Proletarian Quotes

#1. The maximalist dreamers of this epoch, the Left Bolshevik (Vpered) group led by the philosopher of proletarian culture, Aleksandr Bogdanov, were effectively defeated by the hardheaded "centrist" Leninists by 1912.

Michael David-Fox

#2. The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only 'ripened'; they have begun to get somewhat rotten. Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind.

Leon Trotsky

#3. The immediate aim of the Communist is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.

Friedrich Engels

#4. Political economy regards the proletarian like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being. It leaves this to criminal law, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics, and the beadle.

Karl Marx

#5. The larger the unit of capital present, the easier the transaction called emission of credit. Centralized lending of this kind (which is today universal) actively promotes the absorption of the small man by the great, the reduction of small property owners to a proletarian condition.

Hilaire Belloc

#6. Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.

Theodor Adorno

#7. The essential point here is that all people with small, insecure incomes are in the same boat and ought to be fighting on the same side. Probably we could do with a little less talk about' capitalist' and 'proletarian' and a little more about the robbers and the robbed.

George Orwell

#8. I was brought up on the proletarian left, and I remain there. The fair go for workers is fundamental, and I don't believe the free market has a mind.

Clive James

#9. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was neither a revolution, nor great, nor cultural, and, in particular, not in the least proletarian.

Enver Hoxha

#10. Self-criticism, cruel, unsparing criticism that goes to the very root of the evil, is life and breath for the proletarian movement.

Rosa Luxemburg

#11. I was naked and he had more possessions than he could use all at once. I was the proletarian, he was the capitalist, and my relations to him were reduced to the basic proposition of all revolutions: die, I want what you have. It was the first time in my life I'd taken an interest in politics.

MacDonald Harris

#12. The salvation of the young mind and the freeing of it from the noxious reactionary beliefs of their parents is one of the highest aims of the proletarian government.

Nikolai Bukharin

#13. But would the perpetual flux and reflux of individualism reduce all personality to the level of mass consciousness? Would American culture remain neither bourgeois nor proletarian, but infantile? Would the moron, instead of the meek, inherit democracy?

Ellen Glasgow

#14. Much of what is euphemistically known as the middle class, merely because it dresses up to go to work, is now reduced to proletarian conditions of existence. Many white-collar jobs require no more skill and pay even less than blue-collar jobs, conferring little status or security.

Christopher Lasch

#15. I believe I'm going to die doing the things I was born to do. I believe I'm going to die high off the people. I believe I'm going to die a revolutionary in the international revolutionary proletarian struggle.

Fred Hampton

#16. ...a "proletarian" world, with no variety, no "quality", nothing noble, ancient, memorial in it, but in theory simply a gigantic sty of evenly-fed swine, in practice a den of fratricidal and cannibalic monsters.

George Saintsbury

#17. He alone knew the USSR was populated by many total enemies of socialism, egotists and vipers of the future world, and he secretly consoled himself by the thought that one day soon he would exterminate the whole mass of them, leaving alive only proletarian infants and pure orphans.

Andrei Platonov

#18. Women's propaganda must touch upon all those questions which are of great importance to the general proletarian movement. The main task is, indeed, to awaken the women's class consciousness and to incorporate them into the class struggle.

Clara Zetkin

#19. The "dangerous class," the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.

Friedrich Engels

#20. There is no proletarian, not even a Communist movement, that has not operated in the interests of money, and for the time being permitted by money - and that without the idealists among its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact.

Oswald Spengler

#21. I am a registered Democrat who is determined to return my party to the proletarian principles of the Franklin D. Roosevelt era.

Camille Paglia

#22. Those Yalta nights, with extraordinary women who could drink vodka without swooning until six in the morning and sweaty young people from the Association of Proletarian Writers of Crimea who came to ask for literary advice at four in the afternoon.

Roberto Bolano

#23. The suppression of the bourgeois state by the proletarian state is impossible without violent revolution.

Vladimir Lenin

#24. Marxism is not only the theory of socialism, it is an integral world outlook, a philosophical system, from which Marx's proletarian socialism logically follows. This philosophical system is called dialectical materialism.

Joseph Stalin

#25. Each reform, therefore, improving the economical and political situation of the workers proves to be an arm that increases the energy with which the proletarian struggle of classes is fought.

Clara Zetkin

#26. As people get more desperate, history suggests that they're not going to rise in a mighty proletarian tidal wave and wash away their oppressors. They're gonna turn on each other.

Alan Moore

#27. The most visible and often tragic sacrifice of proletarian socialism - not to mention internationalism - on the altar of nationalism, of course, has been by the states that proclaim themselves to be, or to aspire to become, socialist.

Andre Gunder Frank

#28. No difference exists between American and European manners. A proletarian from Chicago can be just as Philistine as an English duke.

Vladimir Nabokov

#29. If you ask any ordinary reader which of Dickens's proletarian characters he can remember, the three he is almost certain to mention are Bill Sykes, Sam Weller and Mrs. Gamp. A burglar, a valet and a drunken midwife-not exactly a representative cross-section of the English working class.

George Orwell

#30. Conditions are changing all the time, and to adapt one's thinking to the new conditions, one must study. Even those who have a better grasp of Marxism and are comparatively firm in their proletarian stand have to go on studying, have to absorb what is new and study new problems.

Mao Zedong

#31. There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Mao Zedong

#32. As Aristotle said, you have to be an aristocrat or a reactionary to write a good proletarian poem.

Kenneth Rexroth

#33. I am thinking of the onion again ... Not self-righteous like the proletarian potato, nor a siren like the apple. No show-off like the banana. But a modest, self-effacing vegetable, questioning, introspective, peeling itself away, or merely radiating halos like ripples.

Erica Jong

#34. Stealing from capitalism is not like stealing out of our own pockets. Marx and Lenin have taught us that anything is ethical, so long as it is in the interest of the proletarian class and its world revolution.

Nicolae Ceausescu

#35. In plain proletarian worker's language, it takes two to tango.

Fred Hampton

#36. The proletarian woman fights hand in hand with the man of her class against capitalist society.

Clara Zetkin

#37. Leninism is Marxism of the era of imperialism and the proletarian revolution.

Joseph Stalin

#38. Must all of them and their families be physically abolished? Of course not? They must be 'liquidated' or melted in the hot fire of exile and labor into the proletarian masses.

Walter Duranty

#39. The subsidiary reason is that the Party member, like the proletarian, tolerates present-day conditions partly because he has no standards of comparison. He must be cut off from the past, just as he must be cut off from foreign countries.

George Orwell

#40. Murphy's Law, that brash proletarian restatement of Godel's Theorem ...

Thomas Pynchon

#41. The feminine section of the proletarian army is of particularly great significance... the success of a revolution depends on the extent to which women take part in it.

Vladimir Lenin

#42. We are not making this demand for the sake of a principle, but in the interests of the proletarian class.

Clara Zetkin

#43. The Woman is the Proletarian of the Proletariat

Flora Tristan

#44. If you lived like a proletarian long enough, among proletarians, weren't you almost certain to become a proletarian too?

Richard Yates

#45. The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general.

Friedrich Engels

#46. What practical conclusions may we now draw for our propaganda work among women? The task of this Party Congress must not be to issue detailed practical suggestions, but to draw up general directions for the proletarian women's movement.

Clara Zetkin

#47. A great army of the proletarian party [must be] prepared to smash the reactionary forces and to clear the way for the advanced forces of society.

J. Stalin

#48. The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.

Gustave Flaubert

#49. The proletarian writer is a writer with a purpose; he thinks no more of art for art's sake than a man on a sinking ship thinks of painting a beautiful picture in the cabin; he thinks of getting ashore - and then there will be time enough for art.

Upton Sinclair

#50. To produce pure proletarian art the artist must be at one with the worker; this is impossible, not for political reasons, but because the artist never is at one with any public.

William Empson

#51. As long as God is a man, not a couple, the life of a woman, according to Hanna,is bound to remain as it is now, namely wretched, with woman as the proletarian of Creation, however smartly dressed.

Max Frisch

#52. These $40 burgers with foie gras and truffles and all of that flies in the face of one of the most proletarian foods around. It's overpriced, overdone and just not worth it.

Adam Richman

#53. She smiled at him. It was her special smile. Her please go away you piece of sub-proletarian turd smile.

Helen Zahavi

#54. Proletarians of the world, look into the depths of your own beings, seek out the truth and realise it yourselves: you will find it nowhere else.

Peter Arshinov

#55. I tell you," said Augustine, "if there is anything that revealed with the strength of a divine law in our times, it is that the masses are to rise, and the under class becomes the upper one.

Harriet Beecher Stowe