Eugene V. Debs Quotes

The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose - especially their lives.

The general public knows practically nothing about the prison and appears to be little concerned about how it is managed and how prisoners are treated.

I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, some one else would lead you out.

The most heroic word in all languages is REVOLUTION.

Progress is born of agitation. It is agitation or stagnation.

You have got to unite in the same labor union and in the same political party and strike and vote together, and the hour you do that, the world is yours.

I would not be a Moses to lead you into the Promised Land, because if I could lead you into it, someone else could lead you out of it.

Nothing is more humiliating than to have to beg for work, and a system in which any man has to beg for work stands condemned. No man can defend it.

It is when you have done your work honestly, when you have contributed your share to the common fund that you begin to live.

Too long have the workers of the world waited for some Moses to lead them out of bondage... I would not lead you out if I could; for if you could be led out, you could be led back again. I would have you make up your minds there is nothing that you cannot do for yourselves.

The workers are the saviors of society, the redeemers of the race.

I would rather be arrested as a traitor than fight a war for Wall Street.

They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people.

Riches are the savings of many in the hands of one.

No war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people.

The class which has the power to rob upon a large scale has also the power to control the government and legalize their robbery.

The people can have anything they want, the only problem is they do not want anything.

I am not a capitalist soldier; I am a proletarian revolutionist. I do not belong to the regular army of the plutocracy, but to the irregular army of the people. I refuse to obey any command to fight from the ruling class, but I will not wait to be commanded to fight for the working class. I am opposed to every war but one; I am for that war with heart and soul, and that is the world-wide war of social revolution. In that war I am prepared to fight in any way the ruling class may make necessary, even to the barricades.

A prison is a cross section of society in which every human strain is clearly revealed.

Every one of the aristocratic conspirators and would-be murderers claims to be an arch-patriot; every one of them insists that the war is being waged to make the world safe for democracy. What humbug! What rot! What false pretense! These... tyrants, these red-handed robbers and murderers, the "patriots," while the men who have the courage to stand face to face with them, speak the truth, and fight for their exploited victims - they are [called] the disloyalists and traitors. If this be true, I want to take my place side by side with the traitors in this fight.

If I were hungry and friendless today, I would rather take my chances with a saloon-keeper than with the average preacher.

I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.

The rights of one are as sacred as the rights of a million.

The guns on the walls that surround the prison accurately, though unwittingly, index the true character of the penitentiary in our day.