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Proletariat   Listen
noun
Proletariat  n.  The indigent class in the State; the body of proletarians.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Proletariat" Quotes from Famous Books



... fact. Its task once terminated, the proletariat had been bled, supposedly as a measure of hygiene. The bourgeoisie, reassured, strutted about in good humor, thanks to its wealth and the contagion of its stupidity. The result of its accession to power had been the destruction ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... "social compact." ... Popular sovereignty. 3. Religious dissenters. 4. Industrial elements. a. The Industrial Revolution. Resulting in exportation, markets, and laissez-faire doctrines. b. The bourgeoisie (employers) ... The Third Estate. c. The proletariat ... Unorganized labor elements. C. The Revolutionary Period, 1789-1800. 1. Triumph of bourgeoisie over feudal aristocracy in France, 1789-1791. Limited monarchy. Mirabeau. 2. Increasing influence and rise to control of France of the Parisian proletariat. ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper

... he 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; ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing

... regard for the mayor than if he had been a professor in St. George's Hall. Now perhaps you begin to appreciate why I remarked that this was an occasion of more than ordinary interest. Can we doubt that word has gone round among the proletariat that their mayor has been insulted, and can we doubt that they will be at the opera house in full force to express their opinion of the committee? You see now my motive in coming. I am like the man that went to the animal show in the hope of seeing the lion eat the trainer. ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins

... intercourse, the pleasures of the intellect, scarcely existed outside the sphere of courts; for one effect of the Revival of Learning had been to make the acquisition of polite knowledge difficult, and the proletariat was less cultivated then than in the age of Dante. Men of ambition who desired to acquire a reputation whether as soldiers or as poets, as politicians or as orators, came to court and served their chosen prince in war or at the council-table, or even in ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds

... affair, little as 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

... of community music, viz., the community chorus. The development of the community chorus (and indeed to a certain extent, the whole movement to bring music and the other arts into the lives of the proletariat) is due to a combination of artistic and sociological impulses; and it undoubtedly owes its origin and success as much to the interest in the living and social problems of the middle and lower classes, which the recently developed science of sociology has aroused, as ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens

... might 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 above the crowd ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... 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

... and naturalists of America are decidedly opposed to the extermination of the grizzly bear. They feel that the wilds of North America are wide enough for the accommodation of many grizzlies, without crowding the proletariat. A Rocky Mountain without a grizzly upon it, or at least a bear of some kind, is only half a mountain,—commonplace and tame. Put one two-year-old grizzly cub upon it, and presto! every cubic yard of its local atmosphere reeks with romantic ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday

... 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 paved ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster

... not 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

... of extemporized seashore where little children 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

... 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 ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn

... fantastic though Shelley's dreams may appear, it is more than likely that some of them will be realized before we expect it. His passionate advocacy of what now is called "Feminism," his sublime revolutionary hopes for the proletariat, his denunciation of war, his arraignment of so-called "Law" and "Order," his indictment of conventional Morality, his onslaughts on outworn Institutions, his invectives against Hypocrisy and Stupidity, are not by any means the ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys

... 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 nearly as important as that the persons ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter

... proletariat. I heard from the plutocrats next day. Sim Eldredge dropped in on me. After much wriggling about the bush he intimated that he knew of Captain Jedediah's call and what ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln

... about Russian communism and the Bolshevik organization. Every military expedition against Russia signified giving the people the conviction that it was desired not to fight an enemy but to suffocate in blood an attempt at a communist organization. I have always thought that the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is the dictatorship of ignorance and incapacity, would necessarily lead to disaster, and that hunger and death would follow violence. There are for the peoples great errors which must be carried ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti

... the premises of Materialism be true, there is no 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 for the consideration of the population question. ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant

... being honest, I tend rather to politics. Have I never told you that I take a leading part on the Continent in the great Class War now raging? And, by the way, has anyone let you know that it is only a matter of time before the present order of society is closed down, the rule of the proletariat established and people like Charles set on to clean ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 29th, 1920 • Various

... of landed proprietors on the one hand and a landless agricultural proletariat on ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson

... end 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 be interrupted by the shouting of populations; and he recalled ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett

... building called "The London Opera House"!' He thrust both hands out, palms upwards, as if the building itself rested on them. 'It stands in a commanding position, with statues of the great composers gazing from the roof at the passing proletariat emanating from the Strand. Inside it is luxuriously equipped, as ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter

... This vast proletariat is slowly cohering. Tribal feuds are being forgotten. The anti-colour laws of South Africa, and particularly of the north — which makes no difference between the savage Zulu fresh from his kraal and the stately Malay, between the Mashaangan and a man like Dr. Abdurahman himself — are welding ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje

... diction, should save him from falling into the hands of an 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 ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson

... this movement in elevated moral aims, as well as in the prominent part it assigned to women, was the Salvation Army. In 1861 William Booth, an English Methodist preacher, resigned his charge and devoted himself to the redemption of London's grossest proletariat. Deeming themselves not wanted in the churches, his converts set up a separate and more militant organization. In 1879 the Army invaded America, landing at Philadelphia, where, as in the Old Country and in other American cities, pitiable ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews

... 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 or ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill

... character. And here let me register my last attack upon Socialistic controversy, which is, that fundamentally it tends to degrade human character by adopting for, and applying to the manual workers of the world a contemptuous epithet. When Marx, if it was he, I am not sure, shouted: "Proletariat of all nations, unite" he said a very wicked thing. It is not my conception of the manual worker that he is a mere "child getter," but rather that he is as such, morally and socially the equal of any of us, ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams

... Promised Land 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, dubious conquest of equal rights for all men will grow the might of justice, of ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau

... been described above between human power and its failure to satisfy human want. The nineteenth century brought with it the factory and the factory slavery of the Lancashire children, the modern city and city slum, the plutocracy and the proletariat, and all the strange discrepancy between wealth and want that has disfigured the material progress of the last hundred years. The rising splendor of capitalism concealed from the dazzled eye the melancholy spectacle of the new industrial poverty ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock

... expect you to profit by associating with the survivors of our good American society—people such as one could once meet everywhere when I was young, but who have been destroyed by the invasion of the proletariat. You are in the last citadel of good-breeding. By the way, find out, if you can, if any of the Bombo connection are extant; as through them I should like, if possible, to establish a chapter of the Scions in South Carolina. Have you, ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister

... were selected for their commercial value, and that the citizens of Rome should cease to be rulers of the Mediterranean basin could never have entered into Caesar's mind. The colonists were in many cases veterans who had served under Caesar, in others members of the city proletariat. We possess the charter of the colony planted at Urso in southern Spain under the name of Colonia Julia Genetiva Urbanorum. Of the two latter titles, the first is derived from the name of Venus Genetrix, the ancestress of the Julian ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... would have destroyed them by force of numbers if their minds had not been subjugated. As this process is in operation still, and can be studied at first hand not only in our Church schools and in the struggle between our modern proprietary classes and the proletariat, but in the part played by Christian missionaries in reconciling the black races of Africa to their subjugation by European Capitalism, we can judge for ourselves whether the initiative came from above or below. My object here is not to ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw

... indignant, and he invited the Government to 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, removed to the police headquarters, and ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin

... as we have seen, competing against one another for the right to live, none of the concessions are made to them now that were of old made to the group of them, but they count, and are judged, individually, amongst the millions of the English proletariat. "Inferiority" has come into their lives; it is expected of them to treat almost everybody else as a superior person. But the cruellest indignity of all is that, although we regard them as inferiors, we still look to them to admire and live up to our standards; ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt

... communist state are to keep in touch with the people. Marxism - the 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 society - communism. Marxism-Leninism - an expanded form of communism developed by Lenin from doctrines of Karl Marx; ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... industrialism leads to a crowded and fertile urban population, the extension of slavery, and all the resultant evils. It was a foretaste of what was seen during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when a sudden industrial expansion led to an enormously high birth-rate, a servile urban proletariat (that very word indicates, as Roscher has pointed out, that a large family means inferiority), and a consequent outburst of misery and degradation from which we ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... Well, Heaven was looking out for its own; it was not in the nature of things that a Pachuca should be trampled in the dust by the proletariat! Patiently, one after another, he tried the keys—ah, the right one at last! He turned it and the door opened. Pachuca chuckled delightedly; it pleased his whimsicality to think that so apparently unsurmountable a difficulty should be solved in so ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall

... imagines that this answer of his will satisfy any but the most bigoted Britain, I am content. Another question I would ask. Does not Mr. Allen think that if the capitalistic classes, who leave their burdens to be borne by the unhappy proletariat, were abolished wars would immediately cease? Does he not know that recently it was proved in Germany that the Krupps were found to be promoting war scares in France in the interests of their own infernal trade? And lastly does not history ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor

... farmer, that Atlas upon whose broad 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 ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... past is that of the bourgeoisie against feudalism, which finds its expression, according to him, particularly in the French Revolution. The one in the future is the revolution of the wage- earners, or proletariat, against the bourgeoisie, which is to establish the Socialist Commonwealth. The whole movement of history is viewed by him as necessary, as the effect of material causes operating upon human beings. He does not so much advocate ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell

... threw out hints of a yacht lying at Larchmont. He could see that she was vastly impressed by this vague talk, so he endorsed his pose by random insinuations concerning great wealth, and mentioned familiarly a few names that are handled reverently by the proletariat. It was Chandler's short little day, and he was wringing from it the best that could be had, as he saw it. And yet once or twice he saw the pure gold of this girl shine through the mist that his egotism had raised between him ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry

... the fundamental and irreconcilable conflict sure one day to arise between those who had accumulated wealth and those who had not. To gain their ends in one or another of these frivolous quarrels, each party in turn admitted to political influence section after section of what you call the proletariat; till in the year 3278 universal suffrage was granted, every man and woman over the age of twelve years [6] being entitled to a single and ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg

... 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 found ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various

... 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 and unsupported, ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw

... internationalism, and of the common interests of the proletariat against capitalism. But of what use is internationalism unless all the nations of the world are of the same mind? How shall it be safe for some nations to guide themselves by these fine sounding principles ...
— Between You and Me • Sir Harry Lauder

... any impulse in return. Nihilism, being based on the absence, real or supposed, of any political institutions worth preserving in Russia, cannot spread to the discontented populations of other countries. Even German socialism cannot borrow weapons or resources from a nation which has no large proletariat and whose industries are still in their infancy. In the nature of its government, the character of its people, and the problems it is called upon to solve, Russia stands, as she has always stood, alone, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various

... 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

... cannon and more small arms. They rake the loyalist Swiss and Germans with a murderous fire. The foreign troops fight to the last. They are killed or overwhelmed as the victorious commonalty take possession of the Square. Danton who has directed the proletariat is the ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon

... 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

... 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 moved by a determination to free ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams

... speciousness of argument, against which a clean vision rebels. The so-called patriotism which seeks expression in war for its own sake is alone intelligible to Shakespeare's pavement orators. "Let me have war, say I," exclaims the professedly patriotic spokesman of the ill-conditioned proletariat in Coriolanus; "it exceeds peace as far as day does night; it's spritely, waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible.... Ay, and it makes men hate one another." ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee

... 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 ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... 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 ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson

... 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 find favour ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson

... 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 ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol

... isn't. It's the 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? ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown

... knowledge of his 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, and that their oppressors are worthless ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood

... worse than was that of the slave. "It did not always pay to starve a slave, because if he died you might have to buy another one. Therefore the lot of the slave under a good master was in many respects better than that of the proletariat in our great cities."[98] "Poverty rather than property is the reward of labour to-day."[99] "Poverty is our reward for creating plenty, and the class that lives in luxury by exploiting our labour contemptuously informs us that the ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker

... the gendelettre pamphleteers. According to the author of the Monography, the pamphlet is the brochure masterpiece; and he himself is its most illustrious exponent. The Abbe de Lamennais does not know how to speak to the proletariat. He is not Spartacus enough, not Marat enough, not Calvin enough; he does not understand how to storm the positions of the ignoble bourgeoisie ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton

... running board and engine hood crowds of self-invited passengers. A British band was playing near the fountain. A line of helmets above the mass and wild cheers revealed French cavalry riding through, and, heralded by jeers and much applause came a procession of the proletariat, of odds and ends, soldiers and shop-girls, mechanics and street-sweepers and cabmen and students, carrying an effigy of the Kaiser ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... a heated debate Mr. Joshua Dredgwood, M.P., said that, in spite of the Parliament Act, the House of Lords still dominated the situation. If there was a General Election next week it would be fought on a cry of the Proletariat against the Peers. The entire Liberal Party rose to its feet and cheered the speaker for seven minutes, waving hats, order ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various

... mob rule in America are over," Golding declares. "It was no easy matter to wean the people of the fallacious idea that a proletariat could manage the finances of ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams

... stumpy little man mounted the tribune. He looked as if he were carrying a sack of coals on his back. He threw out his arms and clenched his fists. By Jove, he was comical! He had a Southern accent, and his delivery was full of defects. He spoke of the workers, of the proletariat, of social justice. It was magnificent; his voice, his gestures gripped one's very bowels; the applause nearly brought the house down. I said to myself "What he is doing, I'll do on the stage, and I'll do ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France

... of the law and law-enforcement 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 ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.

... distractions, can scarcely be classed as amusements. They are patent medicines. It has been well said that the Daily Mail has achieved what no other paper has ever achieved, in enabling some millions of the English proletariat to be whisked from the breakfast to the office table every day of the week and to forget in the ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell

... The ambassador of the proletariat—whose constituency filled the outer part of the shop, pressed their faces against the window and swayed with impatience across the street, and also seized a lamp-post for purposes of observation—rehearsed the terms of the advertisement with considerable accuracy and expounded them with various ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren

... after his fashion; a patriot of the narrow Roman type, reproduced in later days by Fletcher of Saltoun, whose ideal republic was an oligarchy, and who did not shrink from proposing to settle the proletariat difficulty by making the common people slaves. This is quite compatible with the fact revealed to us in the letters of Cicero, that Brutus was implicated, through his agents, in the infamous practice of ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith

... 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, ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant

... slender, frail, scholarly-looking man with a black beard and black-rimmed spectacles, said a few words in Russian, and then he talked for an hour in broken English, explaining how the Russians had won their way to freedom, and now would use it to set free the rest of the proletariat. And then came Comrade Schultze, of the Carpet Weavers' Union, assuring them that there was no need to go to war with Germany, because the German workers had been shown the way to freedom, and would follow very soon; Schultze knew, because his brother was editor of a Socialist ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair

... Middle Ages, the 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 ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons

... had just begun to exercise great influence upon the thinking mind of the European continents. The zeal and craving for knowledge displayed by the working people of those days can hardly be properly estimated, especially by the proletariat of this country, whose literature and source of knowledge chiefly consists of the daily papers. Workingmen, who worked ten and twelve hours in factories and shops, spent their evenings in study and reading of economic, political and philosophic works—Ferdinand Lassalle, ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various

... side with every jest was a bitter sigh, for he, too, had been deeply moved by new social ideals, and we talked much of the growing contrasts of rich and poor, of the suffering and loneliness of the farmer, the despair of the proletariat, and though I could never quite get him to perceive the difference between his program and ours (he was always for some vague socialistic reform), he readily admitted that land monopoly was the chief cause of poverty, and the ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... 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

... men even as Angel Guimera, the dramatist, a Catalan separatist who has been under surveillance for years, or Pere Aldavert, who has suffered imprisonment in Barcelona because of his opinions, while they speak for the proletariat, nevertheless have had scant sympathy for Ferrer's ideas. It would be interesting to know just to what extent these commend themselves to Pablo and Emiliano Iglesias and the ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja

... the door and laughed savagely. "You'll make no terms with the Black Caesar," he said. "This is the reign of the proletariat. The bourgeois ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various

... down into a sullen and unanimous conviction that the only remedy is world-wide destruction. We can say, as one said at the opening of the Cromwellian struggle, "God help the land where ruin must reform!" But the proletariat are desperate. They are ready, like the blind Samson, to pull down the pillars of the temple, even though they themselves fall, crushed to death amid the ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly

... agents 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 pursued ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot

... which, according to the "Times", "prolonged applause and cheers" from the Merchants and Manufacturers! The editor of the "Times" goes back to his office, and inspired by this episcopal eloquence writes a "leader" with the statement that: "We have no proletariat in America!" ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair

... to me, of 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

... 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 ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola

... friends were not sparing of their ideas, and it surprised them to see how little warmth he showed towards the new idol from the North: the rule of the proletariat. They had no timorous scruples or half-measures, they meant to make the world happy in their way—perhaps not in its own. At one stroke they decreed the suppression of all liberties in opposition to theirs; the fallen middle classes were not ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain

... as it may, I was dashed glad I had had the shrewdness to keep out of that second row. It might be unworthy of the prestige of a Wooster to squash in among the proletariat in the standing-room-only section, but at least, I felt, I was out of the danger zone. So thoroughly had Gussie got it up his nose by now that it seemed to me that had he sighted me he might have become personal about ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse

... though Society feel The Proletariat's heavy heel Its kibe approaching, Some luxuries yet are left to sing, The Opera-Box, the Row, the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 10, 1892 • Various

... the drab mass of cloth-capped humans who, at certain hours of the day, flood the streets of Bludston, and swarm on the roofs of clanging and shrieking tramcars, and on Saturday afternoons gather in clotted greyness on the football ground. He might have been sober and industrious-the proletariat of Bludston is not entirely composed of Buttons-but he would have taken the colour of his environment, and the world outside Bludston would never have heard of him. Paul, however, differed greatly from the little Buttons. They, ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke

... his head again; this seemed to be an occasion where unnecessary talking fell under interdiction; for that matter, Rellihan possessed only a vocabulary to use in talking down to the proletariat; he was debarred from telling these dignitaries to ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day

... are quite honest 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 ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward

... enterprise, just as America and Africa have been. The world has need of her raw materials, and is only interested in her people as potential cheap labour. Thus within the last few years something analogous to the proletariat and the bourgeoisie of Europe has come into existence in Russia. We may catch a glimpse of what these new classes are like from a recent book by Mr. Stephen Graham, called ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,

... "I had heard the Sov-world was the Utopia of the proletariat. However, gentlemen, Max Mainz is my friend as ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds

... darkest depths 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, in accents ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky

... we have been treated to accounts written by well-meaning ladies and gentlemen who have assumed clever disguises and have gone out to work—for a week or a month—among the proletariat. But can we thus learn anything new of the fundamental problems of working men, working women, working children? Something, perhaps, but not those great central problems of Hunger and Sex. We have been told that only those who themselves have suffered the pangs of ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger

... 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 capital by undertaking work for the great families, ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler

... stronghold, lay bare the inner workings of the System, the concentration of the wealth of the entire country in the hands of a few, by which the rich each year were becoming richer and the poor each year poorer. It would not be the first time a multi-millionaire had espoused the cause of the proletariat, but he would carry on the fight more vigorously than anyone had done. He would force an issue, make Greed disgorge its ill-gotten gains and accord to Labor its rightful place in the sun, its proper ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow

... another. The proletariat rose up and destroyed it. To mobs anything beautiful is offensive. Palaces looted, banks, museums, houses. The ignorant toying with hand grenades, thinking them sceptres. All the scum in the world boiling to the top. After the Red ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath

... automobiles that brought the guests from the station or from the estates up and down the valley. They were, for the most part, trades-people from the little towns—San Mateo, Redwood City—or the wives of the proletariat—or the servants of the neighboring estates. But, although, they grumbled and envied, they made no attempt to force their way in; it was only the light-fingered gentry the police at the great iron gates were ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... advised that the "War of World Conquest" was not likely to produce a dividend, because its name was against it. Cut out "Imperialism"; substitute another word, with just as many syllables and no less an imposing sound, "Proletariat"; call the thing "Class Warfare"; advertise it thoroughly and attract to it all the political egoists of disappointed ambition in the various countries of the enemy, and the German War Lords would find it no longer necessary to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 3, 1920 • Various

... was the growing conviction of the American masses during the closing decades of the nineteenth century that they were losing ground economically and in danger of sinking into the degraded condition of the proletariat and peasantry of the ancient and contemporary European world. Against the laborious tabulations of the apologists of capitalism we may adduce, as far superior and more convincing evidence of the economic tendency of the American people during the latter ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy

... whatever. And he sighed. It was the same sigh 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 ...
— The Son of His Mother • Clara Viebig

... at this period, was 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

... proletariat, conscious of its mission, raises herewith, in the name of humanity and civilization, the most fervent protest against this criminal action of the war party (Kriegshetzer). It (the Social Democratic Party) demands imperatively that the German Government should exercise all ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith

... educated people, more than the nation wanted and more than was tolerable for the sufferers themselves. Hence the class Bismarck called the abiturienten-proletariat, all the so-called hunger candidates, especially the Mr. Journalists, who are often broken-down scholars and a danger to us. This surplus, far too large as it is, is like an irrigation field that cannot soak up any more water, and it must be ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw

... 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. ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse

... proletariat," he said, "have shown no sign of wanting any rebellion at all, how can I predict when ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett

... Gaul, Spain, Africa, and Asia with the latest news of industrial and financial enterprises in all these sections. What a scurrying of feet there must have been through the streets when the first news reached Rome of the insurrection of the proletariat in Asia in 88 B.C., and of the proclamation of Mithridates guaranteeing release from half of their obligations to all debtors who should kill money-lenders! Asiatic stocks must have dropped almost ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott

... 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 to the opinion of the Press. By that time, moreover, ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell

... the ruined ramshackle port of 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. It is pathetic ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham

... to Mr. 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

... the 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, fair ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Jan. 9, 1892 • Various

... 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

... full of promise for literature as for industry. Our soil speaks to the millions of poor in the old countries of the world of boundless hope. Here there is no ancient system of social exclusiveness to fix a limit to the intellectual progress of the proletariat. Political freedom rests on a firm, broad basis of general education. Our political constitution is not alienated from the intellect of the country, but its successful working depends entirely on the ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot

... 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

... coronet was far too small, So small, that as he sauntered down White Hall Even the youthful Proletariat (Who probably mistook it for a Hat) Remarked on ...
— More Peers Verses • Hilaire Belloc

... rights that the bourgeois should not feast continually, and that the labouring proletariat might ...
— The Cause of it All • Leo Tolstoy

... thing but a flattering account of the literary classes on the continent. Those classes are held up as in a great measure perverted, empty, and dangerous. Niehl divides Society in Germany into four great classes, namely: the peasantry, the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie or middle class, and the proletariat, or mere laborers for wages. The last he regards as the decaying and corrupting class, a sort of scum in hot effervesence. This is, however, one of the classes that produce social movement; the other is the middle class; the conservative or stationary classes are the peasantry and aristocracy. ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various

... pointed out that Morris himself occupied the position of a capitalist employer, and who asked him to live up to his creed by divesting himself of his property and taking his place in the ranks of the proletariat. This argument is dealt with by Mr. Mackail,[54] who describes the steps which Morris took to admit his foremen to sharing the profits of the business, and defends him against the charge of inconsistency. Morris may not have thought out the ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore

... but exceedingly handsome woman, of twenty-seven or eight years, with fair hair and quiet brown eyes; and every detail of her dress, speech, and bearing averred that Edith Dexter was no humble scion of proletariat. Her polished yet reserved manners bespoke high birth and aristocratic associations; but something in the composed, sad countenance, in the listless drooping of the pretty head, hinted that she had long since spilt the rosy sparkling foam of her cup of life, and was patiently drinking ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson

... all these we must not forget the moral selection—which is really immoral or retrograde—made at present by capitalism in its struggle with the proletariat, and which favors the survival of those with servile characters, while it persecutes and strives to suppress all those who are strong in character, and all who do not seem disposed to tamely submit to the yoke of ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri

... 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, that accounted ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald

... as often as twice every three years, is the pearl-fishery. It interests everybody not living in mountain fastnesses, and appeals irresistibly to the hearts of the proletariat. Tricking elephants into captivity may be the sport of grandees, but the chance to gamble over the contents of the humble oyster of the Eastern seas invites participation from the meekest plucker of tea-buds on Ceylon's hill-slopes to the lowliest coolie in Colombo. ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield

... For it must be understood that the "red wing" of the Anarchists is a very small section of the body of philosophers known as Anarchists. There is no doubt that those of the dynamite section are practically insane. They are "impulsives"; they were outraged and they revolted before birth. Most of the proletariat take their thrashing lying down. There are some who cannot do that. It is out of these who are not meek and do not inherit even standing-room on the earth that such as "Matthieu" comes. Perhaps it may not be out ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith

... one optical illusion, they've got another, Max. Over there they claim the proletariat owns the means of production. Great. But the Party members are the ones who control it, and, as a result they manage to do all right for themselves. The Party hierarchy over there are like ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds

... impertinent." I looked at her humbly, and she looked at me without the slightest expression. Oh, it was all very well for the Countess de Vassart to tuck up her skirts and rake hay, and live with a lot of half-crazy apostles, and throw her fortune to the proletariat and her reputation to the dogs. She could do it; she was Eline Cyprienne de Trecourt, Countess de Vassart; and if her relatives didn't like her views, that was their affair; and if the Faubourg Saint-Germain emitted moans, that concerned the noble faubourg and not James ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

... 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 give audience to a poor devil ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton

... this is certain, no secure civilization can be built in the South with the Negro as an ignorant, turbulent proletariat. Suppose we seek to remedy this by making them laborers and nothing more: they are not fools, they have tasted of the Tree of Life, and they will not cease to think, will not cease attempting to ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various

... intensification of our present specialisation of labour as labour, or are we to set to work steadfastly upon a vast social reconstruction which will close this widening breach and rescue our community from its present dependence upon the reluctant and presently insurgent toil of a wages-earning proletariat? Regarded as a project of social development, Syndicalism is ridiculous; regarded as an illuminating and unintentionally ironical complement to the implicit theories of our present social order, it is worthy of close attention. The dream of the Syndicalist ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells



Words linked to "Proletariat" :   labor force, labor, labour, proletarian, social class, socio-economic class, lumpenproletariat, prole, worker



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