"Proletariat" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... political, economic, and social principles espoused by 19th century economist Karl Marx; he viewed the struggle of workers as a progression of historical forces that would proceed from a class struggle of the proletariat (workers) exploited by capitalists (business owners), to a socialist "dictatorship of the proletariat," to, finally, a classless ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... called a "comrade." The economic reasoning which "proved" this "law" was expressed in obscure and technical language peculiar to the propagandists of the movement, and every page of Socialist writings was studded with the then strange words "proletariat" and "bourgeoisie." ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... Salonica, once a fair city, but now facing the sea with almost a mile of fire-devastated streets. The refugees are confined to their huts, and are under a sort of military control. All the people are proletariat, and ought never to have been taken on board ships and brought to Greece. A few would have been killed by Bolsheviks, but not so many as will die here by disease. They cannot help Russia outside of Russia, and it is beyond belief that little countries can look after them indefinitely. ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... roses—"those idle brides of nightingales"—destroyed to make room for useful potato-patches. He sees his Book of Songs taken by the grocer to wrap up coffee and snuff for old women, in a world where the victorious proletariat triumphs. But that line of defence he voluntarily abandons, knowing in his heart, as he said, that the present social order could not endure, and that all beauty it preserved was not to be counted ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... hands of tyrants all the power that tyrants possess. Fortunate it was for Henry George, and for the world, that he did not know that any man who labors to help the workingman will be mobbed by the proletariat for his pains a little later on. Monarchies maybe ungrateful, but their attitude is a sweet perfume compared to the ingratitude of the laborer. He can be helped only by stealth, and his freedom must come from within. The moral weakness of man ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... toffish Town, A second edition, at Half-a-crown, Seeks the suffrages—(and money, for on Swelldom you'll go "stoney")— Of the much derided Mob. Yes, the Proletariat "Bob" (With the Guinea of the Nob) must aid the Sons of Light. Gath and Askelon, you see, can give Me, L.S.D. All true Egoists love those pregnant letters Mystic Three! Flout Philistia with great glee, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Jan. 9, 1892 • Various
... answered Mr. Fyshe quite carelessly. "All these fellows are." (Mr. Fyshe generally referred to the British aristocracy as "these fellows.") "Land, you know, feudal estates; sheer robbery, I call it. How the working-class, the proletariat, stand for such tyranny is more than I can see. Mark my words, Furlong, some day they'll rise and the whole thing will come to ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... he had ceased to present quite so commanding a figure to the proletariat as he had presented when first he was called in to save the situation. Of this he was probably quite aware himself, and it is a great mistake to suppose that he was indifferent to public opinion or even ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... inspiring as the belief of the early Christians in the Second Coming of Christ, which, although quite a false belief, contributed largely to the success of the early Church. "Strikes," says Sorel, "have engendered in the proletariat the most noble, the most profound, the most moving sentiments they possess. The General Strike groups these in a composite picture, and by bringing together, gives to each its maximum intensity; appealing to the most acute memories of particular conflicts, it colours with an intense life all ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... in the course of the Revolution. They hurled the Miliukov Ministry down; it was their Soviet which proclaimed to the world the Russian peace terms-"No annexations, no indemnities, and the right of self-determination of peoples"; and again, in July, it was the spontaneous rising of the unorganised proletariat which once more stormed the Tauride Palace, to demand that the Soviets take over ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... answer to the Neo-Malthusian conclusions; for even those Socialists who have bitterly opposed the promulgation of Neo-Malthusianism—regarding it as a "red herring intended to draw the attention of the proletariat away from the real cause of poverty, the monopoly of land and capital by a class"—admit that when society is built on the foundation of common property in all that is necessary for the production of wealth, the time will come ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... discriminating program of industrial democratization would be one based on the proper time sequence, so that the assumption of responsibility would run parallel to a complementary program of industrial training. The proposal for a sudden dictatorship of the proletariat is an attempt to do away with the intervening time of preparation; the resistance to all sharing of responsibility an attempt to deny the alteration of human capacity in the course of time. Primitive notions of democracy, such as rotation in office, and contempt for the expert, are ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... Hausfrauen have no grace of dainty frills, diaphanous lace or rustling petticoats. They are obviously and incontestably of the class described by a witty writer to whom "a lace petticoat is as much a badge of infamy as a cigarette on the stage." The German proletariat cannot be susceptible to externals, else the universal sad-coloured skirt, the ill-fitting blouse and the ugly hat worn by his women-folk could not ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... machinery. They were free of the burden of Jim Crow. Along with white citizens they were given better schooling, a major factor in improving status. The mass migration also meant that this part of America's peasantry was rapidly joining America's proletariat. The wartime shortage of workers, coupled with the efforts of the Fair Employment Practices Committee and other government agencies, opened up thousands of jobs previously denied black Americans. The number of skilled craftsmen, ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... social sciences, it is self-evident that the prolonged rule of the proletariat in Russia in defiance of nearly the whole world must be regarded as a product of Russian life, past and present. In fact, the continued Bolshevist rule seems to be an index of the relative fighting strength of the several classes in Russian ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... might play. Flowers were solicited and distributed to the folks who had neither taste nor room for flowers. We did some teaching, too, and gave entertainments. A barrel-organ played on certain days by the sand pile; and that music of the proletariat never fails to ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... thousand well-disciplined Czech soldiers whose loyalty to the cause of freedom was stronger than that of the rapidly changing Russian proletariat made it seem desirable to the Bolshevik authorities to rid the country of men so willing to fight and so little subject to the extreme socialistic doctrines then rife in Russia. Both Lenine and Trotzky ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... life,' said Theodormon, 'is that he converted the middle classes to art and socialism, but he never touched the unbending Tories of the proletariat or the smart set. You would have thought, on homoeopathic principles, that cretonne would appeal ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... religion with this type. He glories in fighting for the downtrodden. This explains why he is so often a radical. Much of this vehemence in radicalism is due to the fact that he feels he is getting even with the snobs of the world—the plutocrats—when he furthers the causes of the proletariat. ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... exclusive coterie of poetic words. It should react upon his metrical vocabulary to its beneficial expansion, by taking him outside his aristocratic circle of language, and keeping him in touch with the great commonalty, the proletariat of speech. For it is with words as with men: constant intermarriage within the limits of a patrician clan begets effete refinement; and to reinvigorate the stock, its veins must be replenished from hardy ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... six hundred millions, she fails to create with that money manufacturing or agricultural products, which represent a loss of twelve hundred millions; for, if the manufactured product were not double in value to its cost price, commerce could not exist. The proletariat actually deprives itself of six hundred millions in wages. These six hundred millions of dead loss (representing to a stern economist a loss of twelve hundred millions, through lack of the benefits of circulation) ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... there; Hannah had also been born in the front bedroom, but it was through the window of the back bedroom that the housewife's soul would rejoin the infinite. The house, which Meshach's grandfather, first of his line to emerge from the grey mass of the proletariat, had ruined himself to build, was a six-roomed dwelling of honest workmanship in red brick and tile, with a beautiful pillared doorway and fanlight in the antique taste. It had cost two hundred pounds, and was the monument of a life's ambition. Mortgaged by its ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... dear chap: beginning with the idealists and the theorising Jews, and after them your nicely-bred gentlemen, and then perhaps, your profiteers and Rothschilds, and ALL politicians, and ending up with the proletariat," said Argyle. ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... brought back to her the memory of days when she had possessed a home of her own, and had not yet been soured by ill-hap; then again, Bower belonged to her own class, for all his money saved up and his pomposities of manner. There is a freemasonry between the members of the pure-blooded proletariat; they are ever ready in recognition of each other, and their suspicion of all above them, whether by rank or by nature, is a sense of the utmost keenness. Mrs. Butterfield varied somewhat from the type, inasmuch as she did not care to cringe before her superiors; but that was ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes, directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. ...
— The Communist Manifesto • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
... consider that such things must make it the positive duty of Socialists in France, England, Italy and Russia "to fight against a Government which imprisons without any reason the best-known champions of the International proletariat." The treatment of both Mehring and Frau Luxemburg had been terrible. The former, old and ill, had had the greatest difficulty in getting admission to a prison infirmary. Frau Luxemburg a month ago was taken from her prison bed in the middle of the night, ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... men with the necessary Ghetto taint.' Of the four great Labour Parties, he proceeded to recommend the P.S.D. as the most promising for David's purposes. 'Not the Bolshewiki faction,' he added, 'but the Menshewiki. Recruits might also be found in the Proletariat ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... about their purpose—the transfer of power and property by murder and robbery from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat. If a member of the proletariat is so mad that he refuses or hesitates to act his part in this scheme, then those who have been called by the force of events to assume a dictatorship on his behalf are entitled to destroy him as an unconscious enemy to himself and his ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... the proletariat had learned to say in many languages, that "the injury of one is the concern of all." Their watchwords were brotherhood, sacrifice, the subordination of individual and trade interests, to the good of the working classes, and they were ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... But, I tell you, my boy, that it is they who are becoming the masters. There is no more room in journalism for a gentleman; certainly not for literary men and people of culture. They think it will pay them better to run their wretched sheets for the proletariat. We shall see. Oh, I am better out of it, of course. I see that clearly; and I am thankful to be clear of their drudgery.' (My listening mind brightened.) 'But yet—there's your education to be thought of. Expenses are—And, of course—H'm!' (Clouds shadowed my ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... Estridge decided to cable and await orders in Copenhagen; Palla, to sail for home on the first available Danish steamer; Ilse, to go to Stockholm and eventually decide whether to volunteer once more as a soldier of the proletariat or to turn propagandist and carry the true gospel to America, where, she had heard, the ancient liberties of the ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become "profiteers,", who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... proletariat in England begins with the second half of the last century, with the invention of the steam-engine and of machinery for working cotton. These inventions gave rise, as is well known, to an industrial ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... another gang, to the tune of vast hymn-singing and yells to God. Perhaps it has already passed its apogee; the plutocracy, chastened, shows signs of a new solidarity; the wheel continues to swing 'round. But this combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world. What actual difference does it make to a civilized man, when there is a steel strike, whether the workmen win or the mill-owners win? The conflict can interest him only as spectacle, ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... ascertain the images called up by the terms "the people," "the masses," "the proletariat," "the peasantry," by many who theorize on those bodies with eloquence, or who legislate without eloquence, we should find that they indicate almost as small an amount of concrete knowledge—that they are as far from completely representing the complex facts summed ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... mind returned to Cairy, to his work for Gossom, to his appealing self, and her lips relaxed in a gentle smile. Hers was a simple nature, the cue once caught. She had come of rather plain people, who knew the worth of a dollar, and had spent their lives saving or investing money. The energy of the proletariat had been handed to her undiminished. The blood was evident in the large bones, the solid figure, and tenacious fingers, as well as in the shrewdness with which she had created this household. It was her instinct to push out ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... and it's quite superfluous, still it may be admitted in a well-ordered state." He seems, however, to think very little about Petersburg and comme il faut: he once even called himself one of the proletariat. 'We are working people,' he said; I thought if Dmitri had said that, I shouldn't have liked it; but he may talk about himself, he may boast if he likes. With me he is very attentive; but I kept feeling that a very, very condescending superior was talking ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... free-thinker and emancipator of the worlds."[2] In another place he speaks of Proudhon as having the instinct of a revolutionist, because "he adored Satan and proclaimed anarchy."[3] In still another place he refers to the proletariat of Paris as "the modern Satan, the great rebel, vanquished, but not pacified."[4] In the statutes of his secret organization, of which I shall speak again later, he insists that "principles, programs, and rules are not ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... anti-religious crusade. The result of this was a split in the socialist party and the formation, under the leadership of Troelstra, Van Kol and Van der Goes, of the "Social-Democratic Workmen's Party," which aimed at promoting the welfare of the proletariat on socialistic lines, but by parliamentary means. The followers of Domela Nieuwenhuis, whose openly avowed principles were "the destruction of actual social conditions by all means legal and illegal," were after 1894 known as "the Socialist ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... faith that they can win their bread and a little honor outside the framework of our Jewish business futilities. Today they must be filled with despair, they constitute the foundation of a frightful over-educated proletariat. But it is to these that all my love belongs, and I am just as set on increasing their number as you are set on diminishing it. It is in them that I perceive the latent power of the Jewish people. In ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... existing conditions. A great deal of help was given, always just on the borders of starvation; and more and more men had to apply for it. It did not rob them of their rights as citizens, but made them a kind of politically kept proletariat. ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... be his personal inferior. It is difficult to convey to one who has never known this distinction the way in which the very atmosphere is charged with it in South East Africa. A white oligarchy, every member of the race an aristocrat; a black proletariat, every member of the race a server; the line of cleavage as clear and deep as the colours. The less able and vigorous of our race, thus protected, find here an ease, a comfort, a recognition to which their personal worth would never entitle them in ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... punished with three years' galley-slavery and that several thousand citizens were hanged for expressing liberal opinions; he will suggest that belief in the supernatural, rejected by the thinking classes, finds an abiding shelter among royalty and the proletariat. ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... be some occult power at work under cover of the ex-Central Committee? Is the Commune only a pretext, and are we at the debut of a social and political revolution? I overheard a partizan of the new doctrines say,—"The Proletariat is vindicating its rights, which have been unjustly trampled on by the aristocratic bourgeoisie. This is ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... grimy workers that made the social background of London, the stories one heard of privation and sweating, only joined up very slowly with the general propositions I was making about life. We could become splendidly eloquent about the social revolution and the triumph of the Proletariat after the Class war, and it was only by a sort of inspiration that it came to me that my bedder, a garrulous old thing with a dusty black bonnet over one eye and an ostentatiously clean apron outside the dark mysteries that clothed her, or the cheeky little ruffians who yelled papers about the ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... the highest ideal of American Democracy. The ideal of Oneness can never be realized in a State which permits a single class to enjoy privileges of its own at the expense of all other classes; and it makes no difference whether this class belongs to the Proletariat or to the Plutocracy. Equality before the law, and justice, are the two eternal instruments for establishing the true Democracy. And I do not recall that in any of the measures which Roosevelt supported these two vital principles were violated. The following brief quotations from later ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... are the almighty arbiters. Your superior wisdom is going to lead poor blind mankind up the road to heaven. I say it's down the road to hell! The last century saw the dictatorship of the elite and the dictatorship of the proletariat. This one seems to be birthing the dictatorship of the intellectuals. I don't like ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... audiences for a long time, and it was probably the demand for a higher form of entertainment, resulting from a refinement of the public taste, rather than the result of the many exposures, that finally relegated the Fire-eaters to the haunts of the proletariat. ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... of Rome and its immediate environs, there were several sharp lines of cleavage; between Roman citizens and non-citizens; between the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the working proletariat and the idle proletariat; between the rich and the poor; between freeman (citizens) and the slaves who grew in numbers as the wars of conquest and consolidation multiplied war captives; between the civilian bureaucrats and the members of ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... prosperity of our export trade at this period; and conversely, the prosperity of our export trade was necessary to the existence of the new inhabitants. Capitalism is the cause of our dense population; and the proletariat would infallibly cut their ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... hat, protecting the multiple types of face associated with "the classes." The observing Forsyte might discern in the free or unconsidered seats a certain number of the squash-hatted, but they hardly ventured on the grass; the old school—or schools—could still rejoice that the proletariat was not yet paying the necessary half-crown. Here was still a close borough, the only one left on a large scale—for the papers were about to estimate the attendance at ten thousand. And the ten thousand, all animated by one hope, were asking each other one question: "Where are you ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... lost itself in a cul-de-sac. Progress has ended in an aimless discontent. The schools have produced, according to Bismarck, ten times as many overeducated young men as there are places to fill. The thirst for culture has produced a great, hungry, intellectual proletariat. The forces of darkness are still strong, and it seems sometimes as if the Middle Ages will swallow up everything won by modern struggles. The Liberal wonders at moments if he be not really fighting against destiny. Often in his Culturkampf with Ultramontanism has he proved the truth of Gambetta's ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... whose harsh enforcement of her feudal rights was among the bitterest grievances of the peasantry, and the good Bishop, who had lately roused himself from his habitual indolence to oppose the threatened annexation of the Caccia del Vescovo. One and all proclaimed their ardent sympathy with the proletariat, their scorn of tyranny and extortion in high places; and if the Marchioness, on her return home, ordered one of her linkmen to be flogged for having trod on her gown; if Pievepelago the next morning refused to ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... given. It would have been extremely embarrassing to the Managing Committee and all the office-bearers, and would have, I fear, deeply exasperated and offended the occupants of those family pews; but fortunately this difficulty never did occur. The proletariat of Marylebone had not the sense or the courage, or the profanity, which you will, to hit upon this mode of warming themselves. The real congregation embraced none of the unwashed multitude. Its value in mere velvet, silk, lace, trinkets, and furs was something amazing, and the ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... black cat, the symbol of sabotage and destruction, would jump. The majority of their men would stand for order, they declared, but there were some who would go over. They urged, to offset that reflection on their organization that the proletariat of the city might go ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... two weaknesses of Feuerbach "true Socialism" in educated Germany fastened itself like a spreading plague since 1844, and set literary phrases in the place of scientific knowledge, the freeing of mankind by means of love in place of the emancipation of the proletariat, through the economic transformation of production, in short lost itself in nauseous fine writing and in sickly sentimentality, of the type of which class of writers was ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... Bingley-Spyker that all the members of the Tribunal were shouting together. On the whole he gathered that he had not improved his position. He had been "attacking the proletariat." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... rush-hour on the Tube; when the office was full of shouting men, when strange figures dived in and out and banged doors like characters in an old farce, and Harold, the proud office-boy, lost his air of being on the point of lunching with a duke at the club and perspired like one of the proletariat. On these occasions you could not help admiring Joe, even if you hated him. When a man is doing his own job well, it is impossible not to admire him. And Joe did his job well, superlatively well. He was everywhere. Where others trotted, he sprang. Where others raised their voices, he yelled. ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... that salvation. We know ourselves as we are, and understand our own greatness. We do not hoodwink ourselves into the blind belief that we are ordinary men, with the intellects of Cabinet Ministers, or the passions of the proletariat. No, we—closing time, Waiter! How absurd! Why, is it forbidden in England to eat strawberries after midnight, or to go to bed at one o'clock in the day? Come, Reggie! It is useless to protest, as Mr. Max Beerbohm once said in his delicious 'Defence of ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... that. It begins with the wonderful retail markets of San Francisco, and then changes abruptly to all sorts of sociological problems, then before we know it gives us a beautiful marine view, and then drops us down where the proletariat lives, then up to the homes of the rich and mighty, ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... why should there not be a levy kept up for weeks or months, by the workers, for the purpose of setting themselves up in business as masters? There would then be no longer a capitalist owner face to face with the masses of the proletariat, but all the means of production, the plant, and all the accumulated resources of capital would really be at the disposal of labour. This will never be done, however, as long as co-operative experiments are carried on in the present ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... whip—which may be made either of thongs or of the paragraphs in a set of factory regulations—has kept the rebellious together, and therefore—not because of his higher intelligence—has swept the profits into his own pocket, leaving to the workers, whether they belonged to the proletariat or to the so-called intelligent classes, only so much as sufficed to sustain them. Hitherto the workers have made no attempt to unite their productive labours without a master, as free, self-competent men, and not as servants. The employment of those powerful ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... of its time could not save Athens from despondency and destruction, and when the leaders in the city of Rome came to believe so little in life that only the proletariat had children, it was evident that their very tolerant system of adopting any god that pleased them did not add to the joy of life. The poet, then, who misunderstands the paganism of the Greeks, who does not desire to be united to an absolute Perfection, ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... degrading position, he is likely to rebel in the most healthy but brutal manner, so much so that the aesthetic reformer shrinks back from the consequences of the propagation of his own ideas. Of course, the brutality of the proletariat is not nearly so subtle as that of the aristocracy, and it takes some cleverness to discover that the latter is brutality at all. It requires time and patience to drive into the thick heads of the workers that they are downtrodden, ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... social conditions of the earlier time a state which was adapted merely for purposes of war might easily be found to work satisfactorily enough, but a more complex order of things had now arisen. Social problems had begun to crop up; for the poor and the proletariat the protection of a thoughtful government had come to be required, but ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... Pot-Bouille portrayed the lower bourgeoisie and their servants. Au Bonheur des Dames treated of the great retail shops. La Joie de Vivre came in 1884. Germinal told of mining and the misery of the proletariat. L'Oeuvre pictured the life of artists and authors. La Terre portrayed, with startling realism, the lowest peasant life. Le Reve, which followed, was a reaction. It was a graceful idyl. Le Reve was termed "a symphony in white," and was considered as ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... has ever convinced me, though many people have tried, that the increase of wealth ought to be the sole object of a nation's policy. And it is surely as clear as day that the policy of Free Trade has dislocated the whole structure of our society. It has substituted a miserable city-proletariat for healthy labourers on the soil; it has transferred the great bulk of wealth from the country-gentleman to the traders; and in so doing it has more and more transferred power from those who had the tradition of using ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... with the theories of Marx and Engels, showing that no help was to be found in Utopias, as the interests of the proletarians were in absolute conflict with those of other classes, and these differences could only be settled by international class warfare. Nevertheless with that fear of the proletariat which has always characterized the democrats of revolutionary Freemasonry, Dr. Kallos declared later that "the social revolution must take place without bloodshed."[690] The Karolyi regime was the direct outcome of these illusions, and as in all revolutions ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... crowded that pleaders are said to have been competing with each other to obtain cases by a kind of Dutch auction regarding fees, and also to promote litigation wilfully in order to obtain a living. It is from a kind of "intellectual proletariat" in all countries, that dangerous political agitators are drawn who take up political life not to improve the conditions of their fellows, but to find some sort of a career for themselves, having no useful occupation to ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... not sated yet and still for more are hungering Will find Vol. II. describe how E. gave cause for scandal-mongering. Vol. III. narrates how R. became enamoured of a fairy at A ball, was robbed of all his wealth and joined the proletariat. How E. washed clothes to earn her bread, while R. reclined in beery ease Upon his bed, will be exposed in Vol. IV. of this series. And further volumes show exactly what was worst and best in E., And how at last, aged eighty-four, she ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... contemplated by the founders of the Republic, repugnant to democracy which by its very nature depends for its existence on the elimination of classes. In addition to this, owing to the unprecedented immigration of ignorant Europeans to supply the labour demand, we acquired a sinister proletariat of unskilled economic slaves. Before the war labour discovered its strength; since the war began, especially in the allied nations with quasi-democratic institutions, it is aware of its power to exert ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... sublime disregard for facts and history, persist in extolling the tenets of Russian Communism as new discoveries in the art of government. They assert that the Bolshevists have solved for the first time in history the problem of social equality. They say the experiment of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" has never before been attempted and that it fails to find favor outside Russia because peoples are always prone to condemn what they do ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... of information concerning the division of the Roman republic into a moneyed oligarchy, and the proletariat are very numerous. Compare infra, 205. The speeches of the Gracchi (e.g. Plut., T. Gracchus, 9), and still more the violent discourses of Catiline's conspiracy (Sallust, Cat., 20, 23, 37-39), remind us ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... we know how to turn it to advantage, will put forward by ten years the growth of the Social party and the emancipation of the proletariat, by disarmament, the general strike, ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... system, each one by himself, each one for himself: labor, like all merchandise, is subject to fluctuation: hence the risks of the proletariat. ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... I think I'll be a Socialist, too. You wouldn't mind, would you, Daddy? They're quite different from Anarchists; they don't believe in blowing people up. Probably I am one by rights; I belong to the proletariat. I haven't determined yet just which kind I am going to be. I will look into the subject over Sunday, and declare my principles ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... Nabob Avenue, city of New Bagdad, and began to feel the mantle of the late H. A. Rashid descending upon him. Eventually Jacob slipped the mantle under his collar, tied it in a neat four-in-hand, and became a licensed harrier of our Mesopotamian proletariat. ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... liberty of those governed anything to do with the form of government. Monarchical England is just as free as Republican America, and the Bolshevists have demonstrated ad oculus to the whole world that the proletariat ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... Even in America so great a prophet as Henry Ward Beecher foresaw a tragic day when the bivouac of capital would be set against the camp of labor. And lesser seers are not lacking who freely predict, even for our democratic land, a desperate rebellion of a proletariat of poverty against ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... obtained by tribunician agitation, all the far-reaching advances gained by force of laws and not of arms, had constituted at Rome a single people and created a true Roman nation. There were now at Rome only rich and poor, nobles and proletariat. With intelligence and ability a plebeian could aspire to the magistracies and thence to the senate. Why should not the Italians be allowed the same privilege? It was neither just nor equitable ...
— Public Lands and Agrarian Laws of the Roman Republic • Andrew Stephenson
... shoulders the great world rests, is in full sympathy with every attack made upon the Cormorant by the Commune. While not ready for a revolution by force, he would not take up arms in defense of the prescriptive rights of the plutocrat from the assaults of the proletariat. Yet the American press proclaims that all is well! The "able editor" looks into his leather spectacles— free trade or high tariff brand—and with owl-like gravity announces that if the import tax on putty be increased ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... proletariat's car." She rolled the r surprisingly. "Do you suppose he comes out here to corrupt those poor devils without making them pay for being corrupted? Jeffrey, take off ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... is thus bound to remain divided into two hostile camps, and in such conditions freedom is a vain word. The Radical begins by demanding a greater extension of political rights, but he soon sees that the breath of liberty leads to the uplifting of the proletariat, and then he turns round, changes his opinions, and reverts to repressive legislation and ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... governed. I believe there has been as yet discovered no other basis of government so safe, so stable as popular suffrage, but the fathers never contemplated a suffrage without intelligence. It is a contradiction of terms. A proletariat without any political rights in a republic is no more dangerous than an unintelligent mob which can be used in elections by demagogues. Universal suffrage is not a universal panacea; it may be the best device attainable, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... dates back to the very origin of capital, took on a new form when machinery was introduced. Henceforth, the worker fights not only, nor even mainly, against the capitalist, but against the machine, as the material basis of capitalist exploitation. This is a distinct phase of the struggle of the proletariat everywhere. ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... power of the capitalist to levy toll on the community. This tendency will not cease of itself, but only through definite action on the part of those who do not profit by the capitalist regime. Unfortunately the distinction between the proletariat and the capitalist is not so sharp as it was in the minds of socialist theorizers. Trade-unions have funds in various securities; friendly societies are large capitalists; and many individuals eke out their wages by invested savings. All this increases the difficulty of ...
— Political Ideals • Bertrand Russell
... get, by way of counterpoise to the voting power of a bare and overwhelming proletariat, the worthier and far sweeter voices of those who have virtues and excellences of various kinds to recommend them,—so that if the lowest constituent counts for one, the highest may add up to six or eight. And thus, while no one of the mob is denied his one vote, those who rise ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... to his surprise, she regarded the Republican ideal of government as the highest that had yet been evolved from finite minds, still far from their last and highest stages of development. She believed that the only hope of the present civilization was to avert at any cost the successful rise of the proletariat to power until the governing and employing classes had learned sufficient wisdom to conciliate it and treat it with the same impartial justice they now reserved for themselves. ("And to educate themselves along the lines laid down in 'The Mind in the Making,'" interpolated ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... time, that is, when Germany thought that "the day" had dawned, the war came. Then the voluntary principle manifested its proper fruits. We found ourselves suddenly called upon to confront the supreme crisis of our fate with a gigantic proletariat untrained and unarmed, and with a diminutive army (below even its nominal strength), wholly inadequate to the magnitude of its tasks. What were the consequences? They were these: First, that our devoted Expeditionary Force, insufficient ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... at all a mere accident that the Bund, the strongest organization of the Jewish proletariat, will have nothing to do with the nationalistic agitation. The social and economic motives for concerted action or separation are of far more ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... cases hereditary in their family, and by the beginning of the sixteenth century they were confronted with the more or less veiled and more or less open opposition of the smaller guildsmen and of the newest comers into the city, the shiftless proletariat of serfs and free peasants, whom economic pressure was fast driving within the walls, owing to the ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... is intended by this statement. An aristocracy is in a manner the intellect of the social system, as the middle classes and the proletariat may be said to be its organizing and working power. It naturally follows that these forces are differently situated; and of their antagonism there is bred a seeming antipathy produced by the performance of different ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... that had escaped him when the numerous flaxen-haired little children were playing about on the sandy roads in the Brandenburg March, the same sigh which Sundays drew from him, when he used to see all the proletariat of the town—man and wife and children, children, children—wandering to the Zoo. Yes, he was right—he passed his hand a little nervously across his forehead—that writer was right—now, who could it be?—who had once said somewhere: "Why does a man marry? Only ...
— The Son of His Mother • Clara Viebig
... the old-fashioned but comfortable and picturesque national costume is being gradually thrown aside for the ever-varying modes prescribed by Paris to the world. The inordinate love of amusements in which the lower classes and the proletariat, ever increasing in number, seek more particularly to drown the sense of misery, is another and a still greater source of public demoralization. The general habit of indulging in the use of spirituous ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... feather, but Mr. Wrenn writhingly admitted that he had never heard of Shelley, whose name he confused with Max O'Rell's, which Dr. Mittyford deemed an error. Then, Pater's window. The doctor shrugged. Oh well, what could you expect of the proletariat! Swinging his stick aloofly, he stalked to the Bodleian and vouchsafed, "That, sir, is the AEschylus Shelley had in his pocket ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... municipal board of public works. And the world knows now, if it did not in 1918-19, that the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic was, and is, a highly centralized tyranny, frankly called by its own leaders "The Dictatorship of the Proletariat." The Russian people prayed for "a fish and ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... confessed that, in the beginning, they had fought shy even of each other, lest one of them should develop a hideous susceptibility and impart the taint. There were points at which they both might have touched the aristocracy of journalism; but they had had no dealings with its proletariat or its demi-monde. Below these infernal circles they had discerned the fringe of the bottomless pit, popularity, which he, the Master, told her was "the unclean thing." So that in nineteen hundred and two George Tanqueray, as a novelist, stood almost undiscovered ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... right, my boy. Give her the class war and the Revolution with a capital R! Tell her you're the only original representative of the disinherited proletariat, and that some day, before long, you intend to plant the red flag over her daddy's palace. [Seriously.] Of course, what you'll actually do is meet her like a gentleman, and tell her of some of your adventures in Russia, and give her some idea of what's going on outside of her little Fifth ...
— The Machine • Upton Sinclair
... imports, ministering to the proprietors as domestic servants, or by acting, preaching, paving, lighting, housebuilding, and the rest; and some of these, as the capitalist comes to regard ostentation as vulgar, and to enjoy a simpler life, will employ fewer and fewer people. A vast proletariat, beginning with a nucleus of those formerly employed in export trades, with their multiplying progeny, will be out of employment permanently. They will demand access to the land and machinery to produce for themselves. They will be ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... hall, put his shoulders against the boarding, shoved his hands into his trousers pockets, and gazed into the faces of his constituents. He was still amiable. But Presson sulked. It was hot in there, and the proletariat was unkempt and smoked ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... sphere of life which they had learnt to despise and for the higher walks to which they had vainly aspired. Soured by defeat, and easily persuaded to impute it solely to the alien rulers responsible for a system which had led them merely into a blind alley, they formed the rank and file of a proletariat that could only by courtesy be called intellectual, but was just the material out of which every form of discontent is apt to breed desperadoes. But many were no mere vulgar desperadoes. Amongst those who were engaged in making bombs and collecting revolvers and organising dacoities or who actually ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... twentieth century. Frejus embraces pleasure-seeking, industries, fish, flowers, and soldiering. Mermaids, delightfully reminiscent of the Lido and Abbazia in garb, dive from the end of the mole into a safe swimming-pool; children of the proletariat in coarse black tabliers, who have not left sandals and white socks on the beach behind them, fish for crabs; naval aviators start hydroplanes from an aerodrome beside the Roman amphitheater; fishermen, of olive Mediterranean complexion, dry copper-tinted nets on the beach, laying them, despite ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... represented forgot was precisely what Eachard's opponents had forgotten, that it was not the clergy universally who had been described, for Macaulay, like Eachard, had distinguished, but the clergy as represented by its proletariat. ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... Sixties had been the preparation. These reforms, one-sided and imperfect as they may have been, had none the less sufficed to create new economic conditions. On the one hand, a well-to-do middle-class, recruited almost entirely from non-aristocratic strata, sprang up; on the other, an industrial proletariat. Maxim Gorki emerged from this environment: and as a phenomenon he is explained by this essentially modern antithesis. He flung himself into the literary movement in full consciousness of his social standing. And it was just this self-consciousness, which stamped him as a personality, ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... Rs.20 a month. In Calcutta not a few have been taken on by philanthropic Hindus to do mechanical labour in jute mills at Rs.15 a month simply to keep them from starvation. Things have in fact reached this pitch, that our educational system is now turning out year by year a semi-educated proletariat which is not only unemployed, but in many cases almost unemployable. A Hindu gentleman who is one of the highest authorities on education told me that in Bengal, where this evil has reached the most serious dimensions, he estimates the number of these unemployed at over 40,000. This is ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... defenders by inspiring fear; democracy only by bestowing benefits. Fear or interest lies at the root of all devotion. If the French proletariat is to defend the Republic heroically in the hour of peril, then it must either be happy or have the hope of becoming so. And what use is it to deceive ourselves? The lot of the workman to-day is no better ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... Society's world as a monarch walks among the proletariat, to receive homage and return to places where a monarch has better things ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... of life, where vice and crime and misery abound, comes the Byron of the twentieth century, the poet of the vagabond and the proletariat, Maxim Gorky. Not like the beggar, humbly imploring for a crust in the name of the Lord, nor like the jeweller displaying his precious stones to dazzle and tempt the eye, he comes to the world,—nay, ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... therefore, was one of general agitation throughout the United States. With rapidity and enthusiasm the movement spread. Presently it took on a radical character. Realizing it to be at basis the first national awakening of the proletariat, progressive men and women of every shade of opinion hastened forward to support it and direct it into one of opposition, not merely to a few of the evils of wage slavery, but to what they considered the fundamental cause itself—the ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... excellent idea. It would give him some idea of the girl's mental processes; the psychology of the proletariat, he thought, could be studied to advantage in their ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... of the toast-list one of the humorous vocal quartets which were designed to relieve the seriousness of the programme, was interrupted by the formidable sound of the governed proletariat beyond the walls of the Town Hall. And Edwin's memory, making him feel very old, leapt suddenly back into another generation of male glee-singers that did not disport humorously and that would not have permitted themselves to ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... then, a not inconsiderable number of men are relieved from the common burden of sustaining the existence of the human race, the burden of the remainder is augmented, and they suffer. This is the chief source of the evil which under the name of slavery, or under the name of the proletariat, has always oppressed the great majority of ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... dedicated to the Proletariat from whom Bishop and Mrs. Brown are sprung, and to whose unrequited labors (not to the good providence of a divinity) they owe their ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... as we conceive it, the classes which are now the bearers of German culture will lose almost everything, while the gain of the proletariat will be scarcely visible. And yet for the sake of this scarcely visible gain we must tread the stony path that lies before us. Willingly and joyfully shall we tread it; for out of this, at first, ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... responsibility. On the other hand, we must remember their admirable patience, but the great mass of the people have not attained the level of Christianity; they are savage both in heart and mind, with no outlook wider than that of the family. It is the Italian proletariat which is judged by the Yugoslavs, whose otherwise acute discernment has been warped by the unhappy circumstances of the time. Indifferent to the fact that he himself is a compound of physical energy and oriental mysticism, the Yugoslav has become inclined to contemplate ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... in a mysterious and rather terrible manner, before his very birth. While, in the stern denunciation, the adhering curse, of the outraged and so-soon-to-be-childless mother, he found the just and age-old protest, the patient faith in the eventual triumph of the proletariat—of the defenseless poor as against the callous self-seeking and sensuality of the securely guarded rich. By the fact of his deformity he was emancipated from the delusions of his class, was made one, in right of the suffering and humiliation ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... so long as man feels within himself the prompting to be something better or higher than he is. Yet the English life is wonderfully perfected. With a faery dream of a king supported in his preeminence by a nobility, a nobility supported in turn by a commonalty, a commonalty supported again by a proletariat resting upon immeasurable ether; with a system of government kept, by assent so general that the dissent does not matter, in the hands of a few families reared, if not trained, to power; with a society so intimately and thoroughly ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... of the Government of Pretoria are stirring up ill-feeling against the proprietors and managers of mines. Persons without any defined profession, attracted by the vision of gold, have flocked to Johannesburg; unable to find employment, they have become a discontented proletariat. These are the true adventurers, if the word be taken in its worst sense. Mr. Krueger and his agents choose them as colleagues and pit them against the "wealthy metal-hearted mine owners." This is the policy ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... Rise of the Money Power. Ascendancy of the bourgeoisie over the nobility, clergy, and proletariat. Class ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... embarks on a struggle with the class above it, becomes involved in a struggle with the class below it. Consequently, the princedom finds itself fighting the monarchy, the bureaucrat finds himself fighting the nobility, the bourgeois finds himself fighting them all, while the proletariat is already commencing to ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... that his was a delicate health. In view of the magnificent windfall in connection with the killing of his dog, it had not been his design to accept any more retainers for a long time to come. That occurrence had lifted him, as by the ears, from the proletariat into the capitalistic leisure class; and the map of the world had become but the ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... insist that these differences are insignificant by the side of the fact that Christianity was the idealistic side of a revolt of the proletariat against the whole social order of the time. This notion, which made Christ 'le bon sans-culotte', has again become popular lately; some have even compared the early Christians with Bolsheviks. It is a fair question to ask at what period this was even approximately true. Christ ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... households and on the estates of the rich, and did not interfere to any sensible degree with the labour of the small freeman. As has been justly observed by Salvioli,[78] never at any period did the Roman proletariat complain of the competition of slave labour as detrimental to its own interests. Had there been no slave labour there, the small freeman might indeed have had a wider field of enterprise, and have been better able to accumulate a small ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... cosmopolitan descendant. The McDougall regimen would doubtless be a little too drastic. To improve the Music-hall Song off the face of the earth, is an attempt which could only suggest itself to puritan fanaticism in its most arbitrary administrative form. The proletariat will not "willingly let die" the only Muse whose ministrations really "come home to its business and its bosom." No, Sir, the People's Pegasus cannot, must not be ruthlessly consigned to the knackers. But may it not be gently bitted, discreetly bridled, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 3rd, 1891 • Various
... seriousness. Again, your literary journalist professes to wriggle in his chair over the humour of Jane Austen; to me she is the dullest lady that ever faithfully photographed the trivial. Years ago I happened to be crossing Putney Bridge, in a frock-coat and silk hat, when a passing member of the proletariat dug his elbows in his comrade's ribs and, quoting a music-hall tag of the period, shouted "He's got 'em on!" whereupon both burst into peals of robustious but inane laughter. Now, if I had turned to them, and said, "He would be funnier if I hadn't," and paraphrased, however wittily, ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... established the principle of enormously overpaying its judges and lawyers. The natural result has been to give our law courts and the legal profession generally a bias in favour of private wealth against both the public interest and the proletariat. It has also given our higher national education an overwhelming direction towards the training of advocates and against science and constructive statecraft. An ordinary lawyer has no idea of making anything; that tendency has been destroyed in his mind; he waits and sees and takes advantage ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... his effectiveness as a public speaker, he has shown an acute judgment in these attacks which has not been lost upon the steadier minds in the Labour world of the north. Perhaps he has done as much as any man up there to convince an embittered and disillusioned proletariat that it must accept the ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... consider good substituted for the present go-as-you-please anarchy; a gradually increasing flow of wealth from China to the investing countries, the chief of which is America; the development of a sweated proletariat; the spread of Christianity; the substitution of the American civilization for the Chinese; the destruction of traditional beauty, except for such objets d'art as millionaires may think it worth while to buy; the gradual awakening of China to her exploitation by the foreigner; ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... and laughed savagely. "You'll make no terms with the Black Caesar," he said. "This is the reign of the proletariat. The bourgeois must die! So ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various |
