"Ruling class" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Africanus Maior, and their father Tib. Sempronius Gracchus (in Spain and Sardinia). 3-4. paucorum scelera ... coepere. (i) Tib. Gracchus by his Agrarian Law tried to counteract the selfish land-grabbing of the ruling class (in excess of the 500 iugera limit of the Licinian Laws, 367 B.C.). (ii) C. Gracchus exposed the corrupt Senatorian Courts, transferred their judicial power to the Equites, and carried the Sempronian Law, 'one of ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... interests of the whole State. Of such a kind is the skill of the guardians, who are a small class in number, far smaller than the blacksmiths; but in them is concentrated the wisdom of the State. And if this small ruling class have wisdom, then the whole State ...
— The Republic • Plato
... country, the farmers and land-owners were not yet convinced. In 1846, however, an event occurred which gave the reasoning of Cobden and the eloquence of Bright their due effect upon the minds of the ruling class. This event was the Irish famine of 1846, which lessened the population of Ireland by two millions in one year. This awful event prevailed, though it would not have prevailed unless the exertions of Cobden and Bright had familiarized the minds of men with the true ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... government could fairly claim that in the court of the king, or in the country houses of the gentry, men did know each other's characters, and as long as the rest of mankind was passive, the only characters one needed to know were the characters of men in the ruling class. But the democrats, who wanted to raise the dignity of all men, were immediately involved by the immense size and confusion of their ruling class—the male electorate. Their science told them that politics was an instinct, and that the instinct ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... first in a small way, and with such means as he could obtain from the merchants of Boston, he went on to great achievements. He had the most difficulty in dealing with legislative appropriations and enactments, for as he was not acquainted with the ruling class in Massachusetts, they consequently looked upon him with suspicion. He not only made the plan, but he carried it out; he organized the institution at South Boston and set ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... Person who had overcharged his paunch with dead bird by way of attesting his gratitude for escaping the many calamities which Heaven had sent upon others, fell asleep at table and dreamed. He thought he lived in a country where turkeys were the ruling class, and every year they held a feast to manifest their sense of Heaven's goodness in sparing their lives to kill them later. One day, about a week before one of these feasts, he met the Supreme Gobbler, ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce
... now defined as the true duty of an aristocracy, just because it would have seemed to them madness to abolish themselves. But the process of abolition went on, nevertheless, only now from without instead of from within. So it must always be, in such a case. If a ruling class will not try to raise the masses to their own level, the masses will try to drag them down to theirs. That sense of justice which allowed privileges, when they were as strictly official privileges as the ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... Greek and Latin to the simple A B C. The South has no system of public instruction; no common schools; no means of placing within the reach of the sons and daughters of the poor even the elements of knowledge. While the children of the wealthy are most carefully educated, it is the policy of the ruling class to keep the great mass of the people in ignorance; and so long as this policy continues, so long will that section be as far behind the North as it now is in all that constitutes the elements of prosperity and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... taxes are not levied with a view to the general good of the community, but for the benefit of the ruling class; and this is the political conception of ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... subversion of an unprincipled (the term is of the strictest accuracy) ruling class, or aristocracy, and the obliteration of their peculiar power, that we have to accomplish. This power consists wholly of certain peculiar interests as masters. To deprive them of these, is the only possible terminus of the question at issue. So plain and palpable ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Tomnoddy to take over the milk supply as well as the stamp supply—at an increased salary. Mr. Bernard Shaw has remarked that rich men are better than poor men on parish councils because they are free from "financial timidity." Now, the English ruling class is quite free from financial timidity. The Duke of Sussex will be quite ready to be Administrator of Sussex at the same screw. Sir William Harcourt, that typical aristocrat, put it quite correctly. "We" (that is, the aristocracy) ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... category have to do with "business," the latter with industry, taking the latter word in the mechanical sense. The latter class are not often recognized as institutions, in great part because they do not immediately concern the ruling class, and are, therefore, seldom the subject of legislation or of deliberate convention. When they do receive attention they are commonly approached from the pecuniary or business side; that being the side or phase of economic life that chiefly occupies ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... no doubt that municipal rights have been of immense advantage to European society, as constituted at the time of their introduction. They formed the germ of a new class, destined to be the ruling class of the world, by whom human rights were first to be understood and proclaimed, and the necessary amount of freedom granted to all and secured by just laws justly administered. Christianity is the true source of all those rights, as Christian ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... by occupation and temperament, the middle-class man had little in common with either the servile or the ruling class; little in common with the noble who despised his birth, ridiculed his manners, envied his wealth; little with the priest who found him too rigid, too intelligent, too reserved with his money and his soul to be a good son of the Church; little with the peasant ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... to reach the people with its new sphere of knowledge. Buckle has well said in his "History of Civilization," that "No great political improvement, no great reform, either legislative or executive, has ever been originated in any country by its ruling class. The first suggestors of such steps have invariably been bold and able thinkers, who discern the abuse, denounce it, and ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... people accept their ideas as authoritative and piously sacrifice humanity to a non-human purpose. An aristocracy flourishes where the people find a vicarious enjoyment in admiring the successes of the ruling class. That prevents men from developing their own interests and looking for their own successes. No doubt Napoleon was well content with the philosophy of those guardsmen who drank his health before he ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... "A little knowledge is a dang'rous thing" And doth unfit the plodding mass for toil, Which is their proper sphere; hence ev'ry thought Hard thrust within their skulls doth discontent Engender, and thus far stability Doth threathen for the ruling class, and so As in our "Sunny South" the specter grins Prophetic of grave danger to the State. Francos: The plea doth fall on sympathetic ears. Yet Caesar counseled in his parting words That discord here among our party friends Would breed distemper ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy) |
