The Ruling Class Quotes

1. "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."
Author: Anne Roiphe

2. "The crisis creates situations which are dangerous in the short run, since the various strata of the population are not all capable of orienting themselves equally swiftly, or of reorganizing with the same rhythm. The traditional ruling class, which has numerous trained cadres, changes men and programmes and, with greater speed than is achieved by the subordinate classes, reabsorbs the control that was slipping from its grasp. Perhaps it may make sacrifices, and expose itself to an uncertain future by demagogic promises; but it retains power, reinforces it for the time being, and uses it to crush its adversary and disperse his leading cadres, who cannot be be very numerous or highly trained."
Author: Antonio Gramsci

3. "The ruling class has always slavishly followed industrial innovations, and we have always slavishly followed ruling class materialism. It is what keeps an assembly-line society functioning stylishly."
Author: Bauvard

4. "The whiteness celebrated in Paris is Burning is not just any old brand of whiteness but rather that brutal imperial ruling-class capitalist patriarchal whiteness that presents itself -its way of life- as the only meaningful life there is. What could be more reassuring to a white public fearful that marginalized disenfranchised black folks might rise any day now make revolutionary black liberation struggle a reality than a documentary affirming that colonized, victimized, exploited black folks, are all too willing to be complicit in perpetuating the fantasy that ruling-class white culture is the quintessential site of unrestricted joy, freedom, power and pleasure."
Author: Bell Hooks

5. "You must bow on your knees at all times before the ruling-class norms to show you are submissive."
Author: Bryant McGill

6. "Outcasts may grow up to be novelists and filmmakers and computer tycoons, but they will never be the athletic ruling class."
Author: Chuck Klosterman

7. ". . . the press and the pulpit have in every age and every nation been on the side of the exploiting class and the ruling class."
Author: Eugene V. Debs

8. "Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class -- whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy."
Author: Frank Herbert

9. "What is good for the ruling class, is alleged to be good for the whole of society with which the ruling class identifies itself."
Author: Friedrich Engels

10. "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."
Author: George Orwell

11. "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."
Author: Gore Vidal

12. "At the moment we have a ruling class that has one law and the people the other."
Author: Imran Khan

13. "There isn't much discussion of ruling class in America even in Boston, probably one of the most class-conscious cities in the country?"
Author: Iris Chang

14. "Imperialism creates the illusion of wealth as far as the masses are concerned. It usually serves to hide the fact that the ruling classes are gobbling up the natural resources of the home territory in an improvident manner and are otherwise utilizing the national wealth largely for their own purposes. Eventually the general public is called upon to pay for all of this, frequently after the military machine can no longer maintain external aggression."
Author: Jack D. Forbes

15. "It would be well to realize that the talk of ‘humane methods of warfare', of the ‘rules of civilized warfare', and all such homage to the finer sentiments of the race are hypocritical and unreal, and only intended for the consumption of stay-at-homes. There are no humane methods of warfare, there is no such thing as civilized warfare; all warfare is inhuman, all warfare is barbaric; the first blast of the bugles of war ever sounds for the time being the funeral knell of human progress… What lover of humanity can view with anything but horror the prospect of this ruthless destruction of human life. Yet this is war: war for which all the jingoes are howling, war to which all the hopes of the world are being sacrificed, war to which a mad ruling class would plunge a mad world."
Author: James Connolly

16. "The ruling class is and will continue to be the class of decision makers."
Author: Jean Francois Lyotard

17. "I despise the ruling classes, but they're required for my major."
Author: John Alejandro King

18. "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."
Author: John Marshall Harlan

19. "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."
Author: Karl Marx

20. "Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!"
Author: Karl Marx

21. "...it happens that "society is saved" as often as the circle of its ruling class is narrowed, as often as a more exclusive interest asserts itself over the general. Every demand for the most simple bourgeois financial reform, for the most ordinary liberalism, for the most commonplace republicanism, for the flattest democracy is forthwith punished as an "assault upon society" and is branded as "Socialism."
Author: Karl Marx

22. "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."
Author: Kavita Ramdas

23. "...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."
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

24. "You cannot wage a sustained ideological assault on your own civilization without grave consequences. We are approaching the end of the Anglo-American moment, and the eclipse of the powers that built the modern world...Cecil Rhodes..said that to be born a British subject was to win first prize in the lottery of life. One the eve of the Great Ward, in his play "Heartbreak House", Bernard Shaw turned the thought around to taunt a ruling class too smug and self-absorbed to see what was coming. "Do you think," he wrote, "the laws of God will be suspended in favor of England because you were born in it?....In our time, to be born a citizen of the United States is to win first prize in the lottery of life, and, as the Britons did, too many Americans assume it will always be so. Do you think the laws of God will be suspended in favor of America because you were born in it? Great convulsions lie ahead, and at the end of it we may be in a post-Anglosphere world."
Author: Mark Steyn

25. "No society has succeeded in abolishing the distinction between ruler and ruled... to be a ruler gives one special status and, usually, special privileges. During the Communist era, important officials in the Soviet Union had access to special shops selling delicacies unavailable to ordinary citizens; before China allowed capitalist enterprises in its economy, travelling by car was a luxury limited to tourists and those high in the party hierarchy Throughout the 'communist' nations, the abolition of the old ruling class was followed by the rise of a new class of party bosses and well-placed bureaucrats, whose behaviour and life-style came more and more to resemble that of their much-denounced predecessors. In the end, nobody believed in the system any more. That, couple with its inability to match the productivity of the less bureaucratically controlled, more egoistically driven capitalist economies, led to its downfall."
Author: Peter Singer

26. "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."
Author: Raul Castro

27. "Well than try giving it some thought, why don't you? Apply that finely tutored mind of yours to all those bullshit hero-with-a-high-destiny legends you people are so fucking fond of telling one another. You really think, in a mudball slaughterhouse of a world like this, where war and privation harden whole populations to inhuman brutality and ignorance, where the ruling classes dedicate their sons to learning the science of killing men the way they consign their daughters to breeding till they crack--you really think the gods of a world like that have got no better thing to do with their time than take some random piece of lowborn trash and spend long years carving him into shape for a cat's-paw?"
Author: Richard K. Morgan

28. "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

29. "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."
Author: Tana French

30. "When we examine, not the language of the propaganda, but the witness of the combatants themselves, religion does not occupy the first place. Their motivations are more often secular: they mention their sympathy for a population reduced to poverty, the victims of the whim of ruling classes that live in luxury and corruption- rulers able to maintain themselves in power thanks only to the support of the American government ( as in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt). They speak of the members of their families or their local communities who have suffered or died by the fault of these governments ( and thus of their protectors); and they want to avenge them. The thirst for vengeance did not wait for Islam to appear in the world, and the appeal to the law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is universal."
Author: Tzvetan Todorov

31. "After analyzing our current crisis and studying well-establishedhistorical precedents, I must conclude that the global bankers haveonly three possible cards left to play.The first is admitting culpability and working to restore theAmerican economic engine to its free-market potential. History hastaught us that the ruling class rarely admits error and never concedespower.The second is to foment so much civil unrest and fear that thegeneral population will be clamoring for a global dictator who willprovide them food, shelter, and security in exchange for their individualfreedom and sovereignty. I see the emerging militancy of thelabor union movement playing right into this scenario.The final play is global conflict where they can try and controlthe outcome by means of funding both sides."
Author: Ziad K. Abdelnour

The Ruling Class Quotes Pictures