Plutocracy Quotes

I didn't know the history of this world or how it interacted with the history of mine. Oric, Sabrina, all of them had tried to tell me that my rules didn't apply here, that my laws of decency meant nothing. The culture was medieval or perhaps an "enlightened" plutocracy. The wars of Napoleon could be a living memory for their elders. Their social system could be traced back to Genghis Khan for all I knew. It ~ Daniel Potter

We're not a democracy. It's a terrible misunderstandin g and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us that. In reality, we're a plutocracy: a government by the wealthy. ~ Ramsey Clark

I hope we shall ... crush in it's birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and to bid defiance to the laws of their country. ~ Thomas Jefferson

It's quite clear that Gore won most of the votes. I think the accurate description for them is a military plutocracy. Having lived and worked in the United States, I must add that I don't want to make too much of the distinction between the Bush regime and its predecessors. I don't see a great deal of difference. ~ John Pilger

The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his "ideas" almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store.
Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only wings of a windmill. ~ Sinclair Lewis

Our society will always remain an unstable and explosive compound as long as political power is vested in the masses and economic power in the classes. In the end one of these powers will rule. Either the plutocracy will buy up the democracy, or the democracy will vote away the plutocracy. ~ Irving Fisher

While boasting of our noble deeds we're careful to conceal
the ugly fact that by an iniquitous money system we have
nationalized a system of oppression which, though more refined,
is not less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery. ~ Horace Greeley

There is something to be said for government by a great aristocracy which has furnished leaders to the nation in peace and war for generations; even a Democrat like myself must admit this. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

Today, rather than a democracy we have a plutocracy (rule by moneyed interests) in which some of the formal elements of democracy nonetheless remain. Needless to say a real democracy ... is impossible where income, wealth, and power are concentrated and where inequality is growing, that is, in the normal ways of things under capitalism ~ Fred Magdoff

There is a greater strength than wealth, and it is greater because it cannot be taken away. Our strength, the strength of the proletariat, is in our muscles, in our hands to cast ballots, in our fingers to pull triggers. This strength we cannot be stripped of. It is the primitive strength, it is the strength that is to life germane, it is the strength that is stronger than wealth, and that wealth cannot take away. "But your strength is detachable. It can be taken away from you. Even now the Plutocracy is taking it away from you. In the end it will take it all away from you. And then you will cease to be the middle class. You will descend to us. You will become proletarians. And the beauty of it is that you will then add to our strength. We will hail you brothers, and we will fight shoulder to shoulder in the cause of humanity. "You ~ Jack London

Imagine a country where the majority of the population reaps the majority of the benefits for their hard work, creative ingenuity, and collaborative efforts. Imagine a country where corporate losses arent socialized, while gains are captured by an exclusive minority. Imagine a country run as a democracy, from the bottom up, not a plutocracy from the top down. Richard Wolff not only imagines it, but in his compelling, captivating and stunningly reasoned new book, Democracy at Work, he details how we get there from here - and why we absolutely must. ~ Nomi Prins

Those in power must spend a lot of their time laughing at us. ~ Alice Walker

Abolish plutocracy if you would abolish poverty. As millionaires increase, pauperism grows. The more millionaires, the more paupers. ~ Rutherford B. Hayes

'Plutocracy.' It has a perfect nuance: chilly, inaccessible, icy-rich. ~ Graham Joyce

Every civilization carries the seeds of its own destruction, and the same cycle shows in them all. The Republic is born, flourishes, decays into plutocracy, and is captured by the shoemaker whom the mercenaries and millionaires make into a king. The people invent their oppressors, and the oppressors serve the function for which they are invented. ~ Mark Twain

When a plutocracy is disguised as a democracy, the system is beyond corrupt. ~ Suzy Kassem

We have an underdeveloped democracy and overdeveloped plutocracy. ~ Ralph Nader

They're both plutocracies, rule by the rich. If they had won, all they'd have thought about was making more money, the upper class. Abendsen, he's wrong; there would be no social reform, no welfare public works plans - the Anglo-Saxon plutocrats wouldn't have permitted it. ~ Philip K. Dick

The governments of the Western nations, whether monarchical or republican, had passed into the invisible hands of a plutocracy, international in power and grasp. It was, I venture to suggest, this semi-occult power which ... pushed the mass of the American people into the cauldron of World War I. ~ J. F. C. Fuller

A system is corrupt when it is strictly profit-driven, not driven to serve the best interests of its people, but those of multinational corporations. ~ Suzy Kassem

Our plutocracy, whether the hedge fund managers in Greenwich, Connecticut, or the Internet moguls in Palo Alto, now lives like the British did in colonial India: ruling the place but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; to the person fortunate enough to own a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension, and viable public transportation doesn't even compute. With private doctors on call and a chartered plane to get to the Mayo Clinic, why worry about Medicare? ~ Mike Lofgren

MARLYS WAS A WOMAN of ordinary appearance, if seen in a supermarket or a library, dressed in homemade or Walmart dresses or slacks, a little too heavy, but fighting it, white-haired, ruddy-faced. In her heart, though, she housed a rage that knew no bounds. The rage fully possessed her at times, and she might be seen sitting in her truck at a stoplight, pounding the steering wheel with the palms of her hands, or walking through the noodle aisle at the supermarket with a teeth-baring snarl. She had frightened strangers, who might look at her and catch the flames of rage, quickly extinguished when Marlys realized she was being watched. The rage was social and political and occasionally personal, based on her hatred of obvious injustice, the crushing of the small and helpless by the steel wheels of American plutocracy. ~ John Sandford

Utilitarianism had found [in Samuel Smiles' Self-Help] its portrait gallery of heroes, inscribed with a vigorous exhortation to all men to strive in their image; this philistine romanticism established the bourgeois hero-prototype the penniless office-boy who works his way to economic fortune and this wins his way into the mercantile plutocracy. ~ John Carroll

It's ginned up by the corporate plutocracy as a way of distracting the working-class people that it's screwing. We hamstring our own natural progressivism in this country, and that's really stupid. ~ Edward Norton

Spoke of the professional men and the artists as villeins. What else are they? One and all, the professors, the preachers, and the editors, hold their jobs by serving the Plutocracy, and their service consists of propagating only such ideas as are either harmless to or commendatory of the Plutocracy. Whenever they propagate ideas that menace the Plutocracy, they lose their jobs, in which case, if they have not provided for the rainy day, they descend into the proletariat and either perish or become working-class agitators. And don't forget that it is the press, the pulpit, and the university that mould public opinion, set the thought-pace of the nation. As for the artists, they merely pander to the little less than ignoble tastes of the Plutocracy. But ~ Jack London

Mounting a campaign against plutocracy makes as much sense to the typical Washington liberal as would circulating a petition against gravity. What our modernized liberal leaders offer is not confrontation but a kind of therapy for those flattened by the free-market hurricane: they counsel us to accept the inevitability of the situation. ~ Thomas Frank

Conservatism is not about tradition and morality, hasn't been for many decades ... It is about the putative biological and spiritual superiority of the wealthy. ~ Greg Bear

I know nothing that I may say can influence you," he said. "You have no souls to be influenced. You are spineless, flaccid things. You pompously call yourselves Republicans and Democrats. There is no Republican Party. There is no Democratic Party. There are no Republicans nor Democrats in this House. You are lick-spittlers and panderers, the creatures of the Plutocracy. ~ Jack London

People live with the illusion that we have a democratic system, but it's only the outward form of one. In reality we live in a plutocracy, a government of the rich. ~ Jose Saramago

I'm [Paul O'Neill] an old guy, and I'm rich. And there's nothing they can do to hurt me. ~ Ron Suskind

Now, it's true that some of the protesters are oddly dressed or have silly-sounding slogans, which is inevitable given the open character of the events. But so what? I, at least, am a lot more offended by the sight of exquisitely tailored plutocrats, who owe their continued wealth to government guarantees, whining that President Obama has said mean things about them than I am by the sight of ragtag young people denouncing consumerism. ~ Paul Krugman

The most insidious of our country, the greediest and highest rung of our socioeconomic ladder, line their pockets with misappropriated funds as military personnel and hordes of civilians are maimed or killed. It's not their children out there, blinded by manufactured patriotism or lured into the service with the promise of economic stability, all with the sanctimonious blessings of misguided public consent by way of corporate, state-sponsored media. It won't be their children who are terrorized by Wahabbist insurgents tearing through city blocks and rural areas as only an ever-devouring plague could. It won't be any of their loved ones watching thousands of years of civilization unraveling like an old sweater as each thread of wool is lit on fire or stolen to sell on the black market for greedy consumers with a fetish for hijacked Mesopotamian artifacts. ~ M.B. Dallocchio

We have a new type of rule now. Not one-man rule, or rule of aristocracy or plutocracy, but of small groups elevated to positions of absolute power by random pressures, and subject to political and economic factors that leave little room for decision. They are representatives of abstract forces who have reached power through surrender of self. The iron-willed dictator is a thing of the past. There will be no more Stalins, no more Hitlers. The rulers of this most insecure of all worlds are rulers by accident, inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine they cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them which buttons to push. ~ William S. Burroughs

The real Machiavellian genius of the First Amendment is that free speech turns out to be mostly harmless - a lot of P.C. nit-picking, dingbat conspiracy theories, tedious libertarian screeds and name calling. The only "free speech" that has any effect in a stable, well-run plutocracy is the kind protected by Buckley vs. Valeo in the form of campaign contributions. ~ Tim Kreider

He was in stature but a small man, yet remember that so were Napoleon, Lord Beaverbrook, Stephen A. Douglas, Frederick the Great, and the Dr. Goebbels who is privily known throughout Germany as Wotan's Mickey Mouse. ~ Sinclair Lewis

This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world. ~ H.L. Mencken

One always feels the need to wash one's hands after being forced to deal with the methods of U.S. interventionism. It is so unpleasant and filthy that one shudders. When one hears the pious nonsense of the Jewish-led world plutocracy over the radio or reads it in the press, one need only to look behind the scenes to feel pity for the miseries of mankind. That such a man has the impudence to judge us, to call on God and the world as witnesses of the purity of his deeds, to incite war and send innocent people singing "Onward Christian Soldiers" to battle for his filthy financial interests can only fill anyone with even the most primitive sense of decency with the deepest horror. Were there only such people in the world, one would have to despise humanity.

"Mr. Roosevelt Cross-Examined", 30 November 1941 ~ Joseph Goebbels

It means that, in fact, it's - whether fascist is the right word I don't know - more of a plutocracy than anything resembling a democracy; it has become a nation controlled by a very small, very wealthy elite. ~ Peter Singer

A modern historian has described the struggle between Jews and Jesuits as a "struggle between two rivals," in which the "higher Jesuit clergy and the Jewish plutocracy stood facing one another in the middle of France like two invisible lines of battle."50 The description is true insofar as the Jews found in the Jesuits their first unappeasable foes, while the latter came promptly to realize how powerful a weapon antisemitism could be. This was the first attempt and the only one prior to Hitler to exploit the "major political concept"51 of antisemitism on a Pan-European scale. ~ Hannah Arendt

I once expected to spend seven years walking around the world on foot. I walked from Mexico to Panama where the road ended before an almost uninhabited swamp called the Choco Colombiano. Even today there is no road. Perhaps it is time for me to resume my wanderings where I left off as a tropical tramp in the slums of Panama. Perhaps like Ambrose Bierce who disappeared in the desert of Sonora I may also disappear. But after being in all mankind it is hard to come to terms with oblivion - not to see hundreds of millions of Chinese with college diplomas come aboard the locomotive of history - not to know if someone has solved the riddle of the universe that baffled Einstein in his futile efforts to make space, time, gravitation and electromagnetism fall into place in a unified field theory - never to experience democracy replacing plutocracy in the military-industrial complex that rules America - never to witness the day foreseen by Tennyson 'when the war-drums no longer and the battle-flags are furled, in the parliament of man, the federation of the world.'

I may disappear leaving behind me no worldly possessions - just a few old socks and love letters, and my windows overlooking Notre-Dame for all of you to enjoy, and my little rag and bone shop of the heart whose motto is 'Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise.' I may disappear leaving no forwarding address, but for all you know I may still be walking among you on my vagabond journey aro ~ George Whitman

Plutocracy too long tolerated leaves democracy on the auction block, subject to the highest bidder. ~ Bill Moyers

To proclaim 'America First' was to deny any need to fight fascism either at home or abroad. When American Nazis and white supremacists marched in Charlottesville in August 2017, Trump said that some of them were 'very fine people.' He defended the Confederate and Nazi cause of preserving monuments to the Confederacy. Such monuments in the American South were raised in the 1920s and 1930s, at a time when fascism in the United States was a real possibility; they memorialized the racial purification of Southern cities that was contemporary with the rise of fascism in Europe. Contemporary observers had no difficulty seeing the connection. Will Rogers, the great American entertainer and social commentator of his time, saw Adolf Hitler in 1933 as a familiar figure: 'Papers all state that Hitler is trying to copy Mussolini. Looks to me it's the KKK he's copying.' The great American social thinker and historian W.E.B. Du Bois could see how the temptations of fascism worked together with American myths of the past. He rightly feared that American whites would prefer a story about enmity with blacks to a reforming state that would improve prospects for all Americans. Whites distracted by racism could become, as he wrote in 1935, 'the instrument by which democracy in the nation was done to death, race provincialism deified, and the world delivered to plutocracy,' what we call oligarchy. ~ Timothy Snyder

The two great aims of industrialism - replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy - seem close to fulfillment. ~ Wendell Berry

The Plutocracy's insatiable hunger for pixelated information is enough to put a bulimic Pac-Man to shame ~ Dean Cavanagh

Representative government is artifice, a political myth, designed to conceal from the masses the dominance of a self-selected, self-perpetuating, and self-serving traditional ruling class. ~ Giuseppe Prezzolini

In his 1907 retirement address, Joseph Pulitzer urged his successors to always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty. ~ Joseph Pulitzer