"Proletarian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 class. In the same way no mercy can be shown to the Social Revolutionaries who, while professing allegiance to definite proletarian domination, shrink from definite action now that the time for ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... gaily. "There's a pretty little park at the end, but it's very proletarian, and nobody you and I know will be more likely to see us there than on ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... Kearney himself open his subscription for a gallows, name the manufacturers who were to grace it with their dangling bodies, and read aloud to the delighted multitude a telegram of adhesion from a member of the State legislature: all which preparations of proletarian war were (in a moment) breathed upon and abolished by the mere name and fame of Mr. Coleman. That lion of the Vigilantes had but to rouse himself and shake his ears, and the whole brawling mob was silenced. I could not but reflect what a strange manner of man this was, to be living unremarked ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... syndicalism, he had assailed the parliamentary corruption of Reformist Socialism with the idealistic postulates of revolution and violence. Then, later, on leaving the party and in defending the cause of intervention, he had come to oppose the illusory fancies of proletarian internationalism with an assertion of the infrangible integrity, not only moral but economic as well, of the national organism, affirming therefore the sanctity of country for the working classes as for other classes. Mussolini ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... of the proletarian's failure to whoop for free speech is to be found in his barbarous delight in persecution, regardless of the merits of the cause. The spectacle of a man exercising the right of free speech yields, intrinsically, ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... 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 ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... Democrats, or believers in the Popular Will, such, for example, as the leaders of the French Revolution, the apologists for the Russian Soviet, and the men from whose lips the words "Proletariat" and "Proletarian" are constantly falling, do not, when it comes to the point, want to obey the Will of the Majority of the whole People, but only the majority of a certain arbitrarily selected section of the people. They are, in fact, willing to recognise the Will of the People only when this accords ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... began to use his pirates as a commentary on the injustice and hypocrisy of contemporary English society. Among Defoe's gallery of pirates are Captain White, who refused to rob from women and children; Captain Bellamy, the proletarian revolutionist; and captain North, whose sense of justice and honesty was a rebuke to the corruption of government under Walpole. But the fictional Captain Misson, the founder of a communist utopia, is by far the most original of ...
— Of Captain Mission • Daniel Defoe
... Congress Party for Madagascar Independence - Renewal (AKFM-Fanavaozana), and some 12 other parties, trade unions, and religious groups; Militant Party for the Development of Madagascar (PMDM/MFM), formerly the Movement for Proletarian Power, Manandafy RAKOTONIRINA; Confederation of Civil Societies for Development (CSCD), Guy Willy RAZANAMASY; Association of United Malagasys (Famima); Rally for ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... nominal, 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
... already commenced, i.e., the downfall of English supremacy. If the war hastens and concludes this process, then the sacrifices in blood and treasure will not have been in vain. A great stumbling-block to human progress and especially to the proletarian fight for freedom will have been hurled out ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... of consanguineous marriages, we have seen to what extent the conception of incest should be limited, in respect to civil law. The grave cases of incest are those between parents and children. Their normal causes are mental anomalies, alcoholism, proletarian promiscuity, or isolation of a family in some remote place. Incest is common, in Switzerland especially, among the inhabitants of isolated mountain chalets. I will give a few typical and genuine examples of incest giving ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... 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 of carbons for the arc-lights, familiarly ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... 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 ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... substitution of servitude for slavery. The formation of the Bourgeoise class was a progress from servitude. But he who at the present day should attempt to recede towards slavery and servitude, and presumptuously endeavor to perpetuate the exclusion of the proletarian from the rights and benefits of the social organization, would prove himself the enemy of all civilization, past and future, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... novelists 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 in stating ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 17, 1920 • Various
... 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 ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... 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 dynasty, ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... and the notion 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 ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... man, an employer or "boss," or at least a chance to bide his time until a satisfactory alternative has presented itself for his choice. The French peasants in 1871 who flocked to the army of the government of Versailles to suppress the Commune of Paris (the first attempt in history of a proletarian dictatorship), did so because they felt that were the workingmen to triumph and abolish private property, they, the peasants, would lose a support in their daily struggle for life for the preservation of which it was worth endangering life itself. And having acquired relative protection in their ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... Baldwin for Mackenzie seem to have been closely akin to those entertained by Sir John Falstaff for the troops with whom he declared that he would not march through Coventry. Mackenzie's noisy verbosity and self-assertion offended the patrician instincts of Mr. Baldwin, to whom, indeed, the little proletarian was altogether distasteful and repulsive. This feeling, however, seems to have been due to the antipathetic natures of the two men, rather than to any mere feeling of exclusiveness on the part of Mr. Baldwin. They ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... to continue his work without a day's intermission. Even though the proletarians of all lands were to become "class conscious," and obey the call of Marx by uniting to carry the Class struggle to a proletarian victory in which all capital should become common property, and all Monarchs, Millionaires, Landlords and Capitalists become common citizens, the triumphant proletarians would have either to starve in Anarchy the ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... truth was, that, outside of the cities and large towns, there were no poor from whom to form a party. Degrees of wealth, and of means below wealth, there were, and there were poor men; but there was no class of poor people, and hence no material from which to form a proletarian party. In all our great party-conflicts the wealth and talents of the country were not far from equally divided, the wealth and ability of the South being mostly with the democratic party, while those of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... carried a light 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 re-read ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... to prosecute a big corporation lawyer, if he thought he had any chance of getting a conviction," Pierre said. "Make a nice impression on the proletarian vote in the south ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... son?" But Jesus's manner throughout is that of an aristocrat, or at the very least the son of a rich bourgeois, and by no means a lowly-minded one at that. We must be careful therefore to conceive Joseph, not as a modern proletarian carpenter working for weekly wages, but as a master craftsman of royal descent. John the Baptist may have been a Keir Hardie; but the Jesus of Matthew is of ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... Socialism; it is a vote against identification of the Socialist Party with the revolutionary mass aspirations. A vote for Berger is a betrayal of all the efforts, sacrifices and dreams of those whose lives have gone into the socialist movement as torch-bearers of proletarian triumph over capitalist exploitation, from Marx to the humblest comrade fighting today in the ranks ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... hardly an editor in the South who does not regard it as so much robbery of the tax-payers to support schools for the colored people—for the proletarian classes generally, white and colored. They stoutly maintain that these people really add nothing to the stock of wealth, really produce nothing, and that, therefore charity can become no more magnanimous than when it gives, places in reach of, the poor man the opportunity ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... "A proletarian movement can have no part, however slight, in the game of politics. The moment it takes a seat at that grimy board is the moment it dies within. After that, it may for a time maintain a semblance of life and motion, but in truth it is ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... Louise, with inward wonder that she had not thought of it. His self-possession did not comport with his threadbare clothes any more than his neat accent and quiet tone comported with the proletarian character she had assigned him. She decided that he must be a walking-delegate, and that he had probably come on mischief from some of the workpeople in her father's employ; she had never seen a walking-delegate before, but ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... last week a man—a regular man, neither a decided proletarian nor a typical bourgeois—but just a man was walking along. He was dressed in average clothes, he was shaved and carried a suit case and didn't look out of work and was ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... he has good brains. It's from just such fellows that the real proletarian intellectuals ought to grow up—men to take our places when we leave for the region where evidently there are no class antagonisms. But, ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... 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 ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... 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 refrigerators and air conditioners; ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... are 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;) ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... of 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 moment for ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 on its way to the Hotel-Dieu; or the last sacrament, ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... posterity—can not inherit the fruits of time and dead men's toil as animals inherit the wild fruits of the earth, to fight about them and to devour them, but only as trustees for the generations to come; it will know and will teach that "capitalistic" lust to keep for SELF and "proletarian" lust to get for SELF are both of them space-binding lust—animal lust—beneath the level of time-binding life. The economics of humanity's manhood will know and will teach that the characteristic energies of man as man are by nature civilizing energies, wealth-producing energies, ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... our wealth is to maim us. There is nothing humiliating in such an avowal. It is merely an assertion of the integrity of one's life and work. As a matter of fact no class is so well fitted to face the threat of a proletarian revolution as we harmless rich. It is the class that produces generals, explorers, inventors, statesmen. A social revolution with its stern attendant regimentation would bear most heavily on the relatively undisciplined class of working people. The disciplined ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... general concourse might have been discovered two or three representatives of the wage-earning multitude which Kingsmill depended upon for its prosperity, but their presence was due to exceptional circumstances; the College provided for proletarian education by a system of evening classes, a curriculum necessarily quite apart from that followed by the regular students. Kingsmill, to be sure, was no nurse of Toryism; the robust employers of labour who sent ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... this sense. These classes are, of course, not new to our civilization, but are rather perennial types of human nature, appearing under one or another name and guise in every age. To the puritan, art is immoral; to the philistine, it is useless; to the proletarian, it ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... beauty, which stood towering there before the fire—so simple; so utterly unconscious of the innate nobleness and grace which shone out from every motion of those stately limbs and features—all the delicacy which blood can give, combined, as one does sometimes see, with the broad strength of the proletarian—so different from poor me!—and so different, too, as I recollected with perhaps a savage pleasure, from the miserable, stunted specimens of over-bred imbecility whom I had often passed in London! A strange question that of birth! and one in which ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... Paraguay," which yields the well-known mate, or Paraguayan tea. In this industry he was eminently successful. His amiable manners and inoffensive character attracted the notice of his neighbours, the Guarani Indians—a peaceful tribe of proletarian habits—and soon a colony of these collected around him, entering his employ, and assisting him in the establishment of an extensive "yerbale," or tea-plantation, which bid ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... 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
... Syndicalist philosopher, Georges Sorel, who insists, quite in the German manner, on the purifying and invigorating effects of "a great foreign war," although, very unlike the German professors, he holds that "a great extension of proletarian violence" will do ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... therefore a continually greater and greater 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
... kings were 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. ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... never saw such a petard of 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 ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the twentieth century broke in Russia in 1905. The Russian Revolution of 1917 destroyed the old regime and replaced it first by a moderate or liberal and then by a radical communist control. Like all of the proletarian movements in Europe the Russian revolutionary movement was directed against "capitalism" and "imperialism" and despite the fact that there was no considerable development of the capitalist system in Russia, its imperial organization was so ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... scheme on paper, but in actual practice it fell down. St. Ursula's was situated in an affluent district given over to the estates of the idle rich, and the proletarian who clung to the skirts of these estates was amply provided with an opportunity to work. In the early days, when the school was small, there had been sufficient poor children to go round; but as St. Ursula's had grown, the poor ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... arrest to their 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 ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... if we 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 ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... To them, just as much as to the scholar who has learned by study the relativity of ethics, current morality has ceased to appeal. It is idle to talk of the will of God, or of abstract, absolute ideas of right and wrong to the sociological scholar and the proletarian ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... 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 Angeles. Here, toiling in the day-time, ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... 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 tool of ...
— The Communist Manifesto • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
... say that the disgusting falsehoods spread by the Press in this respect were of no effect The men themselves gave in, and their perfectly just demands were defeated, mainly because middle-class opinion and a great deal of proletarian opinion as well had been led to believe that the builders' cessation of labour was a strike due to their own initiative against existing conditions, and thought the operation of such an initiative immoral in time ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... beside 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 in cool water like a boy playing "hookey" from school. ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... in the streets is quite as great as in our large towns; few are so shabby in clothes as the unemployed or half-employed workmen and labourers in Edinburgh; and a proletarian class, half-naked and in rags, is not to be seen. The supply of clothing material for the middle and lower classes seems as great, whether we look at the people themselves or at the second or third rate class of shops with goods for their ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey |
