Bourgeois Quotes - Page 2

• 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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• 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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• I have against me the bourgeois, the military and the diplomats, and for me, only the people who take the Métro.

  Charles de Gaulle

  Military, People, Diplomats

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• See, I don't like places where people can't dance - don't like clubs or theatres where a bunch of bourgeois people sit around tip, tip, tipping their fingers.

  Etta James

  Inspirational, Dance, People

  "Etta James: 'I was like a punker ... I'd spit in a minute' - a classic interview from the vaults" by Cliff White, www.theguardian.com. January 24, 2012.

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

  Rosa Luxemburg

  Transition, Regression, Socialism

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• Sharpness is a bourgeois concept

  Henri Cartier-Bresson

  Photography, Sharpness, Concepts

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.

  Jurgen Habermas

  People, Together, May

  "The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought)". Book by Jurgen Habermas translated by Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence, 1989.

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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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• There is a strain in Marx of the cleric, of the vulgar moralist. He paints the capitalist and the bourgeois as incarnations of evil; it is they who are responsible for the woes of mankind. The dismissal of the individual's responsibility for his own misery is the quintessence of clericalism.

  John Carroll

  Responsibility, Evil, Woe

  John Carroll (2010). “Break-Out from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky”, p.64, Taylor & Francis

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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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• 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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• 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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• One's existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Life, Thinking, Two

  Gustave Flaubert (1954). “The Selected Letters”

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• When passion is not fed, it changes to need. At this juncture, marriage becomes a fixed idea in the mind of the bourgeois, being the only means whereby he can win a woman and appropriate her to his uses.

  Honore de Balzac

  Marriage, Passion, Mean

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

  Theodor Adorno

  Memories, Past, Leftovers

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