Quotes About Oligarchy

Ideology must be our foundation as it was for the Bolsheviks, but the new archives show that the personalities and patronage of a minuscule oligarchy were the essence of politics under Lenin and Stalin, as they were under the Romanov emperors—and just as they are today under the 'managed democracy' of twenty-first-century Russia.

The principle of equality, which is at the core of democratic values, has very little meaning in a world in which global oligarchy is taking over.

We have seen that monarchy and oligarchy have both merits and demerits. The principal demerit of both is that, sooner or later, the government becomes so indifferent to the desires of ordinary men that there is revolution

A government is usually called 'democratic' if a fairly large percentage of the population has a share of political power. The most extreme Greek democracies excluded women and slaves, and America considered itself a democracy before women had the vote. Clearly an oligarchy approaches more nearly to a democracy as the percentage possessed of political power increases. The characteristic features of oligarchy only appear when this percentage is rather small.

Victoria Ocampo era por cierto una oligarca, pero no todas las oligarcas eran Victoria Ocampo. Las damas de la alta sociedad, como se decía entonces, no empleaban su dinero y su tiempo en la difusión de las letras ni abrazaban la causa del feminismo ni transgredían costumbres establecidas, ni se animaban a proclamar su agnosticismo; nada tenían en común con Victoria

To consider the 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

En 1986, en momentos que representaban las nuevas fuerzas del periodo post oligárquico, la prensa acuñó el término «doce apóstoles» de la economía peruana cuando los doce mayores empresarios fueron convocados por el presidente Alan García para discutir el rumbo que el país debía tomar.

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.

Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle.

The most shop-worn joke in Manila was that the Philippines had spent "three hundred years in a convent, fifty years in a brothel." The oligarchy kept the keys.

Disaster's good for the oligarchy. Ha," Billy said to my goggle-eyes. "Fair's fair. You pull out 'exsanguinate,' I pull out 'oligarchy.'" "I'm in awe. There's nothing sexier than a guy with a big vocabulary. Don't tell your wife I said that.

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 the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.

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. They worship money and power and death. Their ideal solution to all the nation's problems would be another 100 Year War.

The fundamental threat to freedom is power to coerce, be it in the hands of a monarch, a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority.

Honduras in 2009 and Paraguay in 2012 were low-hanging fruit, small countries with outsized oligarchies, where mild reformers were easily dispatched.

You seem to consider the [Supreme Court] judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.

Vamos a acabar con los privilegios de la oligarquía, la Iglesia, los latifundistas y el resto de los explotadores del pueblo. Debemos defender la democracia, amigos; pero recuerden que no todo ha de ser política. Sin ciencia, industria y técnica no hay progreso posible, y sin música y arte no hay alma

When Xi Jinping took command in 2012, some of us anticipated that he might turn foreign policy in a more conciliatory direction by centralizing the policy process and curbing the scrum of interest groups that had characterized Hu Jintao's oligarchy. Xi's personal authority was, and is, more than sufficient to restrain the various groups that had been promoting their own interests by overreaching under Hu's collective leadership.

We are not a people with a revolutionary or an insurrectionary tradition. The War of Independence, while it borrowed the rhetoric of revolution, replaced a foreign oligarchy with a native, slaveholding oligarchy.

Once oligarchs achieve unchecked economic and political power, as they have in the United States, the citizens too become disposable. And that, in the eyes of the elite, is what we are.

Sandy illustrated the depraved mentality of an oligarchic and corporate elite that, as conditions worsen, retreats into self-contained gated communities, guts basic services, and abandons the wider population.

not long afterwards nearly the whole Hellenic world was in commotion; in every city the chiefs of the democracy and of the oligarchy were struggling, the one to bring in the Athenians, the other the Lacedaemonians.

In his book Oligarchy, American political scientist Jeffrey Winters provides a stunning illustration of just how dire US inequality has become: the average wealth of the richest one hundred American households relative to that of the bottom 90 percent approximates the wealth disparity between a Roman senator and a slave at the height of the Roman Empire.

It's the tyranny of an oligarchy that I'm concerned about.