Ellen Wilkinson Quotes

Individuals were all right, she said to herself, lots of them, but it was this rigid system that kept people from knowing each other. Was there another country in the world where the class barriers were so high as in England, and where it was so loudly proclaimed that none existed at all?

I know they have nice manners. They don’t care enough about the miners- at least, when they 'are not dangerous- not to be perfectly charming to anyone who cares enough to defend them. But you think of what that crowd did during the General Strike. Ask Mary Maud. We saw them with bared teeth all right when their class-privileges were in danger. It’s not people like that uncouth fool of a mine manager in Carey’s Main who are dangerous to the workers. They carry their own antidote. Decent people like that vicar’s wife will help the workers to do ’em in. But it’s these kindly wealthy people who play the devil with people like you, Joan. They are so reasonable and they can be so kind. It seems a shame to fight them, and after a while you’d find yourself not wanting to put things so strongly- it might hurt your new friends’ feelings.

That’s the devil of things as they are now. As soon as any member of the working class shows ability as a leader, if he’s too rebellious to be collared as a foreman by the boss, the men make him an official and he steps right out of their class. Take Joan there. Now think what a power she would have been if she could have been kept in that shop where she used to work. Of course she would have got the sack and had to get another, but she’d have gone on fighting. What happens? She’s pretty (don’t blush, Joan), she’s clever, she is made an official. Then come along the Mary Mauds and the Anthony Dacres” (“and the Gerald Blains,” put in Dacre). “Quite. She is now a member of the middle class. Then she’ll get into Parliament and be quite a lady.

Oh, what can’t you men talk about love! You seem to think that any one of you is worth giving up all that a woman has lived for.

One cannot blame capitalists for behaving like capitalists

A society in which the decisive decisions are invariably taken by one group, and in which those decisions are reached only by considerations of their own welfare; is not a just society.

But trade-unionism lives not only in organizations but in the hearts of men.

sad commentary on the decay of working class forthrightness that we now call our papers the Tribune, the Herald, the Worker, instead of a grand challenging title like “The Despots’ Plague”!

In these days of fascism, when the workers’ unions have been smashed, and all effective means of protest and redress removed, the story of these earlier struggles cannot be dismissed as “All so long ago. Things are better now.” Wherever workers are denied their own bulwarks against tyranny, the same kind of oppression recurs; the same kind of accusation are levied by employers against the leadership created from the ranks.

but the history of a town is not that of its famous men only, but the story of the tenacity of its unknown fighters in the struggle for existence