Bourgeois Quotes - Page 4

• Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.

  Rosa Luxemburg

  Transition, Regression, Socialism

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• On the one hand, we have the mass; on the other, its historic goal, located outside of existing society. On one hand, we have the day-to-day struggle; on the other, the social revolution. It follows that this movement can best advance by tacking betwixt and between the two dangers by which it is constantly being threatened. One is the loss of its mass character; the other, the abandonment of its goal. One is the danger of sinking back to the condition of a sect; the other, the danger of becoming a movement of bourgeois social reform.

  Rosa Luxemburg

  Struggle, Character, Loss

  "The Russian Revolution, and Leninism Or Marxism?".

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• Every time a colony wants independence, the questions on the agenda are: a) how do you get the imperialists out, and b) what kind of society do you build? There are usually the bourgeois nationalists who say, 'Let's just change the flag and keep everything as it was.' Then there are the revolutionaries who say, 'Let's change the property laws.' It's always a critical moment.

  Ken Loach

  Law, Independence, Flags

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• Bourgeois political economy ... never gets to see man who is its real subject. It disregards the essence of man and his history and is thus in the profoundest sense not a 'science of people' but of non-people and of an inhuman world of objects and commodities.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Real, Men, Essence

  Herbert Marcuse (2007). “The Essential Marcuse: Selected Writings of Philosopher and Social Critic Herbert Marcuse”, p.78, Beacon Press

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• The usage of the words "public" and "public sphere" betrays a multiplicity of concurrent meanings. Their origins go back to various historical phases and, when applied synchronically to the conditions of a bourgeois society that is industrially advanced and constituted as a social-welfare state, they fuse into a clouded amalgam. Yet the very conditions that make the inherited language seem inappropriate appear to require these words, however confused their employment.

  Jurgen Habermas

  Confused, Historical, Employment

  "Space, Place, and Environmental Ethics". Book by Andrew Light, 1997.

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• I am struck again by the fact that as soon as a working man gets an official post in the Trade Union or goes into Labour politics, he becomes middle-class whether he will or no. ie. by fighting against the bourgeoisie he becomes a bourgeois. The fact is that you cannot help living in the manner appropriate and developing the ideology appropriate to your income.

  George Orwell

  Fighting, Men, Class

  "The Road to Wigan Pier". Book by George Orwell (Diary 6-10 February), March 8, 1937.

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• Nothing threatens freedom of the personality and the meaning of life like war, poverty, terror. But there are also indirect and only slightly more remote dangers. One of these is the stupefaction of man (the "gray mass," to use the cynical term of bourgeois prognosticators) by mass culture with its intentional or commercially motivated lowering of intellectual level and content, with its stress on entertainment or utilitarianism, and with its carefully protective censorship.

  Andrei Sakharov

  Stress, War, Men

  "Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom" by Andrei Sakharov, ("The Threat to Intellectual Freedom"), www.sakharov-center.ru. 1968.

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• What sets a canoeing expedition apart is that it purifies you more rapidly and inescapably than any other. Travel a thousand miles by train and you are a brute; pedal five hundred on a bicycle and you remain basically a bourgeois; paddle a hundred in a canoe and you are already a child of nature.

  Pierre Trudeau

  Children, Paddling, Hundred

  "Exhaustion and Fulfillment: The Ascetic in a Canoe" by Pierre Trudeau, www.canoe.ca. 2000.

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• Constitutional rights are useful up to a point, but they do not serve to guarantee much more than what could be called the bourgeois conception of freedom. According to the bourgeois conception, a "free" man is essentially an element of a social machine and has only a certain set of prescribed and delimited freedoms; freedoms that are designed to serve the needs of the social machine more than those of the individual.

  Theodore Kaczynski

  Men, Rights, Needs

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• Sharpness is a bourgeois concept

  Henri Cartier-Bresson

  Photography, Sharpness, Concepts

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• To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary.  These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail.  This is a revolution!  And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.

  Che Guevara

  Hate, Men, Squad

  "The Cuban Revolution : Years of Promise". Book by Teo A. Babun and Victor Andres Triay, p. 57, 2005.

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• More than one branch of the avant-garde, claiming to break with the bourgeois vision and mode of production, remains tied to it in spite of its denials and ex-communications. We are far from having overcome bourgeois thought or practices, despite the socialist "intermission" between the Russian revolution and the collapse of the Berlin wall. The avant-garde has lost its radical nature. On the other hand, "bourgeois theatre" is sometimes subtle enough to flirt with the avant-garde or to make "intelligent boulevard theatre.

  Patrice Pavis

  Wall, Communication, Flirting

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• Utilitarianism had found [in Samuel Smiles' Self-Help] its portrait gallery of heroes, inscribed with a vigorous exhortation to all men to strive in their image; this philistine romanticism established the bourgeois hero-prototype the penniless office-boy who works his way to economic fortune and this wins his way into the mercantile plutocracy.

  John Carroll

  Hero, Winning, Boys

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• I never wanted to be a star, I never wanted to travel far / I only wanted a little bit of love so I could put a little love in my heart / I never wanted to be la-de-da, go to parties ‘avec le bourgeois’ / I only wanted to sing my song well so I could ring a small bell in your heart

  Cat Stevens

  Song, Stars, Party

  Song: (I Never Wanted) To Be a Star, Album: Izitso

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• The film drama is the opium of the people…down with bourgeois fairy-tale scenarios…long live life as it is!

  Dziga Vertov

  Drama, Live Life, Long

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• Avant-garde theatre, with its distrust of the individual (that bourgeois invention), tends to go beyond [character] and the psychological approach in search of a syntax of types and characters which are "deconstructed and post-individual.

  Patrice Pavis

  Character, Theatre, Avant Garde

  Patrice Pavis, Christine Shantz (1998). “Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis”, p.43, University of Toronto Press

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• Nietzsche, driven by the absolute demand of his existential truthfulness, could not abide the bourgeois world, even when its representative had human nobility.

  Karl Jaspers

  Demand, World, Existential

  Karl Jaspers (1997). “Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity”, p.60, JHU Press

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• In the name of a greater civilization, we curse those who for the sake of their ambitious dreams, brought about the massacre of so many young lives. No matter how brutal the crime, you will always get glorification of its heroism and tradition from the eunuchs of bourgeois culture.

  Amadeo Bordiga

  Dream, Civilization, Names

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• Although the formulations of science now offer the most advanced knowledge of nature, men continue to use obsolete forms of thought long discarded by scientific theory. In so far as these obsolete forms are superfluous for science, the fact that they persist violated the principle of the economy of thought, that characteristic trait of the bourgeois temper.

  Max Horkheimer

  Men, Long, Principles

  "Critical Theory: Selected Essays" by Max Horkheimer, (p. 133), 1982.

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• Nietzsche saw in the Protestant ethic, in both its religious and secular (economic) forms, a final protest before the emergence into dominance of the ordered, bourgeois world of the 'last man' he who will pay any price in tedium for comfort and the absence of tension.

  John Carroll

  Religious, Men, Comfort

  John Carroll (2010). “Break-Out from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky”, p.78, Taylor & Francis

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• As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it's a bore.

  Henry Adams

  Class, America, Boredom

  Henry Adams, Jacob Clavner Levenson, Ernest Samuels, Charles Vandersee (1982). “The Letters of Henry Adams”, p.200, Harvard University Press

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• We must uncover our rituals for what they are: completely arbitrary things, tied to our bourgeois way of life; it isgood-and that is the real theater-totranscend them in the manner of play, bymeans of games and irony; it is good to be dirty and bearded, to have long hair,to look like a girl when one is a boy (and vice versa); one must put "inplay," show up, transform and reversethe systems which quietly order us about.

  Michel Foucault

  Girl, Real, Dirty

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• The habits of every animal are, at least in the eyes of man, constantly similar in all ages. But the habits, the clothes, the words and the dwelling of a prince, a banker, an artist, a bourgeois, a priest and a pauper, are wholly dissimilar and change at the will of civilizations.

  Honore de Balzac

  Eye, Artist, Animal

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• The secret of the nobility and beauty of great ladies lies in the art with which they can shed their veils. In such situations, they become like ancient statues. If they kept the merest scarf on, they would be lewd. Your bourgeois woman will always try to cover her nakedness.

  Honore de Balzac

  Art, Lying, Secret

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• Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.

  Theodor Adorno

  Memories, Past, Leftovers

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