Proletariat Quotes

1. "Times like this, I don't wish for ignorance. I look around and I see the bloated ignorance of the lumpen proletariat: roly-poly, sausage-fingered, ginger-topped fathers of at least two illegitimate children trying to massage the asses of waiflike, peroxide-scarred students who are themselves trying to navigate adulthood with their new-found freedom from outdated parenting."
Author: Ayize Jama Everett

2. "Every writer seeking a present audience necessarily enters into a servile position under it. This is true not only of those who seek a large audience, the popular writers, who whether consciously or by disposition, expand their ideal reader to include all possible types, keeping their vocabulary and ideas small, augmenting their cheerfulness to aid digestion. It is true also of the avant-gardes who long for recognition, appealing to the critics and to their fellow ‘sensitives', creating a work quiet, infinitely subtle, a work under which the bohemians can band together and decry the demand for meaning, or which the professors, that pity-proletariat class, hail as a rallying point for ‘social justice'. In such cases, writers render up their skill and toil to scaring away the common reader with boredom and impotence. Artful writing is the most private of professions."
Author: Bauvard

3. "The country has undergone a profound social upheaval, the greatest the proletariat has ever known."
Author: C. L. R. James

4. "The most disastrous phenomenon of the current situation is the factor that imperialism is employing for its own ends all the powers of the proletariat, all of its institutions and weapons, which its fighting vanguard has created for its war of liberation."
Author: Clara Zetkin

5. "Culturally, I have always been part of the proletariat. I lived side by side with the sons of glassblowers, fishermen and smugglers. The stories they told were shaper satires about the hypocrisy of authority and the middle classes, the two-facedness of teachers and lawyers and politicians. I was born politicized."
Author: Dario Fo

6. "Revolutia rusa se afla atunci inca sub stralucirea romantica a acelui Octombrie ... Cum inca nu incepuse epoca stalinismului, cu crimele sale, am simtit, cu un romantic fanatism, ca revolutia proletariatului va izbuti sa aduca oamenilor lumea pura intrezarita de stiintele matematice."
Author: Ernesto Sabato

7. "Elites are once again invoking Reagan, dropping their G's and saying things in a folksy sort of way that's meant to capture the hearts of people. And it's all fraud; it's all stagecraft. And people are falling for a great deal of elite behavior in this country packaged as if it's proletariat behavior."
Author: Eugene Jarecki

8. "The proletariat uses the State not in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the State as such ceases to exist."
Author: Friedrich Engels

9. "Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat."
Author: Friedrich Engels

10. "The bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie have armed themselves against the rising proletariat with, among other things, 'culture.'"
Author: George Grosz

11. "The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletariat to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeoisie."
Author: Gustave Flaubert

12. "But the poor person does not exist as an inescapable fact of destiny. His or her existence is not politically neutral, and it is not ethically innocent. The poor are a by-product of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible. They are marginalized by our social and cultural world. They are the oppressed, exploited proletariat, robbed of the fruit of their labor and despoiled of their humanity. Hence the poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different social order."
Author: Gustavo Gutiérrez

13. "Look- what I'm getting at is no matter who or what you're dealing with, people build up meaning between themselves and the things around them. The important thing is whether this comes about naturally or not. Being bright has nothing to do with it. What matters is that you see things with your own eyes... There's always going to be a connection between you, Mr. Nakata, and the things you deal with. Just like there's a connection between eel and rice bowls. And as the web of these connections spreads out, a relationship between you, Mr. Nakata, and capitalists and the proletariat naturally develops.~page 189"
Author: Haruki Murakami

14. "The revolution in Russia was terrible for the proletariat in the long years of its development and it is terrible now, after the victory. But at the actual time of revolution it was easy, and this was due to the peasants."
Author: Herman Gorter

15. "This is the absolute truth: and on this truth our tactics must be based. All tactics that are not based on this are false, and lead the proletariat to terrible defeat."
Author: Herman Gorter

16. "School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age."
Author: Ivan Illich

17. "Remember Stalingrad. Remember the crash of 1929. Remember the Industrial Revolution. Now remember that I am the proletariat cog in the machine that causes the meltdown of the aristocratic assembly line. Ben Franklin was a man of vision. Ben wore bifocals. Agatha was a beautiful woman. But if she were standing on her head, she'd look like Walt Disney. She'd often make me feel as small as Mickey Mouse. I am the elevator of love. So why'd she have to take the stairs? I am a rational being. She rationed her love like loaves of bread in times of famine. She was my feminine famine. I ate her love like it was cabbage soup, minus the cabbage; I drank it up like water. She pissed me off like a mouth-shaped urinal that liked to spread, like peanut butter, nasty rumors about the size of my penis. Three inches. That was the width of my love for Agatha. Three and a half years. That was the length of my love for her. 2009. That was the height of my love for her."
Author: Jarod Kintz

18. "If on the one side we do not harbor the illusion that the entire proletariat must be enlightened before it can be called into battle, so on the other we do not doubt that as much enlightenment as possible must be produced with oral and printed agitation."
Author: Johann Most

19. "The anarchists, on behalf of the proletariat, therefore consider it necessary to show the proletariat that it will have to win a gigantic battle before it realizes its goals."
Author: Johann Most

20. "Despite having built his own movement with little help from Moscow, the new Chinese leader was a dedicated Marxist-Leninist who was more than ready to defer to Stalin as the head of the international communist movement. The new China, he announced in June, 1949, must ally "with the Soviet Union, . . . and with the proletariat and broad masses of the people in all other countries, and form an international united front. . . . We must lean to one side."53"
Author: John Lewis Gaddis

21. "How can I accept the Communist doctrine, which sets up as its bible, above and beyond criticism, an obsolete textbook which I know not only to be scientifically erroneous but without interest or application to the modern world? How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia, who with all their faults, are the quality of life and surely carry the seeds of all human achievement? Even if we need a religion, how can we find it in the turbid rubbish of the red bookshop? It is hard for an educated, decent, intelligent son of Western Europe to find his ideals here, unless he has first suffered some strange and horrid process of conversion which has changed all his values."
Author: John Maynard Keynes

22. "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
Author: John Steinbeck

23. "Zombies are the proletariat. Long live the workers!"
Author: Justine Larbalestier

24. "This republic represents the greatest basis for that universal socialist order, the creation of which is at the present time the historic task of the International Proletariat."
Author: Karl Liebknecht

25. "The Russian revolution was to an unprecedented degree the cause of the proletariat of the whole world becoming more revolutionary."
Author: Karl Liebknecht

26. "We are the party of the Czechoslovak proletariat and our general headquarters are in Moscow."
Author: Klement Gottwald

27. "Transcending class distinctions, the speaker [Stalin] portrays the relation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as a mere division of labor. The workers and soldiers achieve the revolution, Guchkov and Miliukov "fortify" it.[…] This superintendent's approach to the historical process is exactly characteristic of the leaders of Menshevism, this handing out of instructions to various classes and then patronizingly criticizing their fulfillment."
Author: Leon Trotsky

28. "The bourgeoisie, which far surpasses the proletariat in the completeness and irreconcilibility of its class consciousness, is vitally interested in imposing its moral philosophy upon the exploited masses. It is exactly for this purpose that the concrete norms of the bourgeois catechism are concealed under moral abstractions...The appeal to abstract norms is not a disinterested philosophic mistake but a necessary element in the mechanics of class deception."
Author: Leon Trotsky

29. "Lenin refused to recognise moral norms established by slave-owners for their slaves and never observed by the slave-owners themselves; he called upon the Proletariat to extend the class struggle into the moral sphere too. Who fawns before the precepts established by the enemy will never vanquish that enemy!"
Author: Leon Trotsky

30. "Against the new leviathan, whether in the guise of universal suffrage, democracy, or of an equally fraudulent triumphant proletariat, he (Kierkegaard) pitted the individual human soul made in the image of a God who was concerned about the fate of every living creature. In contrast with the notion of salvation through power, he held out the hope of salvation through suffering. The Cross against the ballot box or clenched fist; the solitary pilgrim against the slogan-shouting mob; the crucified Christ against the demagogue-dictators promising a kingdom of heaven on earth, whether achieved through endlessly expanding wealth and material well-being, or through the ever greater concentration of power and its ever more ruthless exercise."
Author: Malcolm Muggeridge

31. "The slaves of today will become the tyrants of tomorrow--the proletariat overthrows the hegemon to become the hegemon itself, only to be eventually overthrown by a proto-hegemon that will in turn lose its position. It is this dizzying cycle that keeps humanity chasing the tail it lost millennia ago"
Author: Miguel Syjuco

32. "She is a waitress at his lordships club.My God! The Proletariat!The lower middle classes, sir.Well, yes, by stretching it a bit, perhaps."
Author: P.G. Wodehouse

33. "They see in the political apathy of the proletariat only the apathy, not the protest against a system that has nothing to offer them."
Author: Red Army Faction

34. "Bourgeois class domination is undoubtedly an historical necessity, but, so too, the rising of the working class against it. Capital is an historical necessity, but, so too, its grave digger, the socialist proletariat."
Author: Rosa Luxemburg

35. "History is the only true teacher, the revolution the best school for the proletariat."
Author: Rosa Luxemburg

36. "Dlatego ze, no pomyslcie sami – ile moze istniec boysbandów na glowe, ile rodzajów proszków do prania potrzeba czlowiekowi, ile kryminalnych informacji mozna przyswoic przez dobe? Wszystko jest ograniczone, ograniczone przede wszystkim fizycznymi mozliwosciami wspólczesnego czlowieka, które – i to tez wiecie lepiej niz ja – sa dosyc skromne: zdrowie wspólczesnego czlowieka jest nadwyrezone przez fast food i bezpieczny seks – wymyslony przez was, zeby odciagnac proletariat od walki klas – takiego zdrowia nie starczy."
Author: Serhiy Zhadan

37. "The proletariat could plan to massacre the whole ruling class; a fanatic Jew or black could dream of seizing the secret of the atomic bomb and turning all of humanity entirely Jewish or entirely black: but a woman could not even dream of exterminating males. The tie that binds her to her oppressors is unlike any other. The division of the sexes is a biological given, not a moment in human history. Their opposition took shape within an original Mitsein, and she has not broken it. The couple is a fundamental unit with the two halves riveted to each other: terristic of woman: she is the Other at the heart of a whole whose two components are necessary to each other."
Author: Simone De Beauvoir

38. "Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers' enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others."
Author: Simone Weil

39. "Almost all religions provide opportunities for human beings to convince themselves of their own righteousness, to speak in the name of God, and even to go to war on God's behalf. This 'blasphemy of certainty' is also rife among secularists who in their case have not God but science or the proletariat on their side."
Author: Stephen R. Prothero

40. "Karl Marx, himself a denizen of one of the most congested of all London districts, was equally impressed by the dismal conditions of the new proletariat. he sent Darwin a copy of 'Das Kapital' (which was found unread after his death)."
Author: Steve Jones

41. "They guillotined Charlotte Corday and they said Marat is dead. No, Marat is not dead. Put him in the Pantheon or throw him in the sewer; it doesn't matter-he's back the next day. He's reborn in the man who has no job, the woman who has no bread, in the girl who has to sell her body, in the child who hasn't learned to read; he's reborn in the unheated tenement, in the wretched mattress without blankets, in the unemployed, in the proletariat, in the brothel, in the jailhouse, in your laws that show no pity, in your schools that give no future, and he appears in all that is ignorance and he recreates himself from all that is darkness. Oh, beware human society: you cannot kill Marat until you have killed the misery of poverty!"
Author: Victor Hugo

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