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Limousines used to be reserved for the ruling class, or, on special occasions, for the working class. Today, limousines are like taxicabs with the door handles still intact.
Sep 10, 2025
The Syrians are trying to say that the Lebanese are not capable of ruling themselves.
[Ruling elie] haven't given up on neoliberal ideology, they use it. And I think they've normalized that ideology, the notion that, for instance, that economics should govern all of social life, to such a degree that it becomes increasingly difficult to challenge it.
I don't think Hamas will be satisfied simply ruling the Gaza Strip.
Our fears and taboos are largely social conditions imposed upon us by the ruling powers in order to keep us opressed. They manipulate us with our fears. Now let us be fearless.
What they [ ruling elite] understand is that matters of desire, subjectivities, identities matter. And they take the cultural apparatuses that they control enormously, enormously, in an enormously important way.
[The ruling elites] know who their enemies are, and their enemies are the people, the people at home and the people abroad. Their enemies are anybody who wants more social justice, anybody who wants to use the surplus value of society for social needs rather than for individual class greed, that's their enemy.
It is to deny, what the history of the world tells us is true, to suppose that men of ambition and talents will not continue to spring up amongst us. And, when they do, they will as naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passion, as others have so done before them.
I hope that all critical Muslims read the ruling in full, because it states very clearly what freedom of expression in Denmark is about.
Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.
Madness is consistent; which is more than can be said for poor reason. Whatever may be the ruling passion at the time continues equally so throughout the whole delirium, though it should last for life. Madmen are always constant in love; which no man in his senses ever was. Our passions and principles are steady in frenzy; but begin to shift and waver, as we return to reason.
If you make people uniform, you can control them. If you teach people to read, and think, and question things, you lose control. So, the best idea is to separate people if you wish to maintain a monetary system. It's called divide and conquer. By dividing people, they're not a threat, you can control them.
Libertarians have always battled the age-old scourge of war. They understood that war brought death and destruction on a grand scale, disrupted family and economic life, and put more power in the hands of the ruling class - which might explain why the rulers did not always share the popular sentiment for peace. Free men and women, of course, have often had to defend their own societies against foreign threats; but throughout history, war has usually been the common enemy of peaceful, productive people on all sides of the conflict.
Nominees [to Supreme Court] shouldn't be expected to pre-commit to ruling on certain issues in a certain way. Nor should senators ask nominees to pledge to rule on issues in a particular way.
I hope that even if I go to jail, it will motivate more and more Hongkongers to commit to determine our future, instead of fully relying on those ruling class who have dominated our future.
Every ruling class has wanted only this: all the rewards and none of the burdens. The operational code is: we have a lot; we can get more; we want it all.
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.
Charity has always been a expression of the guilty consciences of a ruling class.
If ruling our world stems from developing certainty in our sanity, how do we discover it? The Shambhala teachings instruct us to "put our mind of fearfulness in the cradle of loving-kindnes."
A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened.
The ruling class isn't dissatisfied: they are healthy, well-fed, live in beauty, enjoy their own importance: fun-loving cannibals.
Oh, by the way…” Jason glanced at Percy. “I resigned my office, gave Frank a field promotion to praetor. Unless you want to contest that ruling.” Percy grinned. “No argument here.” “Praetor?” Hazel stared at Frank. He shrugged uncomfortably. “Well… yeah. I know it seems weird.” She tried to throw her arms around him, then winced as she remembered her busted ribs. She settled for kissing him. “It seems perfect.” Leo clapped Frank on the shoulder. “Way to go, Zhang. Now you can order Octavian to fall on his sword.
Keep in mind, the news media are not independent; they are a sort of bulletin board and public relations firm for the ruling class-the people who run things. Those who decide what news you will or will not hear are paid by, and tolerated purely at the whim of, those who hold economic power. If the parent corporation doesn't want you to know something, it won't be on the news. Period. Or, at the very least, it will be slanted to suit them, and then rarely followed up.
As Brooks Adams put it, the sole problem of our ruling class is whether to coerce or to bribe the powerless majority.
A man filled with meat turns his back on the dry bones of political doctrine. Fanatical devotion to the ruling party comes more readily from the materially deprived At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.
The ruling family in Kuwait is good at blackmail, exploitation, and destruction of their opponents. They had perpetuated a grave U.S. conspiracy against us.... stabbing Iraq in the back with a poisoned dagger.
What is lawful is not binding only on some and not binding on others. Lawfulness extends everywhere, through the wide-ruling air and the boundless light of the sky.
I don't know if most people have truly taken on board what this says about our place in the natural world. It doesn't mean that humans are dominating the Earth, ruling over all of nature. In fact, it is a reminder that we are only a tiny part of nature, at the mercy of a system whose operations predate us by billions of years, and will continue billions of years after we're gone.
Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own.
To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. All other things, ruling, hoarding, building, are only little appendages and props, at most.
We are the only class in history that has been left to fight its battles alone, unaided by the ruling powers. White labor and the freed black men had their champions, but where are ours?
If Grandma Goldman ever smiled, she must have done it in the bathroom with the door locked. She had been the undisputed head of her own family, ruling with an iron hand and a mouth full of rocks.
The structure of the Swiss ruling class is rock-hard, and unchanged since the time of Napoleon. They sit on their mountains and lecture the world on democracy. It's an unbelievable show of self-satisfaction and arrogance.
The country is headed toward a single and splendid government of an aristocracy founded on banking institutions and moneyed incorporations and if this tendency continues it will be the end of freedom and democracy, the few will be ruling...I hope we shall...crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government to trial and bid defiance to the laws of our country. I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.
Every age that has historical status is governed by aristocracies.Aristocracy with the meaning - the best are ruling.Peoples do never govern themselves. That lunacy was concocted by liberalism. Behind its people's sovereignty the slyest cheaters are hiding, who don't want to be recognized.
All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital , and allowed to live only so far as the interest to the ruling class requires it.
Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.
Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable.
Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.
Muhammad divided the world in two sectors. One he called Dar us Salam (House of Peace) and the other, Dar al Harb (House of War). All countries, where Islam is not the ruling authority, are Dar al Harb. It is the duty of the Muslims to wage Jihad in Dar al Harb, overthrow the governments and force people into submission. This is the only kind of peace that Islam recognizes.
Unrecognized alcoholism is the ruling pathology among writers and intellectuals.
God invented whiskey to keep the Irish from ruling the world.
The Republican establishment, the Democrat establishment agree and accept that the media is an equal player in the ruling class. Trump has blown all of that out the window. As such, the normal ways that people in politics are controlled, the normal way that people are contained - the ways people are promoted, punished, destroyed, what have you - are all out the window where Trump is concerned. And therefore the media is considered by the ruling class to be one of the great leveling factors.
In how large a proportion of creatures is existence composed of one ruling passion, the most agonizing of all sensations--fear.
One of the things that happened that I think is noteworthy, my parents were pretty tolerant people given their position in society. They were pretty interesting about being interesting able to look at their children and think oh my children know things and they gave us a lot of sense of our own agency, and that may be a kind of a ruling class trait.
Those who take the most from the table, teach contentment. Those for whom the taxes are destined, demand sacrifice. Those who eat their fill, speak to the hungry, of wonderful times to come. Those who lead the country into the abyss, call ruling difficult, for ordinary folk.
That's all very well as an abstract moral principle, Avril, a coffee-table theoretical construct, but there's no denying the sheer gratuitous pleasure to be derived from seeing members of the ruling class in pain and torment.
I don't believe that Jesus would approve abortion except in the case of incest, rape or the mother's life in danger. But I had to enforce the Supreme Court ruling on Roe v. Wade so I tried to do everything I could to minimize the need for abortions.
Radical feminist theorists do not seek to make gender a bit more flexible, but to eliminate it. They are gender abolitionists, and understand gender to provide the framework and rationale for male dominance. In the radical feminist approach, masculinity is the behaviour of the male ruling class and femininity is the behaviour of the subordinate class of women. Thus gender can have no place in the egalitarian future that feminism aims to create.
The hope of internet anarchists was that repressive governments would have only two options: accept the internet with its limitless possibilities of spreading information, or restrict internet access to the ruling elite and turn your back on the 21st century, as North Korea has done.