"These stupid peasants, who, throughout the world, hold potentates on their thrones, make statesmen illustrious, provide generals with lasting victories, all with ignorance, indifference, or half-witted hatred, moving the world with the strength of their arms, and getting their heads knocked together in the name of God, the king, or the stock exchange-immortal, dreaming, hopeless asses, who surrender their reason to the care of a shining puppet, and persuade some toy to carry their lives in his purse"
About this Quote
The sentence barrels forward like a battlefield report, piling clause on clause until the reader feels the exhausting churn of mass politics. Crane’s triad - God, the king, the stock exchange - is the real punchline. He collapses sacred faith, hereditary authority, and modern capital into one interchangeable set of excuses for slaughter. That’s not atheism or anti-monarchism alone; it’s a wider cynicism about how easily human bodies get drafted into any banner that offers a story simple enough to swallow.
“Shining puppet” and “toy” sharpen the satire: leaders are not titans, they’re props. The scandal is that the crowd wants them anyway, outsourcing thought to a figure that glitters. Crane’s contempt isn’t class snobbery so much as moral panic about abdicated agency. People “moving the world with the strength of their arms” suggests brute labor and brute force; they create history physically while surrendering the intellectual ownership of it.
Written in a late-19th-century America newly acquainted with mass media, industrial wealth, and nationalist mythmaking, the passage reads like an early diagnosis of the modern public: powerful enough to reshape nations, gullible enough to let someone else spend their lives.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Crane, Stephen. (2026, January 15). These stupid peasants, who, throughout the world, hold potentates on their thrones, make statesmen illustrious, provide generals with lasting victories, all with ignorance, indifference, or half-witted hatred, moving the world with the strength of their arms, and getting their heads knocked together in the name of God, the king, or the stock exchange-immortal, dreaming, hopeless asses, who surrender their reason to the care of a shining puppet, and persuade some toy to carry their lives in his purse. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/these-stupid-peasants-who-throughout-the-world-173375/
Chicago Style
Crane, Stephen. "These stupid peasants, who, throughout the world, hold potentates on their thrones, make statesmen illustrious, provide generals with lasting victories, all with ignorance, indifference, or half-witted hatred, moving the world with the strength of their arms, and getting their heads knocked together in the name of God, the king, or the stock exchange-immortal, dreaming, hopeless asses, who surrender their reason to the care of a shining puppet, and persuade some toy to carry their lives in his purse." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/these-stupid-peasants-who-throughout-the-world-173375/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"These stupid peasants, who, throughout the world, hold potentates on their thrones, make statesmen illustrious, provide generals with lasting victories, all with ignorance, indifference, or half-witted hatred, moving the world with the strength of their arms, and getting their heads knocked together in the name of God, the king, or the stock exchange-immortal, dreaming, hopeless asses, who surrender their reason to the care of a shining puppet, and persuade some toy to carry their lives in his purse." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/these-stupid-peasants-who-throughout-the-world-173375/. Accessed 9 Feb. 2026.
