Oligarchy quotes:

Send

All systems are oligarchy. There is no other. -- Tom Metzger
It's the tyranny of an oligarchy that I'm concerned about. -- Pat Robertson
A democracy when put to the strain grows weak, and is supplanted by Oligarchy. -- Aristotle
We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels. -- Henry A. Wallace
Our authorities leave us no doubt that the trust lodged with the oligarchy was sometimes abused, but it certainly ought not to be regarded as a mere usurpation or engine of tyranny. -- Henry James Sumner Maine
But if there's an erosion at home, you know, Thomas Jefferson warned about a tyranny of an oligarchy and if we surrender our democracy to the tyranny of an oligarchy, we've made a terrible mistake. -- Pat Robertson
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around. -- Gilbert K. Chesterton
Democracy is one person, one vote and a full discussion of the issues that affect us. Oligarchy is billionaires buying elections, voter suppression and a concentrated corporate media determining what we see, hear and read. -- Bernie Sanders
The real power in America is held by a fast-emerging new Oligarchy of pimps and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness or even trees, except maybe the ones in their own yards, and they don't mind admitting it. -- Hunter S. Thompson
Those who are able to climb up the ladder will find ways to pull it up after them, or selectively lower it down to allow their friends, allies, and kin to scramble up. In other words: 'Who says meritocracy says oligarchy.' -- Chris Hayes
Monarchy degenerates into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into savage violence and chaos. -- Polybius
The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy. -- Baron de Montesquieu
A government which is composed of the middle class more nearly approximates to democracy than to oligarchy, and is the safest of the imperfect forms of government. -- Aristotle
In the Soviet Union, government controls industry. In the United States, industry controls government. That is the principal structural difference between the two great oligarchies of our time. -- Edward Abbey
To consider judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions is a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. -- Thomas Jefferson
Where some people are very wealthy and others have nothing, the result will be either extreme democracy or absolute oligarchy, or despotism will come from either of those excesses. -- Aristotle
An oligarchy of private capital cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society because under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information. -- Albert Einstein
It is acknowledged, namely, that there are in the world three forms of government, autocracy, oligarchy, and democracy: autocracies and oligarchies are administered according to the tempers of their lords, but democratic states according to established laws. -- Aeschines
The real difference between democracy and oligarchy is poverty and wealth. Wherever men rule by reason of their wealth, whether they be few or many, that is an oligarchy, and where the poor rule, that is a democracy. -- Aristotle
Now is the time to alter our government. Now is the time to stop the movement toward oligarchy. Now is the time to create a government which represents all Americans and not just the 1%... No more excuses. We must all become involved in the political process. -- Bernie Sanders
This is what oligarchy looks like: Today, the top one-tenth of 1 percent owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. The top one-hundredth of 1 percent makes more than 40 percent of all campaign contributions. The billionaire class owns the political system and reaps the benefits from it. -- Bernie Sanders
They that are discontented under monarchy, call it tyranny; and they that are displeased with aristocracy, call it oligarchy: so also, they which find themselves grieved under a democracy, call it anarchy, which signifies the want of government; and yet I think no man believes, that want of government, is any new kind of government. -- Thomas Hobbes
More striking still, it appeared that, if the process of concentration goes on at the same rate, at the end of another century we shall have all American industry controlled by a dozen corporations and run by perhaps a hundred men. Put plainly, we are steering a steady course toward economic oligarchy, if we are not there already. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt
There is an error common to both oligarchies and to democracies: in the latter the demagogues, when the multitude are above the law, are always cutting the city in two by quarrels with the rich, whereas they should always profess to be maintaining their cause; just as in oligarchies the oligarchs should profess to maintain the cause of the people, . . -- Aristotle
The legislator should direct his attention above all to the education of youth; for the neglect of education does harm to the constitution. The citizen should be molded to suit the form of government under which he lives. For each government has a peculiar character which originally formed and which continues to preserve it. The character of democracy creates democracy, and the character of oligarchy creates oligarchy. -- Aristotle
A slave government is an oligarchy; and one, too, of the most arbitrary and criminal character. -- Lysander Spooner
Marcus Crassus cannot, any more than Pompeius, be reckoned among the unconditional adherents of the oligarchy. -- Theodor Mommsen
Please don't begin to believe that the American political establishment is anything but a corrupt puppet of oligarchy. -- Alex Pareene
As an American citizen, one has to vote. If we don't vote, we're not doing our part. We'll become some sort of oligarchy. -- Jason Mraz
The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy. -- Baron de Montesquieu
I never complain. I chose the road of fighting with the Ukrainian oligarchy in 1996, and have paid for this with my freedom and that of my husband, my father and my close friends. -- Yulia Tymoshenko
When Sulla died in the year 676, the oligarchy which he had restored ruled with absolute sway over the Roman state; but, as it had been established by force, it still needed force to maintain its ground against its numerous secret and open foes. -- Theodor Mommsen
An oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this oligarchy of sex which makes father, brothers, husband, sons, the oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of every household... carries discord and rebellion into every home of the nation. -- Susan B. Anthony
It is the doctrine of the oligarchy that there is nothing that we hold in common, that the commonwealth is a myth, that it is even a sign of softheadedness and weakness. The oligarchical power feeds on the sense that we are all individuals, struggling on our own, and ennobled by the effort. -- Charlie Pierce
Who says meritocracy says oligarchy. -- Chris Hayes
Democracy is not compatible with financial oligarchy. -- Che Guevara
Monarchy hardens into despotism. Aristocracy contracts into oligarchy. Democracy expands into the supremacy of numbers. -- Lord Acton
The perversions are as follows: of royalty, tyranny; of aristocracy, oligarchy; of constitutional government, democracy. -- Aristotle
The fear is that we'll move in the direction from being a democracy to an oligarchy. -- Jane Mayer
Democracy is not compatible with financial oligarchy, with discrimination against Blacks and outrages by the Ku Klux Klan. -- Che Guevara
Power that controls the economy should be in the hands of elected representatives of the people instead of an industrial oligarchy -- William O. Douglas
In many respects, this country is becoming an oligarchy, with a tiny percentage of America owning the media, owning the country. -- Bernie Sanders
We have retained the forms and phrases of a republic, but in reality we are living under an oligarchy, not of courtesan, but of bureaucrats. -- Frank Chodorov
Are we prepared to take on the enormous political power of the billionaire class or do we continue to slide into economic and political oligarchy? -- Bernie Sanders
The American oligarchy increasingly has less in common with the American people than it does with the equivalent oligarchies in Germany or Mexico or Japan. -- Lewis H. Lapham
When economic power became concentrated in a few hands, then political power flowed to those possessors and away from the citizens, ultimately resulting in an oligarchy or tyranny. -- John Adams
Commercial concerns have expanded from family business to corporate wealth which is self-perpetuating and which enlightened statesmen and economists now dread as the most potent oligarchy yet produced. -- Helen Keller
Where some people are very wealthy and others have nothing, the result will be either extreme democracy or absolute oligarchy, or despotism will come from either of those excesses -- Aristotle
The right constitutions, three in number- kingship, aristocracy, and polity- and the deviations from these, likewise three in number - tyranny from kingship, oligarchy from aristocracy, democracy from polity. -- Aristotle
I'm much more convinced that the hierarchy comes from the monarchy, and that the hierarchy stays apart from the oligarchy. So the oligarchy is hurtful to the majority in Bolivia. -- Evo Morales
Democracy is premised, in some measure, on majority rule, and democracy is difficult in a situation of concentrated inequalities in which a large, impoverished majority confronts a small, wealthy oligarchy. -- Samuel P. Huntington
Mexico has relied on television for decades to keep the citizens misinformed and in a constant state of stupor. I mean we live in a time where democracy is almost synonymous with oligarchy. -- Andrea Suarez Paz
Democracy is the form of government in which the free are rulers, and oligarchy in which the rich; it is only an accident that the free are the many and the rich are the few. -- Aristotle
A democracy exists whenever those who are free and are not well-off, being in the majority, are in sovereign control of government, an oligarchy when control lies with the rich and better-born, these being few. -- Aristotle
To bring about government by oligarchy, masquerading as democracy, it is fundamentally essential that practically all authority and control be centralized in our Federal government. . . The individual sovereignty of our states must first be destroyed. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt

Send