"Proletariat" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... latter say that drink leads to poverty; the former say that poverty leads to drink. I can only wonder at their either of them being content with such simple physical explanations. Surely it is obvious that the thing which among the English proletariat leads to poverty is the same as the thing which leads to drink; the absence of strong civic dignity, the absence of an instinct that ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... course, their exploiters were a lot of heartless villains, so that made the slaves good and virtuous innocents. That was your real, fundamental, mistake. You know, Obray, the downtrodden and long-suffering proletariat aren't at all good or innocent or virtuous. They are just incompetent; they lack the abilities necessary for overt villainy. You saw, this afternoon, what they were capable of doing when they were given an opportunity. ...
— A Slave is a Slave • Henry Beam Piper
... heat, wallowing along the gutters, dodging teams and cars, as they essayed to play, setting off a few premature firecrackers and mocking the police—all in all, leading the ugly, unnatural, destructive life of all children of the city proletariat. ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... demoralized and desperate, and the idlers, becoming demoralized and worthless, who think themselves a privileged class, born with a right to live in everlasting idleness upon the toil of those who are not thus well born. This division into the aristocracy, the proletariat, and the middle class struggling to become the aristocracy, does not make a republic. It is an ancient falsehood and injustice established by absurd laws of inheritance (as absurd as the Hindoo castes), which have cursed the world, and will continue to ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... The race hatred so deeply rooted in human nature added to the ferocity of the class conflict. Both sides were ruined by the war which, beginning in 1519, dragged along for several years until the proletariat was ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... of the earlier time a state which was adapted merely for purposes of war might easily be found to work satisfactorily enough, but a more complex order of things had now arisen. Social problems had begun to crop up; for the poor and the proletariat the protection of a thoughtful government had come to be required, but was ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... Why the rights that the bourgeois should not feast continually, and that the labouring proletariat might reap the rewards ...
— The Cause of it All • Leo Tolstoy
... 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, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Jan. 9, 1892 • Various
... slammed 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 must die! So ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... the sixteenth century. In the covered galleries, as they were originally, the richer burgesses were buried, though not one of their memorial stones remains; into the open space were flung the poor proletariat, who had gone through life marked with a yellow cross upon their arms, and found in death an undistinguished and promiscuous burial. Looking down upon them all in their last troubled sleep, were the figures carved in high relief ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... background of London, the stories one heard of privation and sweating, only joined up very slowly with the general propositions I was making about life. We could become splendidly eloquent about the social revolution and the triumph of the Proletariat after the Class war, and it was only by a sort of inspiration that it came to me that my bedder, a garrulous old thing with a dusty black bonnet over one eye and an ostentatiously clean apron outside the dark mysteries that clothed her, or the cheeky little ruffians who yelled papers about ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... word he glanced at Markelov, but the latter did not stir). He then turned to Nejdanov and began speaking of himself in no less glowing terms than the distinguished correspondent Kisliakov, saying that he had long ago ceased being a fool, that he fully recognised the rights of the proletariat (he remembered this word splendidly), that although he had actually given up commerce and taken to banking instead with a view to increasing his capital, yet only so that this same capital could at any given moment ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... we could 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 ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... aroused to the 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 ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... with the modern fever of unrest. It has its bourgeoisie, its proletariat, its radicals, but also a city-beautiful association and a rather captious sanitary league. Lately a visiting radical, on the occasion of a certain patriotic celebration, expressed a conventional wish to spit upon the abundantly displayed flag. A knowing friend was ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... 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 ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... found himself everywhere at home. Yet the Society took but little interest in elementary or popular education. Their object was to gain possession of the nobility, gentry, and upper middle class. The proletariat might remain ignorant; it was the destiny of such folk to be passive instruments in the hands of spiritual and temporal rulers. Nor were they always scrupulous in the means employed for taking hold on young men of distinction. One instance ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... and it's quite superfluous, still it may be admitted in a well-ordered state." He seems, however, to think very little about Petersburg and comme il faut: he once even called himself one of the proletariat. 'We are working people,' he said; I thought if Dmitri had said that, I shouldn't have liked it; but he may talk about himself, he may boast if he likes. With me he is very attentive; but I kept feeling that a very, very condescending ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... consent of the governed. I believe there has been as yet discovered no other basis of government so safe, so stable as popular suffrage, but the fathers never contemplated a suffrage without intelligence. It is a contradiction of terms. A proletariat without any political rights in a republic is no more dangerous than an unintelligent mob which can be used in elections by demagogues. Universal suffrage is not a universal panacea; it may be the best device attainable, but it is certain of abuse without ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Our sources of information concerning the division of the Roman republic into a moneyed oligarchy, and the proletariat are very numerous. Compare infra, 205. The speeches of the Gracchi (e.g. Plut., T. Gracchus, 9), and still more the violent discourses of Catiline's conspiracy (Sallust, Cat., 20, 23, 37-39), remind us very forcibly of the ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... the almighty arbiters. Your superior wisdom is going to lead poor blind mankind up the road to heaven. I say it's down the road to hell! The last century saw the dictatorship of the elite and the dictatorship of the proletariat. This one seems to be birthing the dictatorship of the intellectuals. I don't like ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... changes of their life bring interest: a job found, a shilling saved, a dainty earned, all these are wells of pleasure springing afresh for the successful poor; and it is not from these but from the villa-dweller that we hear complaints of the unworthiness of life. Much, then, as the average of the proletariat would gain in this new state of life, they would also lose a certain something, which would not be missed in the beginning, but would be missed progressively and progressively lamented. Soon there would be a looking back: there would be tales of the old world humming in ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Delegates has issued an appeal to the proletariat, which contains the following striking passage: We shall defend our liberty to the utmost against all attacks within and without. The Russian revolution will not quail before the bayca fwyaa, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 11, 1917 • Various
... parading his impudent debaucheries through Milan and Venice as the Pope's Legate. It was rumored, but never well authenticated, that the Venetians helped his death by poison.[5] The sensual indulgences of every sort in which this child of the proletariat, suddenly raised to princely splendor, wallowed for twenty-five continuous months, are enough to account for his immature death without the hypothesis of poisoning. With him expired a plan which might have ended in making the Papacy a secular, hereditary kingdom. During his stay ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... possessing the Russian form of government. James Connolly, who is largely responsible for the present Labor party in Ireland, was, like Lenin and Trotsky, a Marxian socialist, and worked for government by the proletariat. The Irish Labor party celebrated the Russian revolution by calling a "bolshevik" meeting and cheering under a red flag in the assembly room of the Mansion House. And in its last congress, it reaffirmed its "adherence to the principles ...
— What's the Matter with Ireland? • Ruth Russell
... 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
... begins with the wonderful retail markets of San Francisco, and then changes abruptly to all sorts of sociological problems, then before we know it gives us a beautiful marine view, and then drops us down where the proletariat lives, then up to the homes of the rich and mighty, and ends ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... principle of enormously overpaying its judges and lawyers. The natural result has been to give our law courts and the legal profession generally a bias in favour of private wealth against both the public interest and the proletariat. It has also given our higher national education an overwhelming direction towards the training of advocates and against science and constructive statecraft. An ordinary lawyer has no idea of making anything; that tendency has been destroyed in his mind; he waits ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... in his ears. Music of all kinds that could be tortured from brass, reed, hide or string, fought in the air to grain space for its vibrations against its competitors. But what held Blinker in awful fascination was the mob, the multitude, the proletariat shrieking, struggling, hurrying, panting, hurling itself in incontinent frenzy, with unabashed abandon, into the ridiculous sham palaces of trumpery and tinsel pleasures, The vulgarity of it, its brutal overriding of all the ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... just two months. The Duma had not made the revolution, and the middle classes for which it stood were weak in numbers and prestige. The vast mass of the Russian people consisted of peasants who were illiterate and unorganized, and cared for little but the land. The urban proletariat, not having been educated by the Government, had partially educated itself in the abstract socialism of Karl Marx, Lavrov, and Tolstoy. The Extremists followed Marx and were called Social Democrats; but they had themselves split into two sections, ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... classes, humbler classes, humbler orders; vulgar herd, common herd; rank and file, hoc genus omne[Lat]; the many, the general,the crowd, the people, the populace, the multitude, the million, the masses, the mobility, the peasantry; king Mob; proletariat; fruges consumere nati[Lat], demos, hoi polloi [Grk][Grk][Grk], great unwashed; man in the street. mob; rabble, rabble rout; chaff, rout, horde, canaille; scum of the people, residuum of the people, dregs of the people, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... 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 ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... suggests Rome, the 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 ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... unintentionally, by providing me with a job. Whilst the Edison Telephone Company lasted, it crowded the basement of a huge pile of offices in Queen Victoria Street with American artificers. These deluded and romantic men gave me a glimpse of the skilled proletariat of the United States. They sang obsolete sentimental songs with genuine emotion; and their language was frightful even to an Irishman. They worked with a ferocious energy which was out of all proportion to the actual result achieved. Indomitably resolved to assert their ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... the youth, turned man, finds himself sickening with his prize in his hands and looks about him for some clue to the meaning of the mad world in which he has succeeded without satisfaction. Sam McPherson, after a futile excursion through the proletariat in search of the peace which he has heard accompanies honest toil, settles down to the task of bringing up some children he has adopted and thus of forcing himself "back into the ranks of life." Beaut McGregor, refusing a handsome future at the bar, sets out to organize the ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... presented by the modern era, from the strange paradox that has 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 that lay ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... whom were the Toomeys, occupied the several rows of reserved chairs and smiled tolerantly upon the efforts of the performers, and the proletariat stamped and whistled through its teeth and cracked peanuts, a man muffled to the ears by the high collar of a mackinaw coat, his face further concealed by the visor of a cap and ear-laps, rode to the top of the bench, drew rein and looked down ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... moved by the faith that they can win their bread and a little honor outside the framework of our Jewish business futilities. Today they must be filled with despair, they constitute the foundation of a frightful over-educated proletariat. But it is to these that all my love belongs, and I am just as set on increasing their number as you are set on diminishing it. It is in them that I perceive the latent power of the Jewish people. ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... burden, obeying the race command of one who may be his personal inferior. It is difficult to convey to one who has never known this distinction the way in which the very atmosphere is charged with it in South East Africa. A white oligarchy, every member of the race an aristocrat; a black proletariat, every member of the race a server; the line of cleavage as clear and deep as the colours. The less able and vigorous of our race, thus protected, find here an ease, a comfort, a recognition to which their personal worth would never entitle them ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... his mouth thin: his cheeks are shrunken: his arms and legs are long and he has a curious way of stuffing his clenched fists into his trousers pockets. Some one has called him the Mirabeau of the Australian Proletariat. Certainly he looks it. He has a nervous energy almost beyond belief. By birth, temperament, experience and point of view he is a firebrand, but with this difference: he is a Human ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... Waldron observed Sunday. He held no definite religious opinions; but inclined to a vague idea that it was seemly to go, because it set a good example and increased your authority. He believed that church-going was a source of good to the proletariat, and though he did not himself accept the doctrine of eternal punishment, since it violated all sporting tenets, he was inclined to think that acceptation of the threat kept ignorant people straight and made them better members of society. He held that the parson and squire must ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... prosperity of our export trade at this period; and conversely, the prosperity of our export trade was necessary to the existence of the new inhabitants. Capitalism is the cause of our dense population; and the proletariat would infallibly cut their own throats by ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... the downtrodden. This explains why he is so often a radical. Much of this vehemence in radicalism is due to the fact that he feels he is getting even with the snobs of the world—the plutocrats—when he furthers the causes of the proletariat. ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... 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 ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... 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 ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... 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 ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... beginning to be recognised. England is the classic soil of this transformation, which was all the mightier, the more silently it proceeded; and England is, therefore, the classic land of its chief product also, the proletariat. Only in England can the proletariat be studied in all its relations and ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... sturdy young men with the necessary Ghetto taint.' Of the four great Labour Parties, he proceeded to recommend the P.S.D. as the most promising for David's purposes. 'Not the Bolshewiki faction,' he added, 'but the Menshewiki. Recruits might also be found in the Proletariat ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... but in comprehensiveness of thought and in the rational development of the story, none will bear comparison with the Florentines. The rule of the nobility, the tyrannies, the struggles of the middle class with the proletariat, limited and unlimited democracy, pseudo-democracy, the primacy o? a single house, the theocracy of Savonarola, and the mixed forms of government which prepared the way for the Medicean despotism all are so described that the inmost motives of the actors are laid bare to the light. At length ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... 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 ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... the proletariat is? They are the men who have collectively an affection for peace and a horror for war. The chauvinists, the nationalists, &c., are men who have collectively an affection for war and carnage. When they feel, however, over their heads the ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... proposed to enter was so crowded that pleaders are said to have been competing with each other to obtain cases by a kind of Dutch auction regarding fees, and also to promote litigation wilfully in order to obtain a living. It is from a kind of "intellectual proletariat" in all countries, that dangerous political agitators are drawn who take up political life not to improve the conditions of their fellows, but to find some sort of a career for themselves, having no ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... and in the peasant courts one hears, 'Two hundred lashes or stand us a bucket of vodka.' Oh, this generation has only to grow up. It's only a pity we can't afford to wait, or we might have let them get a bit more tipsy! Ah, what a pity there's no proletariat! But there will be, there will be; ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... take one's stand, for satisfaction of desire, on the money which one happened to have but which the majority bitterly and emptily lacked. Some common way there had to be, some freedom all might grasp, a liberty not for the bourgeois only, but for the proletariat—the poor, the sad, the gay proletariat, who also grew old and lost their dreams, and had not the wherewithal to drug their souls, unless indeed they drank much liquor, and that is but a poor ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... read—Pericles Priam had seen to that, because he wanted him to attend to the printing of his circulars and his advertisements in the country newspapers where he was traveling. So now Peter was penned in a corner and compelled to fix his attention upon "The A. B. C. of Socialism," or "Capital and Proletariat," or ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... hostile camps, and in such conditions freedom is a vain word. The Radical begins by demanding a greater extension of political rights, but he soon sees that the breath of liberty leads to the uplifting of the proletariat, and then he turns round, changes his opinions, and reverts to repressive legislation and government ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... influence of time. Figures are the providence of history. Undoubtedly there are other elements in human progress; but in the multitude of hidden causes which agitate nations, there is none more powerful or constant, none less obscure, than the periodical explosions of the proletariat against property. Property, acting by exclusion and encroachment, while population was increasing, has been the life-principle and definitive cause of all revolutions. Religious wars, and wars of conquest, when they have stopped short of the extermination of races, have been only ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... Sunday to the world in general, been literally given. It would have been extremely embarrassing to the Managing Committee and all the office-bearers, and would have, I fear, deeply exasperated and offended the occupants of those family pews; but fortunately this difficulty never did occur. The proletariat of Marylebone had not the sense or the courage, or the profanity, which you will, to hit upon this mode of warming themselves. The real congregation embraced none of the unwashed multitude. Its value in mere velvet, silk, lace, trinkets, and furs was something amazing, and the amount these comfortable ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... penny paper that Lightener bought, the paper with leanings toward the proletariat, the veiled champion of ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... which lingered in my mind for weeks. Side by 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 ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... 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 prove that Britain ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... an invitation for you, Colonel." He was in one of his gently sparkling moods. "Get into your armor asinorum, for we fare forth to make contest with tinsel and gauze. In other words, we mingle with the proletariat. We go to see Margaret Anglin and Henry Miller in that superb and realistic Western libel, 'The ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... value of the man may now be permitted to fall to its natural level. Finally, when the growth of population has made land so dear that common laborers in freedom cannot save enough to buy farms, the occasion for slavery and serfdom lapses. Laborers may now be freed to become a wage-earning proletariat, to take their own risks. An automatic coercion replaces the systematic; the labor stimulus is intensified, but the stress of the employer is diminished. The laborer does not escape from coercion, but merely exchanges one of its forms ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... "Aren't sorry I came, are you? This is Saturday. Times have changed. Maybe you don't know. Proletariat's riding high." ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... will be the best line to take. Make 'em ridiculous. And don't forget to convey the idea of the whole business being plutocratic. You know the sort of thing: Park Lane Israelites, scooping millions, at the expense of the overtaxed proletariat in England. Jingoism, a sort of swell bucket-shop business—you know the tone. None of your heroics, mind you. It's got to be news; but you can work in the ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... 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
... them, and they quickly became her best watch-dogs. The Ministers of the middle-class called themselves Socialists, lured away and annexed to their own party the most intelligent and vigorous of the working-class: they robbed the proletariat of their leaders, infused their new blood into their own system, and, in return, gorged them with indigestible science and ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... 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 ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... Parisian insurrection of June, 1848—the first great battle between Proletariat and Bourgeoisie—drove again into the background, for a time, the social and political aspirations of the European working class. Thenceforth, the struggle for supremacy was again, as it had been before ...
— Manifesto of the Communist Party • Karl Marx
... 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
... course of 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... 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 ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... 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. Verily, the pearl-fishery ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... suppose that anywhere in the world you could find three cormorants with brighter ideas about down-treading the proletariat than the firm of Peters, Satan and Tucker, incorporated. We have sure handed the small consumer a giant blow in the sole ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... 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
... involved in a struggle with the class below it. Consequently, the princedom finds itself fighting the monarchy, the bureaucrat finds himself fighting the nobility, the bourgeois finds himself fighting them all, while the proletariat is already commencing to ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... impression that the Earl of Mountshire was the most powerful noble in England and that his hostess and her cousin, Lady Auriol, regarded the Royal Family as upstarts and only visited Buckingham Palace in order to set a good example to the proletariat. ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... is the author of all authority?" At 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
... 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, children of the grey cap and the red shawl, resembled ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... For this people is already permanently cloven into a higher and a lower class: in its industry as much as its army. Its employers are, in the strictest and most sinister sense, captains of industry. Its proletariat is, in the truest and most pitiable sense, an army of labour. In that atmosphere masters bear upon them the signs that they are more than men; and to ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... and for the higher walks to which they had vainly aspired. Soured by defeat, and easily persuaded to impute it solely to the alien rulers responsible for a system which had led them merely into a blind alley, they formed the rank and file of a proletariat that could only by courtesy be called intellectual, but was just the material out of which every form of discontent is apt to breed desperadoes. But many were no mere vulgar desperadoes. Amongst those who were engaged in making bombs ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... on the electors? Can there really be some occult power at work under cover of the ex-Central Committee? Is the Commune only a pretext, and are we at the debut of a social and political revolution? I overheard a partizan of the new doctrines say,—"The Proletariat is vindicating its rights, which have been unjustly trampled on by the aristocratic bourgeoisie. This ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... the office was full of shouting men, when strange figures dived in and out and banged doors like characters in an old farce, and Harold, the proud office-boy, lost his air of being on the point of lunching with a duke at the club and perspired like one of the proletariat. On these occasions you could not help admiring Joe, even if you hated him. When a man is doing his own job well, it is impossible not to admire him. And Joe did his job well, superlatively well. He was everywhere. Where others trotted, he sprang. Where ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... species of male hat, protecting the multiple types of face associated with "the classes." The observing Forsyte might discern in the free or unconsidered seats a certain number of the squash-hatted, but they hardly ventured on the grass; the old school—or schools—could still rejoice that the proletariat was not yet paying the necessary half-crown. Here was still a close borough, the only one left on a large scale—for the papers were about to estimate the attendance at ten thousand. And the ten thousand, all animated by one hope, were asking each other one question: "Where are you lunching?" ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... been no more than a symptom in Spain. Such 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 ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... the forthcoming general elections. But now, social inequality has become desirable: it gives people something to look forward to in the next reincarnation. Instead of wanting to abolish wealth and privilege and nobility, the proletariat want to reincarnate into them." Harnosh of Hosh laughed happily. "So you can see how furious ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... discriminating program of industrial democratization would be one based on the proper time sequence, so that the assumption of responsibility would run parallel to a complementary program of industrial training. The proposal for a sudden dictatorship of the proletariat is an attempt to do away with the intervening time of preparation; the resistance to all sharing of responsibility an attempt to deny the alteration of human capacity in the course of time. Primitive notions of democracy, ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... disturbing vision of darkness, full of lean jaws and wild eyes, amongst the hundred electric lights of the place. But somehow this vision made me angry, too. The sight of that man, so calm, breaking bits of white bread, exasperated me. And I had the audacity to ask him how it was that the starving proletariat of Europe to whom he had been preaching revolt and violence had not been made indignant by his openly luxurious life. "At all this," I said, pointedly, with a glance round the room and at the bottle of champagne we generally shared between us ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... four inquests, all upon the bodies of air-raid victims: a road-man, his wife, an orphan baby—all belonging to the thick central mass of the proletariat, for a West End slum had received a bomb full in the face—and Lady Queenie Paulle. The policemen were stolid; the reporters were stolid; the proletariat was stolid; the majority of the witnesses were stolid, and in particular the representatives of various philanthropic agencies who gave ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... 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 ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... 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 ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... 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 ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... this country I was on a labour paper in New York, I set up type, I wrote articles, and once in a while I addressed meetings on the East Side. But even before I left London I had read a book on Syndicalism by one of the great Frenchmen, and after a while I began to realize that the proletariat would never get anywhere ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... for foreign commerce and industry; a government which the West will consider good substituted for the present go-as-you-please anarchy; a gradually increasing flow of wealth from China to the investing countries, the chief of which is America; the development of a sweated proletariat; the spread of Christianity; the substitution of the American civilization for the Chinese; the destruction of traditional beauty, except for such objets d'art as millionaires may think it worth while to ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... get, by way of counterpoise to the voting power of a bare and overwhelming proletariat, the worthier and far sweeter voices of those who have virtues and excellences of various kinds to recommend them,—so that if the lowest constituent counts for one, the highest may add up to six or eight. And thus, while no one of the mob is denied his one vote, those who ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... 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, from whose ranks there are continually emerging ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... the people governed. Nor has the liberty of those governed anything to do with the form of government. Monarchical England is just as free as Republican America, and the Bolshevists have demonstrated ad oculus to the whole world that the proletariat exercises the greatest tyranny. ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... PROLETARIAT, the name given to the lowest and poorest class in the State, and which still retains the original Roman meaning, as denoting, from proles, offspring, one who enriches the State not by his prosperity, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... 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 ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... the capitalist to levy toll on the community. This tendency will not cease of itself, but only through definite action on the part of those who do not profit by the capitalist regime. Unfortunately the distinction between the proletariat and the capitalist is not so sharp as it was in the minds of socialist theorizers. Trade-unions have funds in various securities; friendly societies are large capitalists; and many individuals eke out their wages by invested savings. All this increases the ...
— Political Ideals • Bertrand Russell
... the district of Leipsic, Chemnitz, Riesa, Oschatz, and in the mountainous district of southeast Saxony, may see for himself a population lacking in size, vigor, and health, noticeably so indeed. Education at one end turning out an unwholesome, "white-collared, black-coated proletariat," as the Socialists call them; and industry and commerce, which even tempt the farmer to sell what he should keep to eat, at the other, are making serious inroads upon the health and well-being of ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... 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 crush all existing nations, since all existing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 3, 1920 • Various
... work with their hands, offered to those who work with their heads. That such infamy is endured in a town is a piece of barbarity and injustice, the more so as it could be easily removed by a police notice requiring every whip cord to have a knot at the end of it. It would do no harm to draw the proletariat's attention to the classes above him who work with their heads; for he has unbounded fear of any kind of head work. A fellow who rides through the narrow streets of a populous town with unemployed post-horses or cart-horses, unceasingly cracking with all his strength a whip several ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... of that University, with approval, and gives it a meaning of the greatest social helpfulness. In his view it is not a misfortune that society is being to so great an extent recruited from the so-called "lower classes." If there are signs of decadence anywhere, he thinks, they are not in the "proletariat;" they are among the "pampered rich," not the ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... Mr. Fyshe quite carelessly. "All these fellows are." (Mr. Fyshe generally referred to the British aristocracy as "these fellows.") "Land, you know, feudal estates; sheer robbery, I call it. How the working-class, the proletariat, stand for such tyranny is more than I can see. Mark my words, Furlong, some day they'll rise and the whole thing will come to a ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... very differently, of course—there were few of them, and they could combine and dominate, and their power would be unbreakable. And so all over the world two classes were forming, with an unbridged chasm between them—the capitalist class, with its enormous fortunes, and the proletariat, bound into slavery by unseen chains. The latter were a thousand to one in numbers, but they were ignorant and helpless, and they would remain at the mercy of their exploiters until they were organized—until they had become "class-conscious." It was a slow and weary process, ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... quickly sold. Pot-Bouille portrayed the lower bourgeoisie and their servants. Au Bonheur des Dames treated of the great retail shops. La Joie de Vivre came in 1884. Germinal told of mining and the misery of the proletariat. L'Oeuvre pictured the life of artists and authors. La Terre portrayed, with startling realism, the lowest peasant life. Le Reve, which followed, was a reaction. It was a graceful idyl. Le Reve was termed "a symphony in white," and was considered as a concession ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... brother craftsmen; they level the incapable men up and the capable men down by insisting upon uniformity of production and wage. Thus they replace the artificial inequality of the aristocrat with the artificial equality of the proletariat, striving to organize a new tyranny for the old. It is significant that our society believes that this is the only way by which it can gain its rights. That betrays our real infidelity. For between the two, associated capital and associated labor, what is there to choose today? By what law, ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch |
