Quotes & Sayings About Bourgeoisie

Photography works upon the human eye: what is seen is reflected in the brain without the need for complicated thought. In this way the bourgeoisie takes advantage of the mental indolence of the masses and does good business as well. — Willi Munzenberg

The nearer we come to the full military suppression of the bourgeoisie, the more dangerous becomes to us the high flood of petty-bourgeois Anarchism. And the struggle against these elements cannot be waged with propaganda and agitation alone ... The struggle must also be waged by applying force and compulsion. — Vladimir Lenin

I desire a society which selects its rulers from the best elements of every class and denies the right of any class or corporation to usurp the government itself
whether it be the nobles, the clergy, the bourgeoisie, or the proletariat. For government by any class is fatal to the welfare of the whole, — Rafael Sabatini

The leaders of the petty bourgeoisie must teach the people to trust the bourgeoisie. The proletarians must teach the people to distrust the bourgeoisie. — Vladimir Lenin

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

Historically and politically, the petit-bourgeois is the key to the century. The bourgeois and proletariat classes have become abstractions: the petite-bourgeoisie, in contrast, is everywhere, you can see it everywhere, even in the areas of the bourgeois and the proletariat, what's left of them. — Roland Barthes

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other - bourgeoisie and proletariat. — Karl Marx

Even as rigorous a determinist as Karl Marx, who at times described the social behaviour of the bourgeoisie in terms which suggested a problem in social physics, could subject it at other times to a withering scorn which only the presupposition of moral responsibility could justify. — Reinhold Niebuhr

People think that the art market is about opportunists and hedge-fund managers getting broken art, but what really happened is that there was a new configuration of bourgeois values in the U.S. and an acceptance among the bourgeoisie of contemporary art as an idea. I think that bourgeois people are horrible. — Liam Gillick

It will take a long period to decide the issue in the ideological struggle between socialism and capitalism in our country. The reason is that the influence of the bourgeoisie and of the intellectuals who come from the old society will remain in our country for a long time to come, and so will their class ideology. If this is not sufficiently understood, or is not understood at all, the gravest mistakes will be made and the necessity of waging the struggle in the ideological field will be ignored. — Mao Zedong

Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman dares now shock his greengrocer. — George Bernard Shaw

It is the bourgeoisie which has turned religion into an opium of the people by preaching a God, lord of the heavens only, while taking possession of the earth for itself. — Frei Betto

The intelligentsia ... was kept busy embroidering white stitches on the philosophical and ecclesiastical vestments of the bourgeoisie - that old and filthy fabric besmeared with the blood of toiling masses. — Maxim Gorky

I am of the international upper class, the Swedish petit bourgeoisie of Jewish extraction with poor language skills, a conveyor of a few expressions and faces, with some intonation that combines ancient human experience with timely coquetry. — Erland Josephson

Art is a finger up the bourgeoisie ass. — Pablo Picasso

Common sense, in so far as it exists, is all for the bourgeoisie. Nonsense is the privilege of the aristocracy. The worries of the world are for the common people. — George Jean Nathan

I try not to look like a university man here ... My fellow-guests think of a university degree as a disgraceful preliminary to the blood-sucking life of the bourgeoisie. A sign, moreover, that a man has to earn his own living. — Eilis Dillon

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. — Friedrich Engels

The intellectual is a middle-class product; if he is not born into the class he must soon insert himself into it, in order to exist. He is the fine nervous flower of the bourgeoisie. — Louise Bogan

nationalize the tertiary sector. The bourgeoisie, who wants the spirit of lucre — Frantz Fanon

Usher: Why do you play only on the black keys [of the piano]? I suppose you think black is good enough for the proletariat. You play on all the keys only for the bourgeoisie, is that it?
Oleg Bard: Please, citizen, please! I'm concentrating on the white ones!
Usher: So you think white is best? Play on both!
Oleg Bard: I am playing on both!
Usher: So you compromise with [the] Whites, opportunist! — Vladimir Mayakovsky

The courage to be as oneself within the atmosphere of Enlightenment is the courage to affirm oneself as a bridge from a lower to a higher state of rationality. It is obvious that this kind of courage to be must become conformist the moment its revolutionary attack on that which contradicts reason has ceased, namely in the victorious bourgeoisie. — Paul Tillich

If we took over Britain, then we'd have the job of cleaning up the bourgeoisie and keeping people in a revolutionary state of mind. — John Lennon

The bourgeois today burns as heretics and hangs as criminals those to whom he erects monuments tomorrow. — Hermann Hesse

Marx's Kapital is not a treatise on socialism; it is a gerrymand against the bourgeoisie. It was supposed to be written for the working class, but the working man respects the bourgeoisie and wants to be a bourgeoisie. Marx never got a hold of him for a moment. It was the revolting sons of the bourgeoisie itself, like myself, that painted the flag red. The middle and upper classes are the revolutionary element in society. The proletariat is the conservative element. — George Bernard Shaw

Literature, the ultimate gift for expressing the most subtle aspects of man's thought and feeling, may not survive persecution: first by religion, then by the bourgeoisie, then by Marxism, and now by commercialism. The — Anais Nin

In reading, one should notice and fondle details. There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected. If one begins with a readymade generalization, one begins at the wrong end and travels away from the book before one has started to understand it. Nothing is more boring or more unfair to the author than starting to read, say, Madame Bovary, with the preconceived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoisie. We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know. When this new world has been closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge. — Vladimir Nabokov

The very identity of racist Southerners depends upon contrasting themselves with those dirty black "nigras." But, conversely, the out-groups feel that they are really and truly "in," and nourish their collective ego with relishingly indignant conversation about squares, Ofays, Wasps, Philistines, and the blasted bourgeoisie. Even Saint Thomas Aquinas let it out that part of the blessedness of the saints in Heaven was that they could look over the battlements and enjoy the "proper justice" of the sinners squirming in Hell. All winners need losers; all saints need sinners; all sages need fools - that is, so long as the major kick in life is to "amount to something" or to "be someone" as a particular and separate godlet. — Alan W. Watts

But never underestimate the American bourgeoisie's capacity to embrace fascism under the name of populism. — Stephen King

The bourgeoisie is many times stronger than we. To give it the weapon of freedom of the press is to ease the enemy's cause, to help the class enemy. We do not desire to end in suicide, so we will not do this. — Vladimir Lenin

Nor is there any valid reason to reject the idea of God or the notion of the sacred just because of the sickly expression Christianity has given to them, any more than it is necessary to break with aristocratic principles on the pretext that they have been caricatured by the bourgeoisie. — Alain De Benoist

It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times
the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie
seem attractive by comparison. — Christopher Lasch

The objection to propaganda is not only its appeal to unreason, but still more the unfair advantage which it gives to the rich and powerful. — Bertrand Russell

LSD burst over the dreary domain of the constipated bourgeoisie like the angelic herald of a new psychedelic millennium. We have never been the same since, nor will we ever be, for LSD demonstrated, even to skeptics, that the mansions of heaven and gardens of paradise lie within each and all of us. — Terence McKenna

Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen. — Ayn Rand

This is why a tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome.
No, van Gogh was not mad, but his paintings were bursts of Greek fire, atomic bombs, whose angle of vision would have been capable of seriously upsetting the spectral conformity of the
bourgeoisie.
In comparison with the lucidity of van Gogh, psychiatry is no better than a den of apes who are themselves obsessed and persecuted and who possess nothing to mitigate the most appalling states of anguish and human suffocation but a ridiculous terminology. To a man, this whole gang of pected scoundrels and patented quacks are all erotomaniacs. — Antonin Artaud

If the world is divided between Fascism and Communism, obviously Fascism must lose since it is the last, desperate refuge of the bourgeoisie — Czeslaw Milosz

I am invariably and have been since adolescence inimical to the Republican mind which shows at the most inflated size the bad qualities of the bourgeoisie rather than the good qualities of the middle class which the Democrats call forth. — Janet Flanner

The political form of a society wherein the proletariat is victorious in overthrowing the bourgeoisie will be a democratic republic. — Vladimir Lenin

Nor have I any idea why Said should consider Orwell's life a 'comfortable' one. Having taken a bullet through the throat, and while suffering from a demoralising and ultimately lethal case of TB, he lived on an astonishingly low budget and tried whenever possible to grow his own food and even to make his own furniture. Indeed, if there was anything affected about him, it might be his indifference to bourgeois life, his almost ostentatious austerity. — Christopher Hitchens

It would be hard to imagine two more improbable founders for a movement as ascetic as communism. While earnestly desiring the downfall of capitalism, Engels made himself rich and comfortable from all its benefits. He kept a stable of fine horses, rode to hounds at weekends, enjoyed the best wines, maintained a mistress, hobnobbed with the elite of Manchester at the fashionable Albert Club - in short, did everything one would expect of a successful member of the gentry. Marx, meanwhile, constantly denounced the bourgeoisie but lived as bourgeois a life as he could manage, sending his daughters to private schools and boasting at every opportunity of his wife's aristocratic background. — Bill Bryson

How, then, did it happen that this same France forty years later came to be crushed on the battlefield by a nation it outnumbered fivefold? Why should its noblemen be split up into factions, its bourgeoisie in revolt, its people overwhelmed by excessive taxation, its provinces lawless and plagued by roving gangs engaged in pillaging and crime, all authority flouted, the currency weakened, trade at a standstill, and poverty and violence rife everywhere? Why this collapse? What caused this reversal of fortune? It was mediocrity. The mediocrity of just a few kings, their vanity and self-importance, their frivolousness in the conduct of their affairs, their inability to attract talented advisors, their nonchalance, their presumptuousness, their failure to draw up grand designs or even to follow those already conceived. — Maurice Druon

Once, in a spasm of sappiness, you asked Q-Jo if she thought your dreams would ever come true. 'You aren't talking about dreams,' she corrected you, 'you're referring to your pathetic bourgeoisie ambitions. Dreams don't come true. Dreams are true. — Tom Robbins

(Prayer is) a fictitious consolation invented by those who have everything in order to keep those who have nothing contented. I belong to the bourgeoisie and I know the only reason my class bothers to show the lower classes that distant paradise full of ineffable pleasures that will one day be theirs is to divert attention from their own bulging coffers and from the abundance of their harvests. — Eca De Queiros

Dictatorship is rule based directly upon force and unrestricted by any laws. The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won and maintained by the use of violence by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws. — Vladimir Lenin

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. — Leon Trotsky

Whatever prestige the bourgeoisie may today be willing to grant to fragmentary or deliberately retrograde artistic tentatives, creation can now be nothing less than a synthesis aiming at the construction of entire atmospheres and styles of life ... A unitary urbanism - the synthesis we call for, incorporating arts and technologies - must be created in accordance with new values of life, values which we now need to distinguish and disseminate ... — Gil J Wolman

If one defends the bourgeois, philistine virtues, one does not defend them merely from the demonism or bohemianism of the artist but from the present bourgeoisie itself. — Lionel Trilling

Something that's seldom appreciated about me is that I am in sympathy with a great deal of what Marx wrote, except that I'm on the side of the bourgeoisie. — Niall Ferguson

The Communist Manifesto was correct but we see the privileges of the capitalist bourgeoisie yielding to democratic organizations. In my judgment success lies in a steady [peaceful] advance [rather] than in a catastrophic crash. — Eduard Bernstein

I say that the middle class around the world ... is the highest form of evolution. The bourgeoisie! - the human beast doesn't get any better! The worldwide bourgeoisie makes what passes today for aristocrats - people consumed by juvenility who hang loose upon society - look like shiftless children. — Tom Wolfe

The collective sign of relief heaved on V-J Day ought to have inspired Hollywood to release a flood of "happily ever after" films. But some victors didn't feel too good about their spoils. They'd seen too much by then. Too much warfare, too much poverty, too much greed, all in the service of rapacious progress. A bundle of unfinished business lingered from the Depression - nagging questions about ingrained venality, mean human nature, and the way unchecked urban growth threw society dangerously out of whack. Writers and directors responded by delivering gritty, bitter dramas that slapped our romantic illusions in the face and put the boot to the throat of the smug bourgeoisie. Still, plenty of us took it - and liked it. — Eddie Muller

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

The intellectual forces of the workers and peasants are growing and getting stronger in their fight to overthrow the bourgeoisie and their accomplices, the educated classes, the lackeys of capital, who consider themselves the brains of the nation. In fact they are not its brains but its shit. — Vladimir Lenin

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers. — Karl Marx

The prevailing conception is that education must be such as will enable one to acquire enough wealth to live on the plane of the bourgeoisie. That kind of education does not develop the aristocratic virtues. It neither encourages reflection nor inspires reverence for the good. — Richard M. Weaver

camp: "If they should at any time attempt, even in a small way, to move from their criticism to a new act of perjury, they can be sure that what confronts them today is not the cowardly and corrupt bourgeoisie of 1918 but the fist of the entire people. It is the fist of the nation that is clenched and will smash down anyone who dares to undertake even the slightest attempt at sabotage." Goebbels acted immediately — Erik Larson

The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar. — Chris Hedges

The bourgeoisie ... by its imperialist methods of appropriation is destroying the economic structure of the world and human culture generally. Nevertheless, the historical persistence of the bourgeoisie is colossal. It holds power, and does not wish to abandon it ... The red terror is a weapon utilised against a class, doomed to destruction which does not wish to perish. — Leon Trotsky

One of the basic conditions for the victory of socialism is the arming of the workers Communist and the disarming of the bourgeoisie the middle class. — Vladimir Lenin

Hitler did not have Mussolinis revolutionary socialist background ... Nevertheless, he shared the socialist hatred and contempt for the bourgeoisie and capitalism and exploited for his purposes the powerful socialist traditions of Germany. The adjectives socialist and worker in the official name of Hitlers party (The Nationalist- Socialist German Workers Party) had not merely propagandistic value ... On one occasion, in the midst of World War II, Hitler even declared that basically National Socialism and Marxism are the same. — Richard Pipes

My fear was not the fear of God but, as in the case of the whole Turkish secular bourgeoisie, fear of the anger of those who believe in God too zealously( ... ) I experienced the guilt complex as something personal, originated less from the fear of distancing myself from God than from distancing myself from the sense of community shared by the entire city . — Orhan Pamuk

The bourgeoisie is so tediously self-righteous. — Loretta Chase

It's an old ploy of the bourgeoisie. They keep a standing 'art' to defend their collapsing culture. — George Grosz

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. — Karl Marx

The West is a civilization that has survived all the prophecies of its collapse with a singular stratagem. Just as the bourgeoisie had to deny itself as a class in order to permit the bourgeoisification of society as a whole, from the worker to the baron; just as capital had to sacrifice itself as a wage relation in order to impose itself as a social relation - becoming cultural capital and health capital in addition to finance capital; just as Christianity had to sacrifice itself as a religion in order to survive as an affective structure - as a vague injunction to humility, compassion, and weakness; so the West has sacrificed itself as a particular civilization in order to impose itself as a universal culture. The operation can be summarized like this: an entity in its death throes sacrifices itself as a content in order to survive as a form. — The Invisible Committee

What we are headed for is a sort of social structure in which the highbrows are the elite, the middlebrows are the bourgeoisie and the lowbrows are hoi polloi. — Russell Lynes

The Gulag Archipelago, 'he informed an incredulous world that the blood-maddened Jewish terrorists had murdered sixty-six million victims in Russia from 1918 to 1957! Solzhenitsyn cited Cheka Order No. 10, issued on January 8, 1921: 'To intensify the repression of the bourgeoisie.' — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie. — John Maynard Keynes

Intensity of life is only possible at the expense of self. But there is nothing members of the bourgeoisie value more highly than self, albeit only at a rudimentary stage of development. Thus, at the expense of intensity, they manage to preserve their selves and make them secure. Instead of possession by God, an easy conscience is the reward they reap; instead of desire, contentment; instead of liberty, cosiness; instead of life-threatening heat, an agreeable temperature. — Hermann Hesse

Norman Rockwell, the Brueghel of the 20th century bourgeoisie, the Holbein of Jell-O ads and magazine covers; by common assent, the most American artist of all. — Jerry Adler

National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world-market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.
The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading civilized countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.
In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end. — Karl Marx

The bourgeoisie incites the workers of one nation against those of another in the endeavor to keep them disunited. — Vladimir Lenin

You must meet old Rowbotham, Bertie. A delightful chap. Wants to massacre the bourgeoisie, sack Park Lane and disembowel the hereditary aristocracy. Well, nothing could be fairer than that, what? — P.G. Wodehouse

A system of licensing and registration is the perfect device to deny gun ownership to the bourgeoisie. — Vladimir Lenin

Black America "isn't just as fissured as white America; it is more so," wrote Gates. And the mounting intraracial disparities mean that the realities of race no longer affect all blacks in the same way. There have been perverse consequences: in part to assuage our sense of survivor's guilt, we often cloak these differences in a romantic black nationalism - something that has become the veritable socialism of the black bourgeoisie.32 — Jason L. Riley

It is not for nothing that Skaldin in one part of his book quotes Adam Smith: we have seen that both his views and the character of his arguments in many respects repeat the theses of that
great ideologist of the progressive bourgeoisie. — Vladimir Lenin

... he noticed that the free thinkers, the doctrinaires of the bourgeoisie, people who claimed every liberty that they might stifle the opinions of others, were greedy and shameless puritans whom, in education, he esteemed inferior to the corner shoemaker. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

The International Committee to support People's War in India salutes all the initiatives held in different countries of the world for the International Days of action on 29-30-31 January 2015. We are carefully collecting all these small and wide actions. They are a sign of solidarity of proletarians and peoples with the fighting masses in India, marching to the liberation from imperialism, feudalism and comprador bourgeoisie, along the epic rebellion began in Naxalbari on 1967, which impetuously comes up to the present day. — Anonymous

A main part of the struggle of art has been to make an art that is direct, simple, humane, unconnected with powers that be in their essence ... To the degree that it is connected with the bourgeoisie via the marketplace and so on is not necessarily an artist's problem. — Robert Motherwell

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeosis epoch from all earlier ones. — Karl Marx

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image. — Karl Marx

As part of the logic of human sociality, the internal cohesion of a group is in direct proportion to the degree of threat it perceives from the outside. It follows that anyone who wants to unite a nation, especially one that has been deeply fractured, must demonise an adversary or, if necessary, invent an enemy. For the Turks it was the Armenians. For the Serbs it was the Muslims. For Stalin it was the bourgeoisie or the counter-revolutionaries. For Pol Pot it was the capitalists and intellectuals. For Hitler it was Christian Europe's eternal Other, the Jews. — Jonathan Sacks

When Verlaine and Rimbaud were young," [Snyder] said, they were protesting the iron-grip bourgeois rationality had on all aspects of nineteenth-century French culture - the manners, the view of reality, and the exclusion of 'the wild' from public life. Rationality in business and society were dominant values. 'Deranging the senses' was one strategy artists like Verlaine and Rimbaud employed to break free of that.

"Today," he continued, "the bourgeoisie is sociopathic, overindulged, distracted, spoiled beyond measure, and unable to restrain its gluttony, even in the face of pending planetary destruction. In the face of such a threat, it has, by necessity, become the responsibility of the artist to model health and sanity. — Peter Coyote

Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance in that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association of medieval commune: here independent urban republic (as — Karl Marx

That Marxism is not a science is entirely clear to intelligent people in the Soviet Union. One would even feel awkward to refer to it as a science. Leaving aside the exact sciences, such as physics, mathematics, and the natural sciences, even the social sciences can predict an event - when, in what way and how an event might occur. Communism has never made any such forecasts. It has never said where, when, and precisely what is going to happen. Nothing but declamations. Rhetoric to the effect that the world proletariat will overthrow the world bourgeoisie and the most happy and radiant society will then arise. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The party that leans upon the workers but serves the bourgeoisie, in the period of the greatest sharpening of the class struggle, cannot but sense the smells wafted from the waiting grave. — Leon Trotsky

The affirmation of a sexuality that has never been more rigorously subjugated than during the age of the hypocritical, bustling, and responsible bourgeoisie is coupled with the grandiloquence of a discourse purporting to reveal the truth about sex, modify its economy within reality, subvert the law that governs it, and change its future. The statement of oppression and the form of the sermon refer back to one another; they are mutually reinforcing — Michel Foucault

It is a very good thing, and a significant one too, to exterminate the bourgeoisie and capitalism in China. — Mao Zedong

The bourgeois during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. — Karl Marx

Hundreds of thousands and millions of wage slaves of capital and peasants downtrodden by the serf-owners are going to the slaughter for the dynastic interests of a handful of crowned brigands, for the profits of the bourgeoisie in its drive to plunder foreign lands. — Vladimir Lenin

The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. — Buenaventura Durruti

Exchange, fair or unfair,always presupposes and includes the rule of the bourgeoisie. — Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Let me go out on a limb and suggest that those who see hints of a new class ideology developing around information technology are not necessarily wild-eyed. "Bit-twiddlers" are neither exactly proletariat nor bourgeoisie. They may not own the means of production in the sense that Marx argued, but they certainly do have significantly control over those means, in a more profound way than the term "symbols analysts" or "knowledge workers" captures. As a rough generalization, they value science and technological problem-solving elegance equally at least with profit. — Steven Weber

Our enemies are all those in league with imperialism - the warlords, the bureaucrats, the comprador class, the big Landlord class and the reactionary section of the intelligentsia attached to them. The leading force in our revolution is the industrial proletariat. Our closest friends are the entire semi-proletariat and petty bourgeoisie. As for the vacillating middle bourgeoisie, their right wing may become our enemy and their left wing may become our friend - but we must be constantly on our guard and not let them create confusion within our ranks. — Mao Zedong

Nothing perhaps illustrates the general disintegration of political life better than this vague, pervasive hatred of everybody and everything, without a focus for its passionate attention, with nobody to make responsible for the state of affairs - neither the government nor the bourgeoisie nor an outside power. It consequently turned in all directions, haphazardly and unpredictably, incapable of assuming an air of healthy indifference toward anything under the sun. — Hannah Arendt

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries abandoned the idea of spiritual or intellectual happiness in order to have this material happiness, consisting of a certain number of essential consumer goods. And hence, in the nineteenth century, happiness was linked to a well-being obtained by mechanical means, industrial means, production. The new thing that Saint-Just spoke about was that, in the past, happiness could appear as a very vague, very distant prospect for humanity, whereas now, people seemed to be within reach of the concrete, material possibility of attaining it. That was why happiness was to become an absolutely essential image for the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, and for modern society. Happiness was attainable thanks to industrial development, and this image of happiness brought us fully into the consumer society. — Jacques Ellul

[Historian] Kevin Starr has written that "the San Diego free speech battles revealed the depths of reaction possible in the threatened middle- and lower-middle classes of California." He argues that vigilantes were recruited from an anxious petty bourgeoisie, "who were uncertain and insecure in what they had gained or thought they had gained by coming to California." As in late Weimar Germany, "the oligarchy, which is to say, the upper-middle and upper classes, loathed and feared the [Industrial Workers of the World]; but oligarchs did not take to the streets as vigilantes. They did, however, encourage the lower-middle classes to do such work. — Justin Akers Chacon

The Communist Manifesto condemned the bourgeoisie not only for pauperizing, dehumanizing, and enslaving the toiling masses, but also for robbing the intellectual of his elevated status. "The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe." Though the movement was initiated by intellectuals and powered by their talents and hungers, it yet held up the proletariat as the chosen people - the only carrier of the revolutionary idea, and the chief beneficiary of the revolution to come. The intellectuals, particularly those who had "raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole," were to act as guides - as a composite Moses - during the long wanderings in the desert. Like Moses, the intellectuals would have no more to do once the promised land was in sight. "The role of the intelligentsia," said Lenin, "is to make special leaders from among the intelligentsia unnecessary. — Eric Hoffer

[W]e will do what we like with the bourgeoisie ... We give the orders; they do what they are told. Any resistance will be broken ruthlessly. — Adolf Hitler