You have failed in your management. You have made a shambles of civilization. You have been blind and greedy.
Book 1908
The Iron Heel quotes
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About the book
Written in 1908 and framed as a manuscript discovered centuries later, The Iron Heel is the memoir of Avis Everhard, a professor's daughter who falls in love with the socialist firebrand Ernest Everhard. Through her eyes we watch the great trusts of early twentieth-century America tighten their grip and an all-powerful oligarchy rise to crush its opponents. It is often called one of the first modern dystopian novels, and it influenced Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
6 quotes
They never see the blessed sunshine. They die like flies. The dividends are paid out of their blood. And out of the dividends magnificent churches are builded in New England, wherein your kind preaches pleasant platitudes to the sleek, full-bellied recipients…
And beneath will be the abyss, wherein will fester and starve and rot, and ever renew itself, the common people, the great bulk of the population. And in the end, who knows in what day, the common people will rise up out of the abyss; the labor castes and the…
We will grind you revolutionists down under our heel, and we shall walk upon your faces. The world is ours, we are its lords, and ours it shall remain. As for the host of labor, it has been in the dirt since history began, and I read history aright. And in…
The great driving force of the oligarchs is the belief that they are doing right. Never mind the exceptions, and never mind the oppression and injustice in which the Iron Heel was conceived. All is granted. The point is that the strength of the Oligarchy…
You are metaphysicians. You can prove anything by metaphysics; and having done so, every metaphysician can prove every other metaphysician wrong—to his own satisfaction. You are anarchists in the realm of thought. And you are mad cosmos-makers.