Henry Demarest Lloyd Quotes

Civilization degrades the many to exalt the few

... this is a grievance society and that if you want to get into its leading edge you pretty well have to be a victim.

All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man.

The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are so seldom brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged to extort them

Our elite has not evolved in 20 years, and the instincts of this elite are not democratic.

Rugged individualism really means the regimentation of the many for the benefit of the few.

We all live under the constant threat of our own annihilation. Only by the most outrageous violation of ourselves have we achieved our capacity to live in relative adjustment to a civilization apparently driven to its own destruction.

One of the primary tests of the mood of a society at any given time is whether its comfortable people tend to identify, psychologically, with the power and achievements of the very successful or with the needs and sufferings of the underprivileged.

The position of what is generally called great people has of late become extremely difficult. They are more attacked and calumniated, and judged with less indulgence than private individuals. What they have lost in this way, they have not by any means regained in any other. Ever since the revolution of 1790 they are much less secure than they used to be, and the transition from sovereign power to absolute want has been as frequent as sudden.

Nothing is quite so wretchedly corrupt as an aristocracy which has lost its power but kept its wealth

Mankind is divided into rich and poor, into property owners and exploited; and to abstract oneself from this fundamental division, and from the antagonism between poor and rich, means abstracting oneself from fundamental facts.

Justice is not available to all equally; it is something that many of us must struggle to achieve.

America’s super-elite has been particularly effective at using the tools of a political democracy to protect its minority privilege.

We find—in the case of political affairs—that the most servile submission to privileged classes, and the grossest abuses of power by these, have been the precursors of the wildest ebullitions of popular fury,—of the overthrow indiscriminately of ancient institutions, good and bad.

The histories of mankind that we possess are histories only of the higher class.

If the upper classes, through their political representatives, pass legislation that diminishes the income of the middle class and reduces services to the poor and further enrich the affluent, this is not class warfare. But if the middle class and the poor, and their representatives, complain that this is unfair, that is class warfare. So say some of our politicians who oppose class warfare.

The inequality that exists today, … derives less from the unequal availability of opportunity than from the unequal ability to exploit opportunity …

Only powerful people have liberty.

You have a political elite that has been in power since 1979. Typically what happens with this elite, and it has happened in Iran, is that they get more and more out of touch with the realities of the ordinary citizens.

The obtuseness and cowardice of people of property and influence and the stupidity of most [military] officers, frustrated all efforts.

The threat to men of great dignity, privilege, and pretense is not from the radicals they revile; it is from accepting their own myth.

The mulatto is faulty stock, a degenerate, unnatural offspring, doomed by nature to work out its own destruction.

There seem to be some persons who do not believe in freedom — for others. They fear that if the common people were free then they would not work for us, or obey us, or do as we think they ought to do. They are even called "lazy". Unhappily it is too true that we have many strains that seem to have become entirely exhausted, perhaps because of the over-work or the dissipation, or both, of their forbears. These people are literally "born tired".

I think it was a good and necessary thing that the American upper class diversified, and that more African-Americans and Jews and Catholics (like myself) and women now share privileges and powers once reserved for Protestant white men.

I tell my students that the single most powerful thing that we have in this country - something that literally harbors no dissent and no questioning - is the all-powerful elite narrative.