Plutocracy Quotes - Page 2

• 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

  War, Struggle, Two

  "The Antichrist". Book by Friedrich Nietzsche, Introduction, 1895.

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• The great masses of men, though theoretically free, are seen to submit supinely to oppression and exploitation of a hundred abhorrent sorts. Have they no means of resistance? Obviously they have. The worst tyrant, even under democratic plutocracy, has but one throat to slit. The moment the majority decided to overthrow him he would be overthrown. But the majority lacks the resolution; it cannot imagine taking the risks.

  H. L. Mencken

  Mean, Men, Tyrants

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Notes On Democracy”, p.41, Knopf

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• 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

  Running, Country, Book

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• 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

  Class, Long, Political

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• I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Strength, Crush, Hope

  Thomas Jefferson (2010). “The Works of Thomas Jefferson: Correspondence and Papers, 1816-1826”, p.44, Cosimo, Inc.

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• We have an underdeveloped democracy and overdeveloped plutocracy.

  Ralph Nader

  Democracy

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

  Dean Cavanagh

  Men, Insatiable Hunger, Information

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• 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

  Country, Stupid, Class

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I think the accurate description for the George W. Bush administration 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

  Military, Thinking, Differences

  Source: progressive.org

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• I can't agree that what we're seeing is a matter of the American bourgeoisie confronting workers everywhere. It's more like the international plutocracy eliminating the American middle class while inadvertently creating a bourgeoisie in India, China, etc. I do agree that Soros's role is paradoxical, but if all billionaires (or even a few more) were like Soros, the dialectic would give us global social democracy PDQ.

  Hendrik Hertzberg

  Creating, Class, Giving

  Source: www.newyorker.com

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• If you give up on politics, you're giving up on democracy. And if you give up on democracy, you're basically saying to the moneyed interests, the powerful people and institutions of society, take it all. That's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Then we give up. Then we are 100 percent plutocracy.

  Robert Reich

  Giving Up, Powerful, Self

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• 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

  Hero, Winning, Boys

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• Dark influences from the American past congregate among us still. If we are a democracy, what are we to make of the palpable elements of plutocracy, oligarchy, and mounting theocracy that rule our state? How do we address the self-inflicted catastrophes that devastated our natural environment? So large is our malaise that no single writer can encompass it. We have no Emerson or Whitman among us. An institutionalized counterculture condemns individuality as archaic and depreciates intellectual values, even in the universities. (The Anatomy of Influence)

  Harold Bloom

  Dark, Past, Counter Culture

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• We always come back to the same misunderstanding. The Jews because of their spirit of revolt, their exclusiveness and the Messianic tendencies which animate them are in essence revolutionaries, but they do not realize it and believe that they are working for 'progress.'...but that which they call justice is the triumph of Jewish principles in the world of which the two extremes are plutocracy and socialism. Present day Anti-Semitism is a revolt against the world of today, the product of Judaism.

  Leon V. DePoncins

  Believe, Essence, Two

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• 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

  Military, Thinking, Differences

  Source: progressive.org

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• There is a long American tradition of suspicion of concentrated economic power because of its tendency to corrupt government and turn it from a democracy into a plutocracy.

  Zephyr Teachout

  Government, Long, Political

  Zephyr Teachout (2014). “Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin's Snuff Box to Citizens United”, p.301, Harvard University Press

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• 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

  War, Government, Leader

  Theodore Roosevelt (2012). “In the Words of Theodore Roosevelt: Quotations from the Man in the Arena”, p.166, Cornell University Press

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• For me, love carries the seeds of its own destruction.

  Marvin Gaye

  Destruction, Seeds, Carrie

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