Popular quotes about Masses! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 22
We got to face some facts. That the masses are poor, that the masses belong to what you call the lower class, and when I talk about the masses, I'm talking about the white masses, I'm talking about the black masses, and the brown masses, and the yellow masses, too. We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don't fight capitalism with no black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism.
Fred HamptonMoreover, if great men are the only hope of the Evolutionary Process, they are morally bound to rule over the masses for their own good -- we are all here on earth to help others: what on earth the others are here for, I don't know -- and the masses have no right whatsoever to resist them.
W. H. AudenThe only power deserving the name is that of masses, and of governments while they make themselves the organ of the tendencies and instincts of masses.
John Stuart MillNo government by experts in which the masses do not have the chance to inform the experts as to their needs can be anything but an oligarchy managed in the interest of the few. And the enlightenment must proceed in ways which force the administrative specialists to take account of the needs. The world has suffered more from leaders and authorities than from the masses. The essential need ... is the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion. That is the problem of the public.
John DeweyWe may perhaps learn to deprive large masses of their gravity and give them absolute levity, for the sake of easy transport.
Benjamin FranklinIt is the mark of our whole modern history that the masses are kept quiet with a fight. They are kept quiet by the fight because it is a sham-fight; thus most of us know by this time that the Party System has been popular only in the sense that a football match is popular.
Gilbert K. ChestertonThe direction and rhythm of human progress do not depend on the masses, even when they add up to hundreds of millions; they depend on superior minorities.
Gonzalo Fernandez de la MoraToday everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.
Pope FrancisThe masses will not vote for their own upliftment in a higher order of society. This has to be accomplished without their support and request, despite them and indeed against them. It is absurd to pivot your whole project, as does a conventional party, on the submission of change to the decision of those who so need to be changed. You might as well make the case for law and order conditional on the approval of the criminals.
Colin JordanIt is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist. But from the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason.
Lord ActonThe union of men in large masses is indispensable to the development and rapid growth of the higher faculties of men. Cities have always been the fireplaces of civilization whence light and heat radiated out into the dark cold world.
Theodore ParkerThe etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.
Ralph Waldo EmersonUntil today the rights of people have always been put forward by a few individuals acting in the name of the masses. Today instead of people no longer want to be represented; each wants to speak for himself and participate directly - it's the same for the Negroes, for the Jews, for women.
Indira GandhiThe slave power dares anything, and it can be conquered only by the united masses of the people. From Congress to the people, I appeal.
Charles SumnerIf you're born in America with a black skin, you're born in prison, and the masses of black people in America today are beginning to regard our plight or predicament in this society as one of a prison inmate.
Malcolm XThe ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves. A truth's initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed. It wasn't the world being round that agitated people, but that the world wasn't flat. When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.
Donald JamesDeep patriots don't just sing the song, 'America the Beautiful' and then go home. We actually stick around to defend Americaโs beauty -- from the oil spillers, the clear-cutters and the mountaintop removers. Deep patriots don't just visit the Statue of Liberty and send a postcard home to grandma. We defend the principles upon which that great monument was founded -- 'give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.'
Van JonesI set out to create a means whereby music could be a way of vindicating the rights of the masses.
Gustavo DudamelIt is one of the saddest spectacles of our time to see a great democratic movement support a policy which must lead to the destruction of democracy and which meanwhile can benefit only a minority of the masses who support it. Yet it is this support from the Left of the tendencies toward monopoly which make them so irresistible and the prospects of the future so dark.
Friedrich August von Hayek...I have had such a sickening of men in masses, and of causes, that I would not cross this room to reform parliament or prevent the union or to bring about the millennium. I speak only for myself, mind - it is my own truth alone - but man as part of a movement or a crowd is indifferent to me. He is inhuman. And I have nothing to do with nations, or nationalism. The only feelings I have - for what they are - are for men as individuals; my loyalties, such as they may be, are to private persons alone.
Patrick O'BrianCommunists should be the most farsighted, the most self-sacrificing, the most resolute, and the least prejudiced in sizing up situations, and should rely on the majority of the masses and win their support.
Mao ZedongIn their day, Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin represented the aspirations and demands of the exploited working masses, and the cause of socialism was inseparably linked with their names.
Kim Jong IlWe were being put somewhere interesting from being involved with analog, to working with digital. Those two worlds just collided and it felt great! That was probably the key inspiration in terms of me going on to not just making dub plates for my sound, but doing the unobvious and "selling out" to the masses. I subsequently got a record deal because of that.
Jazzie BMore and more, revolution has found itself delivered into the hands of its bureaucrats and doctrinaires on the one hand, and to the enfeebled and bewildered masses on the other.
Albert CamusMany people feel that mass acceptance and smooth socialization are desirable life paths for a young adultโฆ Many people are often wrongโฆ Donโt bother being nice. Being popular and well liked is not in your best interest. Let me be more clear; if you behave in a manner pleasing to most, then you are probably doing something wrong. The masses have never been arbiters of the sublime, and they often fail to recognize the truly great individual. Taking into account the publicโs regrettable lack of taste, it is incumbent upon you not to fit in.
Janeane GarofaloEach man had only one genuine vocation - to find the way to himself....His task was to discover his own destiny - not an arbitrary one - and to live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one's own inwardness.
Hermann HesseAll the means of action -- the shapeless masses -- the materials -- lie everywhere about us. What we need is the celestial fire to change the flint into the transparent crystal, bright and clear. That fire is genius.
Henry Wadsworth LongfellowThe fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures whoโin their grudge against traditional religion as the "opium of the masses"โcannot hear the music of the spheres.
Albert EinsteinThe long-run historical tendency of capitalism has not only been to increase real incomes more or less proportionately nearly all along the line, but to benefit the masses even more than the rich.
Henry HazlittLet us remember that we are all Indians eating Indian grain and salt, and living on the dumb Indian masses.
Mahatma GandhiI think the Grammys are nothing more than some gigantic promotional machine for the music industry. They cater to a low intellect and they feed the masses. They don't honor the arts or the artist for what he created. It's the music business celebrating itself.
Maynard James Keenanall government, whatever its forms or pretenses, is a dead weight that paralyzes the free spirit and activities of the masses.
Emma GoldmanThe history of a revolution is for us first of all a history of the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their own destiny.
Leon TrotskyThe history of mankind is a history of the subjugation and exploitation of a great majority of people by an elite few by what has been appropriately termed the 'ruling class'. The ruling class has many manifestations. It can take the form of a religious orthodoxy, a monarchy, a dictatorship of the proletariat, outright fascism, or, in the case of the United States, corporate statism. In each instance the ruling class relies on academics, scholars and 'experts' to legitimize and provide moral authority for its hegemony over the masses.
Ed CraneThe coral zoophyte may be leveled by transported masses swept over by the waters; yet like the trodden sod, it sprouts again, and continues to grow and flourish as before.
James Dwight DanaWhen I did 'Ugly Betty' it was very similar to working on 'Mad Men' - great group of people in their own little world. But I don't really see a lot of difference. Of course, on the cable shows, you can tackle subjects and be more specific, because networks have to appeal to the masses, but that's constantly changing and evolving.
Bryan BattThe welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.
Thomas SowellIn August, the large masses of berries, which, when in flower, had attracted many wild bees, gradually assumed their bright velvety crimson hue, and by their weight again bent down and broke their tender limbs.
Henry David ThoreauOur Twentieth Century has proved to be more cruel than preceding centuries, and the first fifty years have not erased all its horrors. Our world is rent asunder by those same old cave-age emotions of greed, envy, lack of control, mutual hostility which have picked up in passing respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, radical conflict, struggle of the masses, trade-union disputes.
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynThis is the equivalent of an โinternal showerโ. As the spring freshness born of the heavy rains and vast masses of melting snows on mountains in the hinterlands cause rivers to swell and rush turbulently onward to the sea, so too will your blood flow with renewed vigor as the direct result of your faithfully performing the Contrology exercises.
Joseph PilatesToday Satan rules the world. The masses no longer believe in God. And, yes, Satan is in the Vatican.
Gabriele AmorthSpirituality brings a class of men who lay exclusive claim to the special powers of the world. The immediate effect of this is a reaction towards materialism, which opens the door to scores of exclusive claims, until the time comes when not only all the spiritual powers of the race, but all its material powers and privileges are centred in the hands of a very few; and these few, standing on the necks of the masses of the people, want to rule them. Then society has to help itself, and materialism comes to the rescue.
Swami VivekanandaThe white man will keep on granting tokenism; a few big Negroes will get big jobs, but the black masses will catch hell as long as they stay in the white man's house.
Malcolm XThe literature is like that - they [unions] are constantly talking about the masses, the danger they pose, and how to control them. They understand what they're doing, and they're very class conscious. They press policies which work for their interests.
Noam Chomsky