A Quote by Steven Pinker
In the 1970s, many intellectuals had become political radicals. Marxism was correct, liberalism was for wimps, and Marx had pronounced that 'the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.'
Related Quotes
The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
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 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.
The history of mankind is a history of the subjugation and exploitation of a great majority of people by an elite few by what has been appropriately termed the 'ruling class'. The ruling class has many manifestations. It can take the form of a religious orthodoxy, a monarchy, a dictatorship of the proletariat, outright fascism, or, in the case of the United States, corporate statism. In each instance the ruling class relies on academics, scholars and 'experts' to legitimize and provide moral authority for its hegemony over the masses.
In the mid 19th century, it had taken a generation of political rhetoric to induce southern soldiers to fight for the interests of a small ruling class in the name of democracy.
Like many young men in the South, he had trouble ruling out the possible. They are not like an immigrant's son in Passaic who desires to become a dentist and that is that. Southerners have trouble ruling out the possible. What happens to a... man to whom all things seem possible and every course of action open? Nothing of course.
Because you look at it, you know, and there's basically one set of rules that protect that industrial ruling class. That's what the governments do, that's what the religions do. They protect the interests of that industrial ruling class.
I used to have a phrase: Liberalism is spreading misery equally. And now the ruling class throughout Washington seems to have adopted this.
The economic owning class is always the political ruling class.
They knew bullshit, and they knew about the ruling class; dying for a ruling class cause was almost always bullshit.
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?
Ireland is such a young society. The British were the ruling class up until they left about a hundred years ago, and we've been trying to work out what our class hierarchy is ever since.
Most of Marx's predictions have failed to materialize, and his labor theory of value and other ideas have been proven wrong. Marx failed to recognize the incentive system built into the capitalist model - consumer choice and the profit motive of the entrepreneur. The irony is that capitalism, not socialism or Marxism, that has liberated the worker from the chains of poverty, monopoly, war, and oppression, and has better achieved Marx's vision of a millennium of hope, peace, abundance, leisure, and aesthetic expression for the 'full' human being.
It doesn't actually make any difference whether the President is Republican or Democrat. The genius of the American ruling class is that it has been able to make the people think that they have had something to do with the electing of presidents for 200 years when they've had absolutely nothing to say about the candidates or the policies or the way the country is run.
I'm less influenced by any of [Karl] Marx's ideas today than I've ever been in my life, and most significantly Marx's theory of historical materialism, which I think is virtually a debris of despotism.
When you become sufficiently expert in the state of the art, you stop picking ideas at random. You are thoughtful in how to select ideas and how to combine ideas. You are thoughtful about when you should be generating many ideas versus pruning down ideas.
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