Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes

It is the corpse of the bourgeoisie that separates us. With us, it is that class that is the carrier of the chromosome of banality.

If every one of those good words - liberty, equality, fraternity, democracy, human rights - has been called "bourgeois", what on earth does that leave for us?

The academic Left has a long history of taking the idea of 'false consciousness' seriously.

That is simply that Marxism has been tremendously fashionable in our time, so it has infected a very large number of major institutions in many countries of the world. So I suppose that we shouldn't be too surprised that it should infect the church as well.

I am a communist and a worker, and I have lived in a decadent capitalist society where the workers are slaves.

Communism is in conflict with human nature.

If people don't like Marxism, they should blame the British Museum.

There's a tradition in American fiction that is deadly serious and earnest - like the Steinbeckian social novel.

It did not occur to us that the Marxists' solution was fraudulent or that their vision was distorted, that whatever the wrongs in our society it was not the ideology of theirs that will cure them.

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.

It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.

Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals.

The majority in every society is always the backward. The diligent are no more than thirty percent of the society. It is a natural law that the diligent breed will exploit the backward breed as best they can, like the fish at sea, where the strong eat the weak. It is inconsequential whether the diligent are capitalists and merchants, as in the bourgeois government, or whether the diligent are the managers and supervisors, the intellectuals and the allotters as in the communist government. Ultimately, the diligent will exploit the laboring backward to the best of their ability.

In Russia bureaucracy as the ruling class is master of production and produce, and the Russian workers are an exploited class.

Bourgeois humor is always bankrupt; it is mortgaged to Red radicalism.

A Marxist could not open a newspaper without finding on every page confirming evidence for his interpretation of history; not only in the news, but also in its presentation — which revealed the class bias of the paper — and especially of course what the paper did not say.

Inside the intelligentsia, the pressure of public opinion is overwhelming. Nationalistic loyalty towards the proletariat, and most vicious theoretical hatred of the bourgeoisie, can and often do co-exist with ordinary snobbishness in everyday life.

Someday, the capitalist system will disappear in the United States, because no social class system has been eternal. One day, class societies will disappear.

To begin to know the philosophy of socialism, in backward countries where the class differences are great, very great, and terribly exaggerated over the conditions we know in this country, to overcome this, the theory of revolution, of force and violence, was necessary within those political conditions. It couldn't be anything else.

Penal law was not created by the common people, nor by the peasantry, nor by the proletariat, but entirely by the bourgeoisie as an important tactical weapon in this system of divisions which they wished to introduce.

Marxism is a success because it fuses the two inconsistent strains in Western thought - moral skepticism and moral indignation - and makes them complements in the attack against existing society.

The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.

How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and the intelligentsia who, with whatever faults, are the quality in life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement?

There is no alternative to class struggle.

In a really business-run society like the United States, the business elites are deeply committed to class struggle and are engaged in it all the time. They're instinctive Marxists.