Top 100 Ruling Class Quotes
#1. I think it came from being a ruling class, from never being able to show weakness to the people they have conquered - to people like us. It gave them a sense of unyielding authority.
Peter Cunningham
#2. The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.
Gore Vidal
#3. I'm saying that the moral climate within the ruling class in this country is not that different from the moral climate within the ruling class of Hitler's Germany.
David Clennon
#4. Idleness so called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry itself.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#5. The saving of the Jews in Europe did not figure at the head of the list of priorities of the ruling class. It was the foundation of the State which was primordial in their eyes.
Tom Segev
#6. What presents itself to us as bourgeois legality is nothing but the violence of the ruling class, a violence raised to an obligatory norm from the outset.
Rosa Luxemburg
#7. Those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times.
Kurt Vonnegut
#8. Women don't want to exchange places with men. Male chauvinists, science-fiction writers and comedians may favor that idea for its shock value, but psychologists say it is a fantasy based on ruling-class ego and guilt.
Gloria Steinem
#9. You must bow on your knees at all times before the ruling-class norms to show you are submissive.
Bryant McGill
#10. How to get people to vote against their interests and to really think against their interests is very clever. It's the cleverest ruling class that I have ever come across in history. It's been two hundred years at it. It's superb.
Gore Vidal
#11. The minority, the ruling class at present, has the schools and press, usually the Church as well, under its thumb. This enables it to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them.
Albert Einstein
#12. But the more these conscious illusions of the ruling class are shown to be false and the less they satisfy common sense, the more dogmatically they are asserted and the more deceitful, moralizing and spiritual becomes the language of established society.
Karl Marx
#13. The ruling class has the schools and press under its thumb. This enables it to sway the emotions of the masses.
Albert Einstein
#14. When I grew up, you needed to have straight hair. It's symbolic of needing to be like everyone else, needing to look like everyone else. And what that meant was looking like the dominant ruling class in America.
Anne Roiphe
#16. Whether the British ruling class are wicked or merely stupid is one of the most difficult questions of our time, and at certain moments a very important question.
George Orwell
#17. Politics should be limited in scope to ware, protection of property, and the occasional precautionary beheading of a member of the ruling class.
P. J. O'Rourke
#18. I loved doing My Favorite Year, which was great fun, and The Ruling Class, which I made with all my chums.
Peter O'Toole
#19. By the 1960s the United States had a new ruling class - the teenager!
Billy Graham
#20. Yet in the most mean, cowardly, hypocritical way the British ruling class did all they could to hand Spain over to Franco and the Nazis. Why? Because they were pro-Fascist, was the obvious answer.
George Orwell
#21. I always prided myself on being apart from the ruling class. I think it's always important, not just in Washington but in life, to be able to able to balance your sense of belonging with what it's like to be someone who doesn't belong.
Mark Leibovich
#22. Once the slogans died down, the girl shouted, "God does not exist. All religions are tools concocted by the ruling class to paralyze the spirit of the people!
Liu Cixin
#23. At the moment we have a ruling class that has one law and the people the other.
Imran Khan
#24. Often, this has only meant a change in tyranny. In other words, one ruling class is replaced by another - sometimes by one that is more efficient and therefore still more capable of maintaining itself - while the poor and downtrodden remain poor and downtrodden or become even worse off.
Isaac Asimov
#25. The 1930s birthed two great agrarian novels: 'Gone with the Wind' from the viewpoint of the ruling class, 'The Grapes of Wrath' for the underclass. And both were turned into movies that dared to be true to the books' controversial themes.
Richard Corliss
#26. The state is the executive committee of the ruling class.
Karl Marx
#27. [representative government is] deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament,
Karl Marx
#28. I am running to fix the economy, restore the constitutional system of checks and balances and to end this game of crony capitalism by the ruling class in Washington.
Dave Brat
#29. The deterioration of the intelligentsia is as much a symptom of disease as the corruption of the ruling class or the sleeping sickness of the proletariat.
Arthur Koestler
#30. Idleness does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the dogmatic formualries of the ruling class.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#31. The Roman clergy thus adopted the old aristocracy's ideal of libertas, which had little to do with freedom; rather, it referred to the maintenance of the privileged position of the ruling class, lest society lapse into barbarism.
Karen Armstrong
#32. That's all very well as an abstract moral principle, Avril, a coffee-table theoretical construct, but there's no denying the sheer gratuitous pleasure to be derived from seeing members of the ruling class in pain and torment.
Irvine Welsh
#33. The more a ruling class is able to assimilate the most prominent men of a ruled class, the more solid and dangerous its rule.
Karl Marx
#34. Feminism, unlike almost every other social movement, is not a struggle against a distinct oppressor - it's not the ruling class or the occupiers or the colonizers - it's against a deeply held set of beliefs and assumptions that we women, far too often, hold ourselves.
Kavita Ramdas
#35. Capitalism is the legitimate racket of the ruling class.
Al Capone
#36. In Cuba we have one party, but in the U.S. there is very little difference. Both parties are an expression of the ruling class.
Raul Castro
#37. American decline is real, though the apocalyptic vision reflects the familiar ruling class perception that anything short of total control amounts to total disaster.
Noam Chomsky
#38. Just as everyone in a tribe praying to a volcano god would reinforce the idea that there is a volcano god, so begging politicians for favors reinforces the idea that there is a rightful ruling class, that their commands are "law," and that obedience to such "laws" is a moral imperative.
Larken Rose
#39. The economic owning class is always the political ruling class.
Eugene V. Debs
#40. The ruling class is the rich ... And those people are so able to manipulate our democracy that they really control the democracy.
Walter Cronkite
#41. Limousines used to be reserved for the ruling class, or, on special occasions, for the working class. Today, limousines are like taxicabs with the door handles still intact.
Erma Bombeck
#42. Charity has always been a expression of the guilty consciences of a ruling class.
Doris Lessing
#43. If, in monotheism, God is man, man is God. Why does God look suspiciously like the ruling class? Why is Jesus, a Jewish guy from the Middle East, blond and blue-eyed? There
Gloria Steinem
#44. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital , and allowed to live only so far as the interest to the ruling class requires it.
Karl Marx
#45. What better way for a ruling class to claim and hold power than to pose as the defenders of the nation.
Christopher Hitchens
#46. Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege.
Tommy Douglas
#47. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.
George Orwell
#48. Every vice of the Empire has been repeated in the Foundation. Inertia! Our ruling class knows one law; no
change. Despotism! They know one rule; force. Maldistribution! They know one desire; to hold what is
theirs.
Isaac Asimov
#49. Real power is achieved when the ruling class controls the material essentials of life, granting and withholding them from the masses as if they were privileges.
George Orwell
#50. But in view of the constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here.
John Marshall Harlan
#51. The press and the pulpit have in every age and every nation been on the side of the exploiting class and the ruling class.
Eugene V. Debs
#52. They knew bullshit, and they knew about the ruling class; dying for a ruling class cause was almost always bullshit.
William Kittredge
#53. I hope that even if I go to jail, it will motivate more and more Hongkongers to commit to determine our future, instead of fully relying on those ruling class who have dominated our future.
Joshua Wong
#54. Representative government is artifice, a political myth, designed to conceal from the masses the dominance of a self-selected, self-perpetuating, and self-serving traditional ruling class.
Giuseppe Prezzolini
#55. Outcasts may grow up to be novelists and filmmakers and computer tycoons, but they will never be the athletic ruling class.
Chuck Klosterman
#56. Yale University is famous for its Sex Week. It does not have a Dignity of the Worker Week or even a Save the Planet Week. This self-involved focus speaks volumes about the preoccupations of today's ruling class.
R. R. Reno
#57. As Brooks Adams put it, the sole problem of our ruling class is whether to coerce or to bribe the powerless majority.
Gore Vidal
#58. I used to have a phrase: Liberalism is spreading misery equally. And now the ruling class throughout Washington seems to have adopted this.
Rush Limbaugh
#59. If you don't look like the ruling class, bring your inhaler.
Esai Morales
#60. Jews are not part of a European ruling class imposed on helpless natives, but are caught up in a tragedy in which two peoples are struggling for the same piece of land.
Jack Schwartz
#61. No new social class came to power through the door of the American revolution. The men who engineered the revolt were largely members of the colonial ruling class.
Howard Zinn
#62. Once humanity discovers what's behind the mirror of all the ruling class of governments and religions there will be a new beginning of justice called Enlightenment.
Charleston Parker
#63. No reform ever came from the bottom, and it was always people who understood how the ruling class worked who turned out to be the reformers.
Gore Vidal
#64. Every ruling class has wanted only this: all the rewards and none of the burdens. The operational code is: we have a lot; we can get more; we want it all.
Michael Parenti
#65. Ireland is such a young society. The British were the ruling class up until they left about a hundred years ago, and we've been trying to work out what our class hierarchy is ever since.
Tana French
#66. Exemplary people concern themselves with virtue,
small people concern themselves with territory. The ruling class
thinks of punishment, the lower classes hope for benevolence.
Confucius
#67. Because you look at it, you know, and there's basically one set of rules that protect that industrial ruling class. That's what the governments do, that's what the religions do. They protect the interests of that industrial ruling class.
John Trudell
#68. The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
Karl Marx
#69. You know, I've been around the ruling class all my life, and I've been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country.
Gore Vidal
#71. The first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle for democracy.
Karl Marx
#72. For most of human history, there was a ruling class and then there was everybody else. If you were part of everybody else, it wasn't your job to imagine a different future, different ways of doing things. So, imagination is a fairly modern phenomenon.
Jay S. Walker
#73. What is good for the ruling class, is alleged to be good for the whole of society with which the ruling class identifies itself.
Friedrich Engels
#74. The Republican Party did not disparage the ruling class, because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it.
Angelo Codevilla
#75. A wide distance between the governors and the governed will produce a state that is predatory toward its own citizens, indifferent to their desires, and subject to the inbred whims and compulsions of its ruling class. It will produce crisis. Countering
Christopher L. Hayes
#76. (John F.) Kennedy was an elitist and not a populist. He was enthralled by a certain British aristocratic view of politics in which an enlightened ruling class makes reasoned, rational decisions that are in the interest of the more emotional and easily manipulated masses.
Scott Farris
#77. The former ruling class kept the community of actors in ignorance by means of various lies.
Bela Lugosi
#78. The modern university is the institution through which the next generation's elite is formed. It inculcates the two essential, nonnegotiable principles of the American ruling class: consumerism and relativism.
Jonathan V. Last
#79. The structure of the Swiss ruling class is rock-hard, and unchanged since the time of Napoleon. They sit on their mountains and lecture the world on democracy. It's an unbelievable show of self-satisfaction and arrogance.
Jean Ziegler
#80. The ruling class is smarter than you, and they're more creative. And if you forget that lesson, you go down the drain. Because if they weren't, they wouldn't be around as long as they have been and as strong as they have been.
Al Lewis
#81. Monotheism makes me grouchy. I don't trust any religion that makes God look like one of the ruling class. I guess I'm a pagan or an animist.
Gloria Steinem
#82. To decide once every few years which members of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament-this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in parliamentary- constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics.
Vladimir Lenin
#83. There isn't much discussion of ruling class in America even in Boston, probably one of the most class-conscious cities in the country?
Iris Chang
#84. People who dismiss the unemployed and dependent as 'parasites' fail to understand economics and parasitism. A successful parasite is one that is not recognized by its host, one that can make its host work for it without appearing as a burden. Such is the ruling class in a capitalist society.
Jason Read
#85. The ruling class isn't dissatisfied: they are healthy, well-fed, live in beauty, enjoy their own importance: fun-loving cannibals.
Marge Piercy
#86. I think we live in an industrial dimensional reality where we're programmed to believe what we're told. We're programmed to believe them. We're programmed to believe what that ruling class wants us to believe.
John Trudell
#87. In fact, because of this deep desire for peace, the ruling class leaders of this land, from 1945 on, stepped up the hysteria and propaganda to drive into American minds the false notion that danger threatened them from the East.
Paul Robeson
#88. England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.
George Orwell
#89. 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
#90. Our minds become slaves to those we see as having total power to control us and to cause pain to us. We are quick to give up control of ourselves to those who have the power to rule us as long as they also have the power to feed us. This is the fundamental construct of a feudal society.
Majid Kazmi
#91. All the old history was written for the amusement of the ruling classes. The lower classes couldn't read, and their rulers didn't care about remembering what happened to them.
Frank Zappa
#92. I believe that Britain is becoming more class-conscious, and I quake at the very idea of Old Etonians ruling the world again.
Johnny Vegas
#93. The capitalist class rules but does not govern: it contents itself with ruling the government.
Karl Kautsky
#94. We are the only class in history that has been left to fight its battles alone, unaided by the ruling powers. White labor and the freed black men had their champions, but where are ours?
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#95. Journalists belong in the gutter because that is where the ruling classes throw their guilty secrets.
Gerald Priestland
#96. Those in power must spend a lot of their time laughing at us.
Alice Walker
#97. Every leader attracts a different type of follower from the left or the right, from the lowest or the highest class. Every leader unwittingly attracts certain stereotypes that fuel their underlying agenda.
Anita B. Sulser PhD
#98. 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
#99. Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in 19th-century France and England, or 20th-century Russia and America.
Lillian Hellman
#100. 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
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