Ruling Class Quotes

“The very concept of "revolutionary violence" is somewhat falsely cast, since most of the violence comes from those who attempt to prevent reform, not from those struggling for reform. By focusing on the violent rebellions of the downtrodden, we overlook the much greater repressive force and violence utilized by the ruling oligarchs to maintain the status quo, including armed attacks against peaceful demonstrations, mass arrests, torture, destruction of opposition organizations, suppression of dissident publications, death squad assassinations, the extermination of whole villages, and the like.”
― Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

“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.”
― James Connolly

“Among those who have everything, I have never seen a family go to the seashore just to celebrate a political decision, because for them politics changes almost nothing. This is something I realized when I went to live in Paris, far away from you: the ruling class may complain about a left-wing government, they may complain about a right-wing government, but no government ever ruins their digestion, no government ever breaks their backs, no government ever inspires a trip to the beach. Politics never changes their lives, at least not much. What’s strange, too, is that they’re the ones who engage in politics, though it has almost no effect on their lives. For the ruling class, in general, politics is a question of aesthetics: a way of seeing themselves, of seeing the world, of constructing a personality. For us it was life or death.”
― Édouard Louis, Qui a tué mon père

“Those in power must spend a lot of their time laughing at us.”
― Alice Walker

“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, Why I Write

“History teaches us that all ruling elites try to portray themselves as the natural and durable social order, even ones that are in serious crisis, that threaten to devour their environmental base in order to continually recreate their hierarchical structure of power and privilege. And all ruling elites are scornful and intolerant of alternative viewpoints.”
― Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

“Κάθε μικροαστός ονειρεύεται τον αστό που ζεσταίνει μέσα του, που τον μεγαλώνει στο θερμοκήπιο της μεγάλης ελπίδας για ένα πέρασμα στην «ανώτερη τάξη». Κάθε ψιλικατζής ονειρεύεται ένα σούπερ μάρκετ. Και επειδή το όνειρο για μερικούς πραγματοποιείται, όλοι οι χάχες πιστεύουν πως θα βγει αληθινό και γι’ αυτούς. Δεν έχει σημασία που οι περισσότεροι πεθαίνουν φτωχοί. Σημασία έχει που ο καπιταλισμός τους επιτρέπει να ονειρεύονται το δικό τους πλούτο. Και ο φασισμός, που είναι η ακραία μορφή καπιταλισμού, είναι μια εγγύηση για τη διατήρηση του ονείρου”
― Βασίλης Ραφαηλίδης, Ιστορία (κωμικοτραγική) του νεοελληνικού κράτους, 1830-1974

“Ruling classes have always sought to instill in their subordinates the capacity to experience exploitation and material deprivation as guilt, while deceiving themselves that their own material interests coincide with those of mankind as a whole.”
― Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations

“your back had been mangled by the factory, mangled by the life you were forced to live, by the life that wasn’t yours, that wasn’t yours because you never got to live a life of your own, because you lived on the outskirts of your life — because of all that you stayed at home, and usually they were the ones who came over.”
― Édouard Louis, Qui a tué mon père

“When the mainstream media and the ruling class decide to pick on a critical issue, it is usually for two reasons: first, the issue is serious enough and is affecting their interests, and therefore the narrative must be controlled to ensure that the results are in their favor. Second, in doing the former, the ruling class gets to strictly filter and manage the narrative on what needs to be said about any given topic; which ‘experts’ are given the stage to speak; and whose voices are excluded from debates, or even defamed and slandered, if necessary.”
― Louis Yako

“September 2017 Emmanuel Macron condemns the “laziness” of those in France who, according to him, are blocking his reforms. You’ve always known that this word is reserved for people like you, people who can’t work because they live too far from large towns, who can’t find work because they were driven out of the educational system too soon, without a diploma, who can’t work anymore because life in the factory has mangled their back. We don’t use the word lazy to describe a boss who sits in an office all day ordering other people around. We’d never say that. When I was little, you were always saying, obsessively, I’m not lazy, because you knew this insult hung over you, like a specter you wished to exorcize.”
― Édouard Louis, Qui a tué mon père

“The notion that egalitarian purposes could be served by the "restoration" of upward mobility betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding. High rates of mobility are by no means inconsistent with a system of stratification that concentrates power and privilege in a ruling elite. Indeed, the circulation of elites strengthens the principle of hierarchy, furnishing elites with fresh talent and legitimating their ascendancy as
a function of merit rather than birth.”
― Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy

“Here we must ask a critical question: what does it mean when American media outlets deliberately censor and silence anything related to Palestine, the voices of war atrocities in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Syria, while at the same time glorifying the Ukraine war or presumably covering Black Lives Matter or police brutality against black people? Can we believe that such media has good intentions? Can we believe that they really care about Black people, or are they more interested in deepening the divide in the society? I personally find this suspicious and ill intentioned. I believe the purpose here is not to support any Black causes or push for meaningful changes, but rather, exploiting the already existing and strong structural racism and white supremacy weaved into the fabric of the entire society to make people even more alienated from each other. Mistaken are those who think that “divide and conquer” is only practiced in remote places and in so-called “third world” countries. There are many ways to divide and conquer, but we need to have the right critical tools to detect and fight against them, as is the case here.

[From “The Trump Age: Critical Questions” published on CounterPunch on June 23, 2023]”
― Louis Yako

“Macron, Hollande, Valls, El Khomri, Hirsch, Sarkozy, Bertrand, Chirac. The history of your suffering bears these names. Your life story is the history of one person after another beating you down. The history of your body is the history of these names, one after another, destroying you. The history of your body stands as an accusation against political history”
― Édouard Louis, Qui a tué mon père

“There is an attitude that has developed since about the 1890s that attempts to cast all politics and sociology out of poetry. I don't understand how anyone can seriously maintain this attitude. Actually, the attitude itself is political. Art which embodies the ideals of the ruling class in society isn't conceived as being political, and is simply judged by how well it is done. Art which contains ideas which threaten the position of that ruling class is silenced by critics: it is political, they say, and not art.”
― Marge Piercy, Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt

“Ce sont toujours les dominants qui fixent le niveau de la violence dans l'histoire.”
― Frédéric Lordon, Vivre sans ?

“Page 118
As social organization progresses and the governing class begins to reap the benefits of an improved bureaucratic machine, its superiority in culture and wealth, and especially its better organization and firmer cohesion, may compensate to some extent for the lack of individual energy; and so it may come about that considerable portions of the governing class, especially the circles that give the society its intellectual tone and direction, lose the habit of dealing with people of the lower classes and command them directly. This state of affairs generally enables frivolousness, and a sort of culture that is wholly abstract and conventional, to supplant a vivid sense of realities and a sound and accurate knowledge of human nature. Thinking loses virility. Sentimental and exaggeratedly humanitarian theories come to the fore, theories that proclaim the innate goodness of men, especially when they are not spoiled by civilization, or theories that uphold the absolute preferableness, in the arts of government, of gentle and persuasive means to severe authoritarian measures. People imagine, as Taine puts it, that since social life has flowed blandly and smoothly on for centuries, like an impetuous river confined withing sturdy dikes, the dikes have become superfluous and can readily be dispensed with, now that the river has learned its lesson.

… It would seem therefore that there is a frequent, if not a universal, tendency in very mature civilizations, where ruling classes have acquired highly refined literary cultures, to wax enthusiastic, by a sort of antithesis, over the simple ways of savages, barbarians and peasants (the case of Arcadia!), and to clothe them with all sorts of virtues and sentiments that are as stereotyped as they are imaginary. Invariably underlying all such tendencies is the concept that was so aptly phrased by Rousseau, that man is good by nature but spoiled by society and civilization. This notion has had a very great influence on political thinking during the past hundred and fifty years.

… certain it is that when the ruling class has degenerated in the manner described, it loses its ability to provide against its own dangers and against those of the society that has the misfortune to be guided by it. So the state crashes at the first appreciable shock from the outside foe. Those who govern are unable to deal with the least flurry; and the changes that a strong and intelligent ruling class would have carried out at a negligible cost in wealth, blood and human dignity take on the proportions of a social cataclysm.”
― Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class

“Don’t kid yourself, Professor. The powerful don’t think things over. They just react. It’s all they know.”
― Vincent H. O'Neil, A Pause in the Perpetual Rotation

“There are only a few people who are able to change the map of the world”
― Atef Ashab Uddin Sahil

“How does Plato solve the problem of avoiding class war? Had he been a progressivist, he might have hit on the idea of a classless, equalitarian society; for, as we can see for instance from his own parody of Athenian democracy, there were strong equalitarian tendencies at work in Athens. But he was not out to construct a state that might come, but a state that had been—the father of the Spartan state, which was certainly not a classless society. It was a slave state, and accordingly Plato’s best state is based on the most rigid class distinctions. It is a caste state. The problem of avoiding class war is solved, not by abolishing classes, but by giving the ruling class a superiority which cannot be challenged. As in Sparta, the ruling class alone is permitted to carry arms, it alone has any political or other rights, and it alone receives education, i.e. a specialized training in the art of keeping down its human sheep or its human cattle.”
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies - Volume One: The Spell of Plato

“The communism of the ruling caste of his best city can thus be derived from Plato’s fundamental sociological law of change; it is a necessary condition of the political stability which is its fundamental characteristic. But although an important condition, it is not a sufficient one. In order that the ruling class may feel really united, that it should feel like one tribe, i.e. like one big family, pressure from without the class is as necessary as are the ties between the members of the class. This pressure can be secured by emphasizing and widening the gulf between the rulers and the ruled. The stronger the feeling that the ruled are a different and an altogether inferior race, the stronger will be the sense of unity among the rulers. We arrive in this way at the fundamental principle, announced only after some hesitation, that there must be no mingling between the classes.”
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies - Volume One: The Spell of Plato

“The very idea of truth has been reduced to the purpose of a useful tool in the control of nature, and the realization of the infinite potentialities inherent in man has been relegated to the status of a luxury. Thought that does not serve the interests of any established group or is not pertinent to the business of any industry has no place, is considered vain or superfluous.”
― Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason

“[The Democracy of the Naïve ]
There are still the naïve folks who talk about democracy
They even claim that the future of democracy in this country or that is in danger…
As if democracy had a past or a present,
And therefore, its future is now in danger…
There was never democracy or justice, my friends…
There world has and will remain ruled
By the whims of the elite and the invisible hands
That get the naïve publics to consider
The problems, desires, whims, and agendas of the chosen few
As noble human endeavors
That require the struggle and revolution
Of the naïve and kindhearted people…
There is no democracy nor revolutions, my Friends,
Except those that must happen silently to remove all elites
That plan in secret to push the naïve publics
To appoint or remove this government or that
Based on their interests…
What do you think, my Friends?
Do you still believe that the future of democracy is in danger?

[Original poem published in Arabic on December 21, 2022 at ahewar.org]”
― Louis Yako

“Neoliberalism has, to a great extent, succeeded in replacing in-depth, critical, and independent social science with research funded by corporations to serve corporate interests. We are seeing a sharp decline of independent writers and researchers and a sharp rise of UX (user experience) jobs that are often narrow in scope, and solely focused on understanding users not to create a more informed and critical society, but simply to increase numbers, get users to consume more, and to increase profits for the few at the top.”
― Louis Yako

“I argue that the U.S. ruling class has been exploiting and co-opting the already existing structural racism and white supremacy as a divide and conquer tool through Trump to keep people divided and weakened. I contend that the establishment is not divided over Trump as anyone would be misled to think if they compare, for example, the way CNN vs Fox news cover any stories about Trump or his supporters. Rather, we should consider that the U.S. ruling class is using the mainstream media to keep people bitterly divided and distracted from asking more pressing questions about the unlimited wealth, power, and corruption of the ruling class.

[From “The Trump Age: Critical Questions” published on CounterPunch on June 23, 2023]”
― Louis Yako

“We must be suspicious of the fact that we are still hearing about Trump and his trial, while more important cases, like that of Assange, are shrouded with secrecy and no time was wasted to throw him in jail. The reason for that is that Assange did in fact expose the lies, manipulation, and corruption of the U.S. and world elites, whereas Trump has been doing nothing but serving their interests. Same can be applied to Snowden who is still in exile. The key point here is that it’s time for Trump supporters themselves to begin questioning how they, too, are being co-opted and exploited to keep the nation divided and to crush any possibility of wider resistance in which people see each other as allies fighting for similar causes not divided enemies fighting each other like sardines trapped in a can, while the unlimited wealth and power of the few at the top remain unchecked.

[From “The Trump Age: Critical Questions” published on CounterPunch on June 23, 2023]”
― Louis Yako

“[T]he American ruling class has been deliberately capitalizing on and exploiting the history and wounds of racism and white supremacy for the sake of producing more divide, keeping potential and existing Trump supporters feeling ever more agitated and disenfranchised. The age-old racism and white supremacy are being exploited here without any intention to fix, let alone end, either. This is done to ensure that people in the U.S. remain distracted from the real conversation, which should be about the frighteningly small ruling class that often pretends to be anti-Trump but has been using every social and psychological tool to ensure that what Trump embodies and represents continue to serve their interests.

[From “The Trump Age: Critical Questions” published on CounterPunch on June 23, 2023]”
― Louis Yako

“The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the 60s).”
― David Graeber

“A Mall and Bullet Holes"
While walking in the city of Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina,
a country devastated and drained
by the wars of the global elite,
exactly like mine,
I arrived at an intersection and noticed a huge mall on the right side…
On the left side, there was
an old residential building filled with bullet holes
that looked like eyewitnesses
to all the free death that took place here
in a war that has since ended,
yet its real causes and the criminals behind it
are still lurking in every corner,
like infected pus ready to burst
at any moment of awareness…
I wondered bitterly:
When will the world understand
that violence never erupts inadvertently,
that all violence in our times is premeditated and agreed upon
by a small elite that decides in advance
that any nation that rejects malls, consumption, and superficiality,
must be disciplined with free death for those who resist!
It is also agreed upon – and it all costs – that
the minds and souls of all survivors
must permanently be pierced with bullet holes!
In the same intersection, I observed a redhaired elderly woman
with sorrowful eyes deep as bullet holes…
I then saw a group of youth wearing modern clothes,
like those we see in malls…
The elderly woman looked at them as if
wishing to tell them about all that happened here,
but they didn’t notice her existence
for their eyes were fixated on their phones…
I painfully wondered then:
Has anyone told them about what happened here?
Can they distinguish the sounds of bombs from those of fireworks?
Has this elderly woman, who looked broken and brokenhearted,
told them about the real price she’d paid
with all the holes left in her heart and her history
for the sake of these malls and cheap consumer goods?


[Original poem published in Arabic on July 4, 2024 at ahewar.org]”
― Louis Yako

“When will the world understand
that violence never erupts inadvertently,
that all violence in our times is premeditated and agreed upon
by a small elite that decides in advance
that any nation that rejects malls, consumption, and superficiality,
must be disciplined with free death for those who resist!
It is also agreed upon – and it all costs – that
the minds and souls of all survivors
must permanently be pierced with bullet holes!
[From a poem titled "A Mall and Bullets Holes". Original poem published in Arabic on July 4, 2024 at ahewar.org]”
― Louis Yako