The status quo cannot be used to justify your actions. The status quo is not permanent; it is subject to constant change, to the transition from worse to better. And this transition can only happen thanks to our rejection of the current order.
While the educated minority, devouring the lives of generations, was only beginning to figure out why they were living so well, and while the majority, working day and night, did not yet understand that the profit of their labor was wholly taken by others, both the former and the latter considered it to be the natural order of things—the world of anthropophagy could hold. People often take a prejudice or a habit for the truth—and in such cases it does not oppress them. But once they realized that their truth is nonsense—the game was up. Only by means of violence can then people be forced to do that which a human being considers absurd.
— Herzen
All our charitable institutions, all our punitive laws, all our restrictions and prohibitions with which we try to prevent and stop crime—what are they, at best, if not the inventions of a fool, who, having placed all of his load into a basket on one side of a donkey, has decided to help the unfortunate animal by loading up the basket on the other side with stones?
— Henry George
The squalid poverty that festers in the heart of our civilization, the vice and crime and degradation and ravening greed that flow from it, are the results of a treatment of land that ignores the simple law of justice, a law so clear and plain that it is universally recognized by the veriest savages. What is by nature the common birthright of all, we have made the exclusive property of individuals; what is by natural law the common fund, from which common wants should be met, we give to a few that they may lord it over their fellows. And so some are gorged while some go hungry, and more is wasted than would suffice to keep all in luxury.
— Henry George
Wise consumption is a far more difficult art than wise production. Twenty people can gain money for one who can use it; and the vital question, for individual and for nation, is, never “how much do they make?” but “to what purpose do they spend?”
My correspondents write under the conviction that no individual practice can have the smallest power to change or check the vast system of modern commerce, or the methods of its transaction.
But I, as I consider the quantity of wise talking which has passed in at one long ear of the world, and out at the other, without making the smallest impression upon its mind, I am sometimes tempted for the rest of my life to try and do what seems to me rational, silently; and to speak no more.
— John Ruskin
Should we be striving towards a popular ideal in which ascending the rungs of the social ladder will frighten the best people more than it will captivate them?
— John Ruskin
We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilized invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men—divided into mere segments of men—broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail. Now it is a good and desirable thing, truly, to make many pins in a day; but if we could only see with what crystal sand their points were polished—sand of human soul, much to be magnified before it can be discerned for what it is—we should think there might be some loss in it also.
Men may be beaten, chained, tormented, yoked like cattle, slaughtered like summer flies, and yet remain in one sense, and the best sense, free. But to smother their souls within them, to blight and hew into rotting pollards the suckling branches of their human intelligence, to make the flesh and skin which, after the worm’s work on it, is to see God, into leathern thongs to yoke machinery with—this it is to be slave-masters indeed. It is verily this degradation of the operative into a machine, which, more than any other evil of the times, is leading the mass of the nations everywhere into vain, incoherent, destructive struggling for a freedom of which they cannot explain the nature to themselves. Their universal outcry against wealth, and against nobility, is not forced from them either by the pressure of famine, or the sting of mortified pride. These do much, and have done much in all ages; but the foundations of society were never yet shaken as they are at this day. It is not that men are ill fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, and therefore look to wealth as the only means of pleasure.
It is not that men are pained by the scorn of the upper classes, but they cannot endure their own; for they feel that the kind of labor to which they are condemned is verily a degrading one, and makes them less than men. Never had the upper classes so much sympathy with the lower, or charity for them, as they have at this day, and yet never were they so much hated by them.
— John Ruskin
If the state is governed on the basis of reason, then we should be ashamed if there is any want and poverty; if, however, the state is not governed on the basis of reason, then we should be ashamed of wealth and honors.
— Chinese wisdom
To realize God’s law, to the extent that we understand it, our effort is required, and people are making this effort, and, though slowly, we are nevertheless moving closer to its realization.
