Ruling Quotes

Capitalism is the legitimate racket of the ruling class. (Al Capone)
The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return. View quote
Gore Vidal
It has been shown that, in contrast to everything which classical national economy has hitherto taught, not the producer but the consumer is the ruling factor in economic life. View quote
Hjalmar Schacht
As a rule, all heroism is due to a lack of reflection, and thus it is necessary to maintain a mass of imbeciles. If they once understand themselves the ruling men will be lost. View quote
Ernest Renan
Women have been called queens for a long time, but the kingdom given them isn't worth ruling. View quote
Louisa May Alcott
One hardly saves a world without ruling it. View quote
Emil Cioran
If people would know how little brain is ruling the world, they would die of fear. View quote
Ivo Andrić
The law is an adroit mixture of customs that are beneficial to society, and could be followed even if no law existed, and others that are of advantage to a ruling minority, but harmful to the masses of men, and can be enforced on them only by terror. View quote
Peter Kropotkin
After having won a scepter, few are so generous as to disdain the pleasures of ruling. View quote
Pierre Corneille
Were I to deduce any system from my feelings on leaving Eton, it might be called The Theory of Permanent Adolescence. It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development. From these it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental, and in the last analysis homosexual. View quote
Cyril Connolly
A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. (George Orwell)
The true love is a state of half-madness, of some kind of soft obsession, ruling a so delicate kind of feeling that can lead a person from the greatest happiness to the most dreadful pain. View quote
Lima Barreto
A new era will dawn in Africa, when the impoverished masses of a nation rise up to rescue their right to a decent life from the hands of the ruling oligarchies. View quote
Che Guevara
In every one of us there are two ruling and directing principles, whose guidance we follow wherever they may lead the one being an innate desire of pleasure the other, an acquired judgment which aspires after excellence. View quote
Socrates
The ruling family in Kuwait is good at blackmail, exploitation, and destruction of their opponents. They had perpetuated a grave U. S. conspiracy against us.... stabbing Iraq in the back with a poisoned dagger. View quote
Saddam Hussein
To decide once every few years which members of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament - this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in parliamentary- constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics. View quote
Vladimir Lenin
Does not the whole history of socialism, particularly of French socialism, which is so rich in revolutionary striving, show us that when the working people themselves take power in their hands the ruling classes resort to unheard-of crimes and shootings if it is a matter of protecting their money-bags. View quote
Vladimir Lenin
The ruling power within, when it is in its natural state, is so related to outer circumstances that it easily changes to accord with what can be done and what is given it to do. View quote
Marcus Aurelius
Either all things proceed from one intelligent source and come together as in one body, and the part ought not to find fault with what is done for the benefit of the whole; or there are only atoms, and nothing else than a mixture and dispersion. Why, then, art thou disturbed? Say to this ruling faculty, Art thou dead, art thou corrupted, art thou playing the hypocrite, art thou become a beast, dost thou herd and feed with the rest? View quote
Marcus Aurelius
You know, I've been around the ruling class all my life, and I've been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country. View quote
Gore Vidal
George Orwell once wrote: "And it's not a matter of whether the war is not real or if it is. Victory is not possible. The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia but to keep the very structure of society intact." (Michael Moore)
That's all very well as an abstract moral principle, Avril, a coffee-table theoretical construct, but there's no denying the sheer gratuitous pleasure to be derived from seeing members of the ruling class in pain and torment. View quote
Irvine Welsh
Absolute Evil is not the kingdom of hell. The inhabitants of hell are ourselves, i. e., those who pay our painful, embarrassing, humanistic duties to society and who are compromised by our intellectually dubious commitment to virtue, which can be defined by the perpetual smear-word of French polemic: the bourgeois. (Bourgeois equals humanist.) This word has long been anathema in France where categories are part of the ruling notion of logique. The word cannot be readily matched in England or America. View quote
V. S. Pritchett
If any religion had the chance of ruling over England, nay Europe within the next hundred years, it could be Islam. View quote
George Bernard Shaw
Economic analysis is the first principle of Marxism. Professors who were genuine leftists would have challenged the entire economics-driven machinery of American academe the wasteful multidepartmental structure, the divisive pedantry of overspecialization, the cronyism and sycophancy in recruitment and promotion, the boondoggling ostentation of pointless conferences, the exploitation of graduate students and part-time teachers, the subservience of faculty to overpaid administrators, the mediocrity and folly of the ruling cliques of the Modern Language Association. View quote
Camille Paglia