Top 82 Quotes About Oligarchy
#1. The new oligarchy must increasingly rely on the advice of scientists until in the end the politicians become merely the scientists' puppets.
C.S. Lewis
#2. 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.
#3. Monarchy degenerates into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into savage violence and chaos.
Polybius
#4. 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.
#5. 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.
Montesquieu
#6. 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
#7. The second corruption of the state is oligarchy (oligos = few), in which the military elite is narrowed down to a few ruling families of immense wealth and prestige, who now openly flaunt their wealth and possessions.
Robert Payne
#8. 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
#9. Power that controls the economy should be in the hands of elected representatives of the people instead of an industrial oligarchy
William O. Douglas
#10. 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
#11. Because the rich are generally few in number, while the poor are many, they appear to be antagonistic, and as the one or the other prevails they form the government. Hence arises the common opinion that there are two kinds of government - democracy and oligarchy.
Aristotle.
#12. 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.
#13. Called to the throne by the voice of the people, my maxim has always been: A career open to talent without distinction of birth. It is this system of equality for which the European oligarchy detests me
Napoleon Bonaparte
#14. 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
#15. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels.
Henry A. Wallace
#16. He who is a citizen in a democracy will often not be a citizen in an oligarchy.
Aristotle.
#17. 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
#18. In many respects, this country is becoming an oligarchy, with a tiny percentage of America owning the media, owning the country.
Bernie Sanders
#19. All governments use force and all assert that they are founded on reason. In fact, whether universal suffrage prevails or not, it is always an oligarchy that governs, finding ways to give to'the will of the people'the expression which the few desire.
Vilfredo Pareto
#20. 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
#21. Of governments there are said to be only two forms - democracy and oligarchy. For aristocracy is considered to be a kind of oligarchy, as being the rule of a few, and the so-called constitutional government to be really a democracy.
Aristotle.
#22. Of all the objections which have been framed against the federal Constitution, this is perhaps the most extraordinary. Whilst the objection itself is levelled against a pretended oligarchy, the principle of it strikes at the very root of republican government.
James Madison
#23. Too late did the socialist movement of the early twentieth century divine the coming of the Oligarchy. Even as it was divined, the Oligarchy was there - a fact established in blood,
Jack London
#24. 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
#25. We must eliminate all newspapers; we cannot make a revolution with free press. Newspapers are instruments of the oligarchy.
Ernesto Che Guevara
#26. The perversions are as follows: of royalty, tyranny; of aristocracy, oligarchy; of constitutional government, democracy.
Aristotle.
#27. Monarchy hardens into despotism. Aristocracy contracts into oligarchy. Democracy expands into the supremacy of numbers.
Lord Acton
#28. In 1890, Donnelly published Caesar's Column, a dystopian science fiction novel set in the far-off 1980s, when the United States had become a capitalist tyranny controlled by a ruthless Jewish oligarchy.
Arthur Goldwag
#29. This oligarchy of sex, which makes fathers, brothers, husbands and sons, the oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of every household - which ordains all men sovereigns, all women subjects, carries dissension, discord, and rebellion into every house of the nation.
Susan B. Anthony
#30. All systems are oligarchy. There is no other.
Tom Metzger
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. I believe that oligarchy follows next in order. And what manner of government do you term oligarchy? A government resting on a valuation of property, in which the rich have power and the poor man is deprived of it. I
Plato
#34. 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.
#35. For tyranny is a kind of monarchy which has in view the interest of the monarch only; oligarchy has in view the interest of the wealthy; democracy of the needy: none of them common good of all.
Aristotle.
#36. On a basic level, he had seen first-hand how his government used the element of fear to accomplish its objectives; the same element of fear that had been used as an excuse to engage its huge war machine in conflicts for the profits of America's oligarchy.
Kenneth Eade
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. A "centrally planned economy" by definition discourages and despises participation by the masses. It's a bureaucratic oligarchy.
A.E. Samaan
#41. The incurably suspicious Arthur Lee, youngest brother of Richard Henry, was of opinion that what others termed 'errors' in the Constitution were a deliberate scheme to create an oligarchy.
Douglas Southall Freeman
#42. Power always becomes consolidated back into the hands of very few people ... whether they be an economic aristocracy, a royalty, a monarchy which is the most concentrated form of oligarchy where it depends on one King who is ordained supposedly by God to rule.
Immortal Technique
#43. Democracy is not compatible with financial oligarchy.
Che Guevara
#44. Big government = oligarchy.
Simple equation.
Big government = loss of representation.
A.E. Samaan
#45. A slave government is an oligarchy; and one, too, of the most arbitrary and criminal character.
Lysander Spooner
#46. 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.
G.K. Chesterton
#47. 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
#48. A democracy when put to the strain grows weak, and is supplanted by Oligarchy.
Aristotle.
#49. 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.
Bell Hooks
#50. All men agree that a just distribution must be according to merit in some sense; they do not all specify the same sort of merit, but democrats identify it with freemen, supporters of oligarchy with wealth (or noble birth), and supporters of aristocracy with excellence.
Aristotle.
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. It had long been realised that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism.
George Orwell
#55. We've become, now, an oligarchy instead of a democracy. I think that's been the worst damage to the basic moral and ethical standards to the American political system that I've ever seen in my life.
Jimmy Carter
#56. A democracy cannot rule an empire. Neither can one man, though empire may appear to presuppose monarchy. There is always an oligarchy somewhere, open or concealed.
Ronald Syme
#57. But there's a message there for everyone and it is that people can unite, that democracy from below can challenge oligarchy, that imprisoned migrants can be freed, that fascism can be overcome, and that equality is emancipatory. The
Angela Y. Davis
#58. The form of government is a democracy when the free, who are also poor and the majority, govern, and an oligarchy when the rich and the noble govern, they being at the same time few in number.
Aristotle.
#59. The American oligarchy spares no pains in promoting the belief that it does not exist, but the success of its disappearing act depends on equally strenuous efforts on the part of an American public anxious to believe in egalitarian fictions and unwilling to see what is hidden in plain sight.
Michael Lind
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. In the American oligarchy, the President is a temporary chairman of the board who is there to take responsibility for actions decided in private sessions. He is there to sell policy more than to make it.
Diana Johnstone
#63. Human rights can only be assured among a virtuous people. The general government ... can never be in danger of degenerating into a monarchy, an oligarchy, an aristocracy, or any despotic or oppresive form so long as there is any virtue in the body of the people.
George Washington
#64. Please don't begin to believe that the American political establishment is anything but a corrupt puppet of oligarchy.
Alex Pareene
#65. It's the tyranny of an oligarchy that I'm concerned about.
Pat Robertson
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. Marcus Crassus cannot, any more than Pompeius, be reckoned among the unconditional adherents of the oligarchy.
Theodor Mommsen
#69. 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
#70. Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms.
Aristotle.
#71. A new era will dawn in Africa, when the impoverished masses of a nation rise up to rescue their right to a decent life from the hands of the ruling oligarchies.
Che Guevara
#72. The financial elite already have the politicians in their pockets, as a result of their lobbying.
Kenneth Eade
#73. The Establishment is amassing wealth and aggressively annexing power in a way that has no precedent in modern times. After all, there is nothing to stop it.
Owen Jones
#75. What the United States call democracy is actually a vertical model of remote governance by oligarchs - economic barons and their political representatives. The result is that citizens in the United States have little control over what the U.S. government does.
S. Brian Willson
#76. We will preserve the right to counsel for the common man in this age of oligarchic anarchy.
Kenneth Eade
#77. A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will.
Eric Hoffer
#78. By vice, dissipation, and extravagance, [the nobility] have been driven to the most despicable, and often the most atrocious actions, for which persons in a humble line would be exemplarily punished, while men and women of rank claim the privilege of being infamous.
Eliza Parsons
#79. We are in a prison of our own minds holding our own chains around us. We create our oligarchs and fight for their right to oppress us.
Heather Marsh
#80. Those in power must spend a lot of their time laughing at us.
Alice Walker
#81. There has never been a communism that worked. They were all dictatorships or oligarchies, every single one.
David Crosby
#82. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
