be a real war ... . Specifically in the U.S., which happens to have a highly class-conscious business class ... . And they have long seen themselves as fighting a bitter class war, except they don't want anybody else to know about it.
Noam Chomsky
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. Admit that there is some level that would make even you call yourself the victim of class war.
David Brin
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. The important part of Marxism was its demand for active, constant, practical, class-war.
Francis Parker Yockey
#20. Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.
Toni Morrison
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. I remember an article, I can't recall who by, it was after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which said that now the Wall was down, there could be no more class war. Only someone with money could ever say such a thing.
Claude Chabrol
#26. 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
#27. It's a class war, and a war on young people too ... that's why tuition is rising so rapidly. There's no real economic reason for that. It's a technique of control and indoctrination. And this is really the first organized, significant reaction to it, which is important.
Noam Chomsky
#28. Occupy is the first major public response to thirty years of class war
Noam Chomsky
#29. I wanted to look at the upper-middle-class scene since the war, and in particular my generation's part in it. We had spent our early years as privileged members of a privileged class. How were we faring in the Age of the Common Man? How ought we to be faring?
Simon Raven
#30. This is not class warfare, this is generational warfare. This administration and old wealthy people have declared war on young people. That is the real war that is going on here. And that is the war we've got to talk about.
James Carville
#31. Until the Second World War, it was unthinkable for a married woman of the working or middle class to disgrace her husband by working after marriage, because her employment indicated that he was a poor provider
Sandra Scarr
#32. Peter Pastmaster and the absurdly youthful colonel of the new force were drawing up a list of suitable officers in Bratts Club.
'Most of war seems to consist of hanging about,' he said. 'Let's at least hang about with our own friends.
Evelyn Waugh
#33. Rich people never go to war. You ask a college kid to go to war, and he's like, 'Umm, I'm taking this sociology class, and I think war is, like, really stupid, and my roommate's, like, half Afghani, so it's going to cause some static.'
Bill Burr
#34. In our charade with ourselves we pretend that our war is not really war. We have changed the name of the War Department to the Defense Department and call a whole class of nuclear missiles Peace Keepers!
Jack Kornfield
#35. Let us wage a moral and political war against the billionaires and corporate leaders, on Wall Street and elsewhere, whose policies and greed are destroying the middle class of America.
Bernie Sanders
#36. We think. We are not peasants. We are mechanics. But even the peasants know better than to believe in a war. Everybody hates war.
There is a class that control a country that is stupid and down not realise anything and never can. That is why we have this war.
Also they make money out of it.
Ernest Hemingway,
#37. War is rich old men protecting their property by sending middle class and lower class young men off to die. It always has been.
George Carlin
#38. See, that's why Barack's running: to end the war in Iraq responsibly - to build an economy that lifts every family, to make sure health care is available for every American - and to make sure that every child in this nation has a world-class education all the way from preschool to college.
Michelle Obama
#39. The table was shocked. The entire class in fact. They'd heard tell of Civil War reenactments, but they were still occurring? The War Between the States was another time and another country. As was the South. Are barbers still surgeons? Is there still sharecropping? What about indoor plumbing?
T. Geronimo Johnson
#40. We have a long and proud tradition as a nation of investing in our human capital so that we can build a thriving middle class. You look at the G.I. Bill after the war - it was an investment in our service members who had served this nation with distinction.
Thomas Perez
#41. The naive notion that a mother naturally acquires the complex skills of childrearing simply because she has given birth now seemsas absurd to me as enrolling in a nine-month class in composition and imagining that at the end of the course you are now prepared to begin writing War and Peace.
Mary Blakely
#42. Mark Kirk: Lied about going to war. Opposed middle class tax cuts. And said unemployment's not that big an issue.
Alexi Giannoulias
#43. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose - especially their lives.
Eugene V. Debs
#45. Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. ... And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
Oliver Stone
#47. If I had to guess and put a name on it, I'd say that at some point, the drug war was as much a function of class and social control as it was of racism.
David Simon
#48. What proportion of the peasantry was well off and what poor is judged by what they bequeathed, and since the poorest had nothing to leave, they remain mute. For no other class is that famous goal of the historian, wie es wirklich war (how it really was), so elusive.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#49. So herein lies the paradox and predicament of young black men labeled criminals. A war has been declared on them, and they have been rounded up for engaging in precisely the same crimes that go largely ignored in middle-and upper-class white communities - possession
Michelle Alexander
#50. Middle-class-led reform movements, from the Progressive Era to the War on Poverty, have been marred by an elitist distance from the would-be beneficiaries of reform.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#51. I joined the Pass Mods. class and studied the cyropaedia and Livy's Wars with a resentful feeling that there was quite enough war in the world without having to read about it in Latin
Vera Brittain
#52. I'm a good little middle-class boy. I live in Gloucestershire or Kensington. I don't exist in the war zone, but it's certainly not far away. I grew up in an area where it is a war zone - south London.
Nick Love
#53. War is a sociological safety valve that cleverly diverts popular hatred for the ruling classes into a happy occasion to mutilate or kill foreign enemies.
Ernest Becker
#54. 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
#55. In time of war there is a unification of interests, especially if the war is fierce; but in time of peace the clash may be very great between the interests of one class and those of another.
Bertrand Russell
#56. After World War I the resentment of the working class against all that it had to suffer was directed more against Morgan, Wall Street and private capital than the government.
C.L.R. James
#58. When your country is in a costly war, with our soldiers sacrificing abroad and our nation facing a debt crisis at home, being asked to pay your fair share isn't class warfare - it's patriotism.
Cory Booker
#59. I hadn't found out yet that mankind consists of two very different races, the rich and the poor. It took me ... and plenty of other people ... twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my class and ask the price of things before touching them, let alone setting my heart on them.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#60. It is notorious that, whenever the demand for labor is much greater than the supply, or the wages of labor are much higher than the expenses of living, very many, even on the ordinary laboring class, are remarkable for indolence, and work no more than compelled by necessity.
Edmund Ruffin
#61. War cannot be abolished unless classes are abolished.
Vladimir Lenin
#62. Passive resistance is a sport for gentleman (and ladies)-just like the pursuit of war, a heroic enterprise for the ruling classes but a grievous burden on the rest.
Kenneth Kaunda
#63. 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
#64. There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning.
Warren Buffett
#65. There is no economic necessity for continuing the arms race after the World War, even from the standpoint of the capitalist class itself, with the exception of at most certain armaments interests.
Anonymous
#66. Let's not forget we created that ideal middle class by destroying all of our industrial competitors during World War II.
Jeff Greene
#67. Revolutions and revolutionary wars are inevitable in class society, and without them it is impossible to accomplish any leap in social development and to overthrow the reactionary ruling classes and therefore impossible for the people to win political power.
Mao Zedong
#68. The real working class, though they hate war and are immune to jingoism, are never really pacifist, because their life teaches them something different. To abjure violence it is necessary to have no experience of it.
George Orwell
#69. I grew up in somewhat of a war zone in West Philadelphia in 1985, '86. It wasn't as extreme as someone coming in the classroom and just unloading on a class, but I knew to take the scenic route to go to the grocery store to avoid certain elements.
Questlove
#70. For their holidays: the rich go see the world; the poor go see their parents.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#71. I was born in 1923 into a middle class Jewish family in Vienna, a few years after the end of World War I, which was disastrous from the Austrian point of view.
Walter Kohn
#72. From what I could see, men or women, children or adults, young or aged, rich or poor, war was making everyone equal.
Alephonsion Deng
#73. Of the twenty or so civilizations known to modern Western historians, all except our own appear to be dead or moribund, and, when we diagnose each case ... we invariably find that the cause of death has been either War or Class or some combination of the two.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#74. They knew bullshit, and they knew about the ruling class; dying for a ruling class cause was almost always bullshit.
William Kittredge
#75. Our aim is to achieve a socialist system of society, which, by eliminating the division of mankind into classes, by eliminating all exploitation of man by man and nation by nation, will inevitably eliminate the very possibility of war.
Vladimir Lenin
#76. Astonishingly, American taxpayers now will be forced to finance a multi-billion dollar jobs program in Iraq. Suddenly the war is about jobs. We export our manufacturing jobs to Asia, and now we plan to export our welfare jobs to Iraq, all at the expense of the poor and the middle class here at home.
Ron Paul
#77. And what if Britain lost? There would be a financial crisis, unemployment, and destitution. Working-class men would take up Ethel's father's cry and say that they had never been allowed to vote for the war. The people's rage against their rulers would be boundless.
Ken Follett
#78. We have before us the fiendishness of business competition and the world war, passion and wrongdoing, antagonism between classes and moral depravity within them, economic tyranny above and the slave spirit below.
Karl Barth
#79. I intend to make America strong again. I'm going to be the champion of the middle class, where I came from. If you make me your president, our best days are ahead. I'm ready to be commander-in-chief, ladies and gentlemen, on day one. I intend to win a war that we cannot afford to lose.
Lindsey Graham
#80. The [Vietnam War Memorial] Wall became a magnet for citizens of every generation, class, race, and relationship to the war perhaps because it is the only great public monument that allows the anesthetized holes in the heart to fill with a truly national grief.
Adrienne Rich
#81. From the year of his birth in 1914 until the outbreak of war in 1941, my father lived in a mostly white, mostly working-class, mostly Irish Catholic neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York.
Tim O'Brien
#82. With all due respect to all philistines, the dictatorship of the proletariat does just consist in "giving a hiding" to the classes that were previously supreme, before forcing them to recognize the new order and to submit to it.
Leon Trotsky
#83. Peace is an Excellent Thing, and War is a great Misfortune. But there are Many things More valuable than Peace, and many Things Much worse than war. The maintenance of the Ottoman Empire belongs to the First Class, the Occupation of Turkey by Russia belongs to the Second.
Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston
#84. I don't know what the country's coming to. Everyone trying to be better than their betters
mink coats and no manners. No wonder Germany's arming.
Arthur Wimperis
#85. If facts are inconvenient, well, damn those who live and work with facts.
David Brin
#86. Secularists argue that differences of religion were the chief cause of violence in our history - conveniently overlooking violent clashes of region, race, and class, not the least of which was the bloodiest war in history until that time, the Civil War.
Stephen V Monsma
#87. Accelerating the emergence of an American industrial bourgeoisie, the war tied the fortunes of this class to the Republican party and the national state.
Eric Foner
#88. Always, it is the poor people who pay. And always, it is the poor people's women who pay the most.
David Mitchell
#89. Dickens had, with all his genius, the narrow short sight of his day and class, sentimental tears for poverty but no vision to remove it except by inviting everybody to be as noble a fellow as himself. War
Stephen Leacock
