Class Conflict Quotes & Sayings

In order to bring about a convulsive political change, it was essential to intensify the existing social tensions to the point where all would be driven to choose sides in what would thus be established as a simplistic equation of class conflict. Marxists and their ideological inheritors described this as sharpening the contradictions of society. — Richard K. Morgan

Even the alleged benefits of war, so far as more than alleged, spring from the fact that conflict of peoples at least enforces intercourse between them and thus accidentally enables them to learn from one another, and thereby to expand their horizons. Travel, economic and commercial tendencies, have at present gone far to break down external barriers; to bring peoples and classes into closer and more perceptible connection with one another. — John Dewey

What better way for a ruling class to claim and hold power than to pose as the defenders of the nation. — Christopher Hitchens

It is possible that the question of a conflict between races may come up in the future, as did that between freedom and slavery before. The condition of the colored man within our borders may become a source of anxiety, to say the least. But he was brought to our shores by compulsion, and he now should be considered as having as good a right to remain here as any other class of our citizens. — Ulysses S. Grant

The psychologist George Frankl atributes class structure and conflict and most of the ills of society to the sexual class war based on the Oedipul pattern; that is, murderous phallic conflict between males for the favour of the women, those favours being defined by the men themselves. This system is, as it were, only haunted by women, who cannot in it acheive expression or contribute to society anything of their true nature, and are regarded as a kind of castrated man. — Peter Redgrove

Semantics ... is a sober and modest discipline which has no pretensions of being a universal patent-medicine for all the ills and diseases of mankind, whether imaginary or real. You will not find in semantics any remedy for decayed teeth or illusions of grandeur or class conflict. Nor is semantics a device for establishing that everyone except the speaker and his friends is speaking nonsense — Alfred Tarski

In fact it seems that there may be not one but two basic dichotomies : on the one hand similitude and difference, on the other hands solidarity and opposition. The "indifference" is ultimately a form of opposition.

At the pre-oedipien state, when there is acquired the distinction of the self and the other, similitude is a sign of belonging to a single class, an extension of the self, and difference is a sign of exteriority, of separation.
With the oedipien state the homology is reversed: difference of sex signifies complementarity and desire, whereas identity of sex entails identity of object of desire, rivalry, conflict — Gilbert Durand

After analyzing our current crisis and studying well-established
historical precedents, I must conclude that the global bankers have
only three possible cards left to play.
The first is admitting culpability and working to restore the
American economic engine to its free-market potential. History has
taught us that the ruling class rarely admits error and never concedes
power.
The second is to foment so much civil unrest and fear that the
general population will be clamoring for a global dictator who will
provide them food, shelter, and security in exchange for their individual
freedom and sovereignty. I see the emerging militancy of the
labor union movement playing right into this scenario.
The final play is global conflict where they can try and control
the outcome by means of funding both sides. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

You will not find in semantics any remedy for decayed teeth or illusions of grandeur or class conflict. — Alfred Tarski

I like to search for class struggle in strange domains. For example it is clear that in classical Hollywood, the couple of vampires and zombies designates class struggle. Vampires are rich, they live among us. Zombies are the poor, living dead, ugly, stupid, attacking from outside. And it's the same with cats and dogs. Cats are lazy, evil, exploitative, dogs are faithful, they work hard, so if I were to be in government, I would tax having a cat, tax it really heavy. — Slavoj Zizek

A class cannot exist in society without in some degree manifesting a consciousness of itself as a group with common problems, interests and prospects - although this manifestation may for long periods be weak, confused, and subject to manipulation by other classes. — Harry Braverman

From a young age, I was rubbing elbows with a very different kind of person and social class, and I felt a lot of tension and conflict in my identity because of that. — David Lindsay-Abaire

The complacency of the individual who admires his own excellence is bad enough, but it is more respectable than the complacency of the man who has no self-esteem because he has not even a superficial self which he can esteem. He is not a person, not an individual, only an atom. This atomized existence is sometimes praised as humility or as self-sacrifice, some-times it is called obedience, sometimes it is devotion to the dialectic of class war. It produces a kind of peace which is not peace, but only the escape from an immediately urgent sense of conflict. It is the peace not of love but of anesthesia. It is the peace not of self-realization and self-dedication, but of flight into irresponsibility. — Thomas Merton

Pareto explained how every elite is overthrown by a jealous minority which stirs the masses by denouncing the abuses of the establishment and finally replaces it. Elites, as he said, circulate. Naturally, their names and the rationalizations of their privileges change. But it is important to note also that each elite inspires a new socio-political mythology by which the new situation is interpreted for the occasion. Yet the same leitmotiv runs through all these self-glorifications: "where would the people be if it were not for our services? — Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen

Our 20th Century has proved to be more cruel than preceding centuries, and the first fifty years have not erased all its horrors; our world is rent asunder by those same old cave-age emotions of greed, envy, lack of control, mutual hostility which have picked up in passing respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, radical conflict, struggle of the masses, trade-union disputes. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Peace is not just the absence of conflict; peace is the creation of an environment where all can flourish regardless of race, color, creed, religion, gender, class, caste or any other social markers of difference. — Nelson Mandela

The political perspective of this book, ironically, is the progeny of the progressive potential of capitalism as an historical system. The joint possibility of universal material well-being and the democratization of society is a product of the capitalist era. But the history of capitalism is a chronicle of the tension between possibilities and limits: democracy and universal affluence in perpetual and ubiquitous conflict with class domination - itself a product of the social organization of capitalist production. — Samuel Bowles

A permanent division of labor inevitably creates occupational and class inequality and conflict. — Robert Shea

Call it Camelot's revenge: the class of court scribes who made it their profession to uphold a make-believe version of America free of conflict and ruled by noble men helped Nixon get away with it for so long - because, after all, America was ruled by noble men. — Rick Perlstein

Libertarians have always battled the age-old scourge of war. They understood that war brought death and destruction on a grand scale, disrupted family and economic life, and put more power in the hands of the ruling class - which might explain why the rulers did not always share the popular sentiment for peace. Free men and women, of course, have often had to defend their own societies against foreign threats; but throughout history, war has usually been the common enemy of peaceful, productive people on all sides of the conflict. — David Boaz

Hence the uneasiness which they arouse in those who, for whatever reason, wish to keep us wholly imprisoned in the immediate conflict. That perhaps is why people are so ready with the charge of "escape." I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, "What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and hostile to, the idea of escape?" and gave the obvious answer: jailers. — C.S. Lewis

'Rapa Nui' is about the conflict in the 1600s on Easter Island. It's about the clash of the royal clan and the working class. — Jason Scott Lee

Talk about the flag or drugs or crime (never about race or class or justice) and follow the yellow brick road to the wonderful land of consensus. In place of honest argument among consenting adults the politicians substitute a lullaby for frightened children: the pretense that conflict doesn't really exist, that we have achieved the blessed state in which we no longer need politics. — Lewis H. Lapham

Liberty is not about class war, income war, race war, national war, a war between the sexes, or any other conflict apart from the core conflict between individuals and those who would seek power and control over the human spirit. Liberty is the dream that we can all work together, in ways of our choosing and of our own human volition, to realize a better life. — Jeffrey Tucker

Condemning class struggle does not mean condemning every possible form of social conflict. Such conflicts inevitably arise and Christians must often take a position in the "struggle for social justice." What is condemned is "total war," which has no respect for the dignity of others (and consequently of oneself). It excludes reasonable compromise, does not pursue the common good but the good of a group, and sets out to destroy whatever stands in its way. — Pope John Paul II

This society in which knowledge workers dominate is in danger of a new "class conflict" between the large minority of knowledge workers and the majority of workers who will make their livings through traditional ways, either by manual work ... or by service work. The productivity of knowledge work - still abysmally low - will predictably become the economic challenge of the knowledge society. On it will depend the ability of the knowledge society to give decent incomes, and with them dignity and status, to non knowledge people. — Peter Drucker

The culturalization of politics analytically vanquishes political economy, states, history, and international and transnational relations. It eliminates colonialism, capital, caste or class stratification, and external political domination from accounts of political conflict or instability. In their stead, "culture" is summoned to explain the motives and aspirations leading to certain conflicts — Wendy Brown

I'm an enemy of what I call 'computer theology.' There's a class conflict out there. There's a techno-elite that lives in a different world. — Walt Mossberg

The specific character of [women's] oppression cannot be explained away by equating different situations through superficial and childish simplifications[:]

It is true that both the woman and the male worker are condemned to silence by their exploitation. But under the current system, the worker's wife is also condemned to silence by her worker-husband. In other words, in addition to the class exploitation common to both of them, women must confront a particular set of relations that exist between them and men, relations of conflict and violence that use physical differences as their pretext. — Thomas Sankara

Party politics and religion now substituting for class conflict. — Howard Zinn

There would be no need for political power in the Marxist sense of the organized power of one class used to oppress another. Nor, given Marx's idea that communism would come first to the most industrially advanced societies, and would be international in character, would there be any need for the state in the sense of an organization existing to defend the nation against attacks from other nations. Relieved from oppressive conditions that bring their interests into conflict, people would voluntarily co-operate with each other. The political state resting on armed force would become obsolete; its place would be taken by 'an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all' (CM 238). — Anonymous

The old leftism had primarily a negative approach - that is, the orientation was towards negating what currently existed. Capitalism was a thing that could be fought more or less on its own terms, you could win terrain (geographical or otherwise), defend it, and take more. The strategic and tactical focus was on what would do most to lead to a defeat of capitalist forces, in whatever form they took - whether a colonial government or a greedy factory owner. This model of conflict is at its most literal in, say, a guerilla war, but it applies to all possible terrains of class struggle. Concessions by capital and established strongholds of working class power, even if reformist or imperfect, were to be leveraged as much as they could towards a further defeat of capitalism. — Anonymous

There is no conflict between best in British class and being a global newspaper. We are an international newspaper rooted in the City of London, and I think people understand that. The 'FT' stands out as a global niche product. — Lionel Barber

Beginning in the mid to late 1980s, poverty, underdevelopment, economic dependence, ethnic and class conflict, lack of political practices prioritizing equal citizenship rights, and fragile political and economic institutions all came to be structural handicaps from the legacy of European colonialism. Colonialism was not the source of all of Africa's problems, but it was a significant contributor. What — Edmond J. Keller

you can't hide from a hurricane under a beach umbrella — Philip Rahv

Feminism is lesbian in the sense that lesbians have always hated the female role and coveted the male role. It is based on Marxist notions of "equality" and class conflict that have no relevance to mystical and biological phenomenon such as love. — Henry Makow

Book I wrote this book because I believe there is still hope to prevent the catastrophic events planned by the global elite ruling class. In a desperate attempt to protect their monopoly on the global financial system, they are willing to start World War III. It is their intention to use ISIS to ignite a massive conflict in the Middle East, a conflict designed to draw Russia and China in so they can start a global war. — James Garcia

History and the task of the future no longer signify the struggle of class against class or the conflict between one church dogma and another, but the settlement between blood and blood, race and race, Folk and Folk. And that means: the struggle of spiritual values against each other. — Alfred Rosenberg

The freedom to apprehend aesthetic value may rise from class conflict, but the value is not identical with the freedom, even if it cannot be achieved without that apprehension. Aesthetic value is by definition engendered by an interaction between artists, an influencing that is always an interpretation. — Harold Bloom

In fact the system of collective contribution, levy of a tenth, and redistribution to the participants, is the schema of the sacrificial rite (one provides the victim; the god, the temple, the priests levy a tenth, then redistribution takes place: redistribution that imparts a new strength and power to those who benefit from it, deriving from the sacrifice itself).

The game - sacrifice, division, levy, redistribution - is a religious form of individual and group invigoration which has been transposed into a social practice involving the resolution of a class conflict. — Michel Foucault

What's kind of happening is the conflict over football might be a class conflict where there is a percentage of people who have no relationship to physicality and a percentage of the populace who still does. — Chuck Klosterman

Since when do we in America believe that our society is made up of two diametrically opposed classes - one rich, one poor - both in a permanent state of conflict and neither able to get ahead except at the expense of the other? Since when do we in America accept this alien and discredited theory of social and class warfare? Since when do we in America endorse the politics of envy and division? — Ronald Reagan

According to the law of nature, wherever there is an awakening of a new and stronger life, there it tries to conquer and take the place of the old and the decaying. Nature favours the dying out of the unfit and the survival of the fittest. The final result of such conflict between the priestly and the other classes has been mentioned already. — Swami Vivekananda