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bourgeois quotes

  • Il faut e  pater le bourgeois. One must astound the bourgeois.

    - Charles Baudelaire
    Attributed.

  • Destroy him as you will, the bourgeois always bounces upexecute him, expropriate him, starve him out en masse, and he reappears in your children.

    - Cyril Vernon Connolly
      In the Observer,7 Mar.

  • [The] English proletariat is becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimatelyat the possession of a bourgeoisaristocracyand a bourgeoisproletariat as well as a bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justifiable.

    - Friedrich Engels
      Letter to Karl Marx,7 Oct.

  • Axiome: la haine du bourgeois est le commencement de la vertu. Axiom: Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom.

    - Gustave Flaubert
      Letter to George Sand,10 May.

  • How beastly the bourgeois is Especially the male of the species.

    - D(avid) H(erbert) Lawrence
      'How Beastly the Bourgeois Is'.

  • Only in a higher phase of communist society†can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety, and society inscribe on its banners,'From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!' See Bakunin 53:25.

    - Karl Heinrich Marx
      Critique of the Gotha Programme, May.

  • He'd been mistaken in thinking that if he killed himself the sordid bourgeois world would perish with him.

    -Yukio pseudonym of  Hiraoka Kimitake Mishima
    Acts ofWorship,'Raisin Bread' (translated byJohn Bester,1989).

  • Her exotic daydreams do not prevent her from being small-town bourgeois at heart, clinging to conventional ideas orcommitting this or thatconventional violationof the conventional, adultery being a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.

    -Vladimir Nabokov
    'Madame Bovary'. Collected in Lectures on Literature (published 1980).

  • A person of bourgeois origin goes through life with some expectation of getting what he wants, within reasonable limits. Hence the fact that in times of stress 'educated'people tend to come to the front.

    - George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair Orwell
      The Road to Wigan Pier, ch.3.

  • Bourgeois society is infected by monomania: the monomania of accounting. For it, the only thing that has value is what can be counted in francs and centimes. It never hesitates to sacrifice human life to figures which look well onpaper, suchasnational budgets or industrial balance sheets.

    - Simone Weil
    La condition ouvrie'  re,'La rationalisation' (published1951).

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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