"Proletarian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rule out the Austrians, is mostly "the peasant come to town"—a proletarian crowd, though not governed by proletarians but by a small educated class plus an obedient army. You can see by the women that it is a peasant people—not a jumper or a short skirt in the whole of Belgrade. They are quiet-eyed and modest. The Serbs are much harder than the ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... the difference between what he produces and his own cost of production, is surplus-value, and is taken and divided up by the capitalist into rent, interest, profit. This surplus-value, then, this profit, is so much robbery effected by taking advantage of the necessity of the proletarian—the naked propertyless labourer."[182] "All that the worker produces beyond what is absolutely necessary to keep himself and his offspring in life, this surplus beyond subsistence—this difference between the recompense of labour and its products—this ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... menace to the whole foundation on which the fabric of the State is built. From without, Japan is threatened with the risk of war against America or of a revival of China. From within, there will be, before long, the risk of proletarian revolution. ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... slain, And pristine majesty of golden thrones And haughty sceptres lay o'erturned in dust; And crowns, so splendid on the sovereign heads, Soon bloody under the proletarian feet, Groaned for their glories gone—for erst o'er-much Dreaded, thereafter with more greedy zest Trampled beneath the rabble heel. Thus things Down to the vilest lees of brawling mobs Succumbed, whilst each man sought unto himself Dominion and supremacy. So next Some wiser heads ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... a resolution expressing "firm confidence that the Soviet Government will succeed in getting peace and so in opening a wide road to the construction of a proletarian state." A note was passed up to Kamenev who, glancing at it, announced that the newly elected representative of the Chinese workmen in Moscow wished to speak. This was Chitaya Kuni, a solid little Chinaman with a big head, in black leather coat and breeches. I had often seen him before, ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... out of his chair, made coffee, gave Carol a cup, and talked on, half defiant and half apologetic, half wistful for friendliness and half amused by her surprise at the discovery that there was a proletarian philosophy. ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... himself with awe, at this unbelieveable strange fortune, this real comradeship with the hero of his dreams. To Jimmie this man had been a disembodied intelligence, a dispenser of proletarian inspiration, a supernatural being who went about the country standing upon platforms and swaying the souls of multitudes. It had never occurred to Jimmie that he might have a bare body, and might enjoy splashing about ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... talk itself into faith in a false past, as men make up the things they would have said in a quarrel. Of these sins one lies buried deepest but most noisome, and though it is stifled, stinks: the true story of the relations of the rich man and the poor in England. The half-starved English proletarian is not only nearly a skeleton but he is a skeleton ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... March, 1917, was in many respects similar to the French Revolution of 1789. It brought the downfall of absolute monarchy. It was not so bourgeois in character as the French Revolution, because there was a definite proletarian class in Russia, though small in comparison with its immense population, and capitalist production was established. But the Russian Revolution had this disadvantage compared with the French Revolution—there was practically no class able to take over the administration ...
— Bolshevism: A Curse & Danger to the Workers • Henry William Lee
... say so," Petkoff murmured. "But, as one colleague to another, tell me: how much longer do you think it will be before the proletarian ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Then a proletarian wedding procession—headed by the bride and bridegroom, an ungainly pair in their Sunday best—all singing noisily together. Then a pauper funeral, or a covered stretcher, followed by sympathetic eyes ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... in a number of female animals. As to man, it has long been observed that the poor are more fruitful than the rich, and, as a rule, notwithstanding the much greater mortality of their children, bring up larger families. The word 'proletarian' is derived from this phenomenon as it was known to the Romans; in England, Switzerland, and in several other countries the upper classes—that is, the rich—living in ease and abundance, have relatively fewer children—nay, to a great extent decrease in numbers. The census statistics in civilised ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... satisfaction of any open-minded person of normal intelligence that Bolshevism is the negation of the faith and morals which constitute the strongest bond of the Jewish people. Trotzky has many times declared that he is no Jew, but a "general proletarian," and Bela Kun, in a formal statement, declared himself to be opposed to all religions and national cultures, the Jewish included, and that he stood only for the economic interests of the proletariat. I could quote many similar statements ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... been clumsy, if nothing else, and he had always thought that clumsiness was inexcusable. He had a guilty sense that while Beth was still the little lady to her finger tips, born to a natural nobility, he, the Grand Duke Peter, had been the boor, the vulgar proletarian. The look in her eyes had shamed him as the look in his own eyes had shamed her. She had known what his wooing meant, and it hadn't been what she wanted. The mention of love on lips that kissed as his ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... seen an irate, proletarian mother cuffing her offspring over an empty wood-box, you may picture perhaps the present proceeding of Big Medicine. To many a man the thing would have been unfeasible, after the first blow, because of the horses. But Big Medicine was very nearly all that he claimed to be; and ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... nation. In these same dreams he beheld himself at the head of a legion of heroes returning to Varenne as a warrior, a legislator, a rival of Washington, suppressing abuses, cutting down enormous fortunes, assigning to each proletarian a suitable share, and, in the midst of his far-reaching and vigorous measures, protecting the good and fair-dealing nobles, and assuring an honourable existence to them. Needless to say, the distress inseparable from all ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... vaguely understood by the masses is now quite certain. The Boxer movement of 1900, like the great proletarian risings which occurred in Italy in the pre-Christian era as a result of the impoverishment and moral disorder brought about by Roman misgovernment, was simply a socio-economic catastrophe exhibiting itself in an unexpected form. The dying Manchu ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... if anything of dead Rome be still left in the living city, it should be found in the Roman people. In the Mysteres du Peuple of Eugene Sue, there is a story, that to the Proletarian people, the sons of toil and labour, belong genealogies of their own, pedigrees of families, who from remote times have lived and died among the ranks of industry. These fabulous families, I have often thought, should have had their home in the Eternal City. Amongst ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... class and the proletarian class represent the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels perfectly satisfied with this self-estrangement, knowing that in this estrangement resides its own power, and possesses therein the semblance of a human existence; ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... relief in legislation, labor organizes to limit its numbers in certain trades. Meanwhile the women of the working class go on breeding more workers to wipe out in the future the advantages gained for the present. In Paris, for instance, the proletarian quarters of the city show a birth rate more than three times as high as the birth rate ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... you?" said I, "you sugarcoated old mandible, or I'll conciliate your exegesis with a proletarian!" ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... revolutionists in Switzerland formed the organization known as the Group for the Emancipation of Labor. This organization was based upon the principles and tactics of Marxian Socialism and sought to create a purely proletarian movement. As we have seen, when revolutionary terrorism was at its height Plechanov and his disciples had proclaimed its futility and pinned their faith to the nascent class of industrial wage-workers. In the early 'eighties ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... well enough; there was no other choice in the field of action, where all is determined in advance. Just as the unjust victory leads inevitably to the revenge which in its turn will be unjust, so capitalistic oppression will provoke the proletarian revolution, which will follow the bad example and oppress, when it has the power—an endless chain. Here is a stern Greek justice which the mind can accept and even honour as the rule of the universe. But the heart cannot submit, cannot ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... "These proletarian protagonists whipped me into a fury. My father, too, had his rifle, and when drunk he invoked it, as it hung on the wall, thus: 'Come down, my sweet rifle, how brightly you shine! What tyrant dare stifle that sweet voice of thine.' But my father was only a ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... turns up his nose at it, and the poorest proletarian will only undertake the task when starvation is staring him in the face. For it is not only dirty, but deemed degrading. It is, therefore, one of the travaux-forces which, as a matter of necessity, falls to the lot of the "gaol-bird." Convicts ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... leaders: Association for the Protection of Martinique's Heritage (ecologist) [Garcin MALSA]; Caribbean Revolutionary Alliance or ARC; Central Union for Martinique Workers or CSTM [Marc PULVAR]; Frantz Fanon Circle; League of Workers and Peasants; Proletarian Action Group or GAP; Socialist Revolution Group ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... of Divine Justice now took the place in the popular mind formerly occupied by Church and Emperor. All the then oppressed classes of society—the small peasant, half villein, half free-man; the landless journeyman and town-proletarian; the beggar by the wayside; the small master, crushed by usury or tyrannized over by his wealthier colleague in the guild, or by the town-patriciate; even the impoverished knight, or the soldier of fortune defrauded of his pay; ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... conceived as god; and such change is not only possible, but the only sort of change that is real. The mere transfiguration of institutions, as from military and priestly dominance to commercial and scientific dominance, from commercial dominance to proletarian democracy, from slavery to serfdom, from serfdom to capitalism, from monarchy to republicanism, from polytheism to monotheism, from monotheism to atheism, from atheism to pantheistic humanitarianism, from general illiteracy to general literacy, from romance to realism, ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... a dingy tricolor flag. A few broken steps lead to a pair of folding-doors. Inside is the sanctuary of the office, guarded by that flag as if by the honor of the country: for tricolor represents all Frenchmen, be he prince or proletarian. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed ...
— The Communist Manifesto • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
... but business-like walking-stick. She walked with an easy quickness down the Avenue and through the proletarian portion of Morningside Park, and crossing these fields came into a pretty overhung lane that led toward Caddington and the Downs. And then her pace slackened. She tucked her stick under her arm and ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... proletarian dictatorship is the Communist Party, which in general directs all the political and economic work of the State, leaning, first of all, on the Soviets as on the more revolutionary form of dictatorship of the proletariat, and secondly on the Trades Unions, as organizations ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... was a slender, mop-headed, man-grown, truculent flame of an individual who seemed to go out of his way to insult his passengers. It was this that attracted Daylight's interest, and he was not long in finding out what was the matter with Jones. He was a proletarian, according to his own aggressive classification, and he had wanted to write for a living. Failing to win with the magazines, and compelled to find himself in food and shelter, he had gone to the little valley of Petacha, not a hundred miles from Los ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... flowing into foreign banks. In addition, the population had enough surplus money to buy the products of the new domestic industries as these appeared. Thus, the industrialization of Taiwan may be called "industrialization without tears," without the suffering, that is, of proletarian masses who produce objects which they cannot afford for themselves. Today, even lower middle-class families have television consoles which cost the equivalent of US $200; they own electric fans and radios; they are buying Taiwan-produced ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... proletarian, is nobler than another, but not more sacred. In truth, all workers and all honest men are as good as each other. But the poor, the exploited, are fifteen hundred millions here on earth. They are the Law because ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... a few words as to the intellectual functions of the Fifth Avenue clergy. Let us realize at the outset that they do their preaching in the name of a proletarian rebel, who was crucified as a common criminal because, as they said, "He stirreth up the people." An embarrassing "Savior" for the church of Good Society, you might imagine; but they manage to fix him up and ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... predicament, preemptory, prelate, preliminary, preposterous, prerequisite, prerogative, presentiment, primogeniture, probation, probity, proclivity, procrastinate, prodigal, prodigious, prodigy, profligate, progenitor, proletarian, prolific, prolix, promiscuous, promissory, propaganda, propensity, prophylactic, propinquity, propitiatory, propitious, proprietary, prorogue, proselyte, prototype, protuberant, provender, proximity, prurient, psychical, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... has become suddenly aroused to the misery in our industrial order. To both of these types, feeling intensely on the subject, the socialist party appeals as the only party with promises sweeping enough to be attractive. The one becomes the proletarian, the other the intellectual, the one becomes the workshop, the other the parlor-socialist. Many of the latter type are persons overburdened either with unearned inherited wealth or with an undigested education. Many of them, having enjoyed for a time the interesting experience ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... wisely mounted higher Than constables in curule wit, When on tribunal bench we sit, Like speculators shou'd foresee, From Pharos of authority, Portended mischiefs farther then Low Proletarian tything-men: 720 And therefore being inform'd by bruit, That dog and bear are to dispute; For so of late men fighting name, Because they often prove the same; (For where the first does hap to be, 725 The last does coincidere;) Quantum in nobis, have thought good, ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... anything. Bolshevism is a movement; and in my opinion a very natural and just movement considered as a revolt against the crude cruelty of Capitalism. But when we find the Bolshevists making a rule that the drama "must encourage the proletarian spirit," it is obvious that those who say so are not only maniacs but, what is more to the point here, are monomaniacs. Imagine having to apply that principle, let us say, to "Charley's Aunt." None of these things seek ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... of the Boer nation were the settlers of the Dutch trading company at the Cape of Good Hope, sturdy farmers and tradesmen belonging to the proletarian class of Holland, and a subsequent contingent of French Huguenot refugees and their families who joined as colonists soon after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. I mention below the names still existing ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... particular kind of groceries inside them. But Krupp can make a plausible claim that the huge infernal machines to which his country owes nearly all of its successes could only have been produced under the equally infernal conditions of the modern factory and the urban and proletarian civilisation. That is why the victory of Germany would be simply the victory of Krupp, and the victory of Krupp would be simply the victory of Capitalism. There, and there alone, Capitalism would be able to point to something ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... Commission on Money and Credit (to finish the conversion of America into a total socialist state, under the dictatorship of whatever "proletarian" happens to be enthroned in the White House) can be seen, between the lines, in the Commission's remarks about the "formidable ...
— The Invisible Government • Dan Smoot
... in silence, the two men, masters of the world, awaited the coming of the practical scientist, the proletarian, on whom they both, at last analysis, had to rely for most ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... trial, and they gazed upon a sight for Gods and men—a travesty on the sacred name of justice. Such scenes would seem unbelievable to us but for the recent events of the Russian Revolution, which prove that in our age also a proletarian dictatorship can be senselessly wicked ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... passions. Try to ignore them or box them up, and they will burst forth destructively. When Haywood dramatizes the class struggle he uses class resentment for a social purpose. You may not like his purpose, but unless you can gather proletarian power into some better vision, you have no grounds for resenting Haywood. I fancy that the demonstration of King Canute settled once and for all the stupid attempt to ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... governing classes in their very difficult and delicate and dangerous task of safeguarding the interests of this great empire: in short, to let itself be gammoned by elegant phrases and by adroit practisings on its personal good-nature, its inveterate proletarian sentimentality, and its secret misgivings as to the correctness of its manners. The Junkers have already taken the fullest advantage of the war to paralyze democracy. If the Labour members do not take a vigorous counter-offensive, and ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... a man; I think the devil was in him. He had two favourite expressions—"it is logical," or illogical, as the case might be; and this other, thrown out with a certain bravado, as a man might unfurl a banner, at the beginning of many a long and sonorous story: "I am a proletarian, you see." Indeed, we saw it very well. God forbid that ever I should find him handling a gun in Paris streets! That will not be a good ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is then the first to suffer!" He saw himself in the man's place. "Poor glow-worm!" he cried, "he may change the green light in his tail to red—or was it red to begin with? but it is no use! Those proletarian forces descending upon him from the rear are quite blind in their purpose: it is merely dead weight and impetus that send them along." And then he pulled up abruptly, astonished to find that he was talking in Max's manner. ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... silken-haired; his Scandinavian cheeks like petals at an age when his companions' faces were like maps of the moon; stubborn and healthy; wearing a celluloid collar and a plain black four-in-hand; a blue-eyed, undistinguished, awkward, busy proletarian of sixteen, to whom evening clothes and poetry did not exist, but who quivered with inarticulate determinations to see Minneapolis, or even Chicago. To him it was sheer romance to parade through town with a tin haversack ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... so fertile in literary resource or so catholic in their choice of subject that the reader is never sure, when he picks up their latest masterpiece, whether he is to have a comedy of manners, a proletarian tragedy, a tale of Court intrigue or a satire on the follies of the age. To the steady-going devotee of fiction—the reader on the Clapham omnibus—this versatility is a source of annoyance rather than of attraction, and I accordingly take pleasure ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 17, 1920 • Various
... Colonel Bonhommne's sabre, than that of Marshal de Montmorenci's baton; or that the word of command rang out more efficiently from the patrician's dainty lips, than from under the rough moustaches of the proletarian. ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... to our guns. The seats are cheap. That has a nasty proletarian look about it. But appearances are deceptive. The proletariat isn't poor. Everybody is poor except Capital and Labour. Between these upper and nether millstones great numbers ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence |
