Oligarchy Quotes

“There has always been, and there is now, a profound conflict of interest between the people and the government of the United States.”
― Howard Zinn

“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

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

“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, Binding Chaos

“Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms.”
― Aristotle

“So nobody must be allowed to think at all. Down with the public schools! Children must be drilled mentally by quarter-educated herdsmen, whose wages would stop at the first sign of disagreement with the bosses. For the rest, deafen the whole world with senseless clamour. Mechanize everything! Give nobody a chance to think. Standardize "amusement." The louder and more cacophonous, the better! Brief intervals between one din and the next can be filled with appeals, repeated 'till hypnotic power gives them the force of orders, to buy this or that product of the "Business men" who are the real power in the State. Men who betray their country as obvious routine.

The history of the past thirty years is eloquent enough, one would think. What these sodden imbeciles never realize is that a living organism must adapt itself intelligently to its environment, or go under at the first serious change of circumstance.”
― Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears

“I say, they [those at the top] don't have to conspire, because they all think alike. The president of General Motors and the president of Chase Manhattan Bank really are not going to disagree much on anything, nor would the editor of the New York Times disagree with them. They all tend to think quite alike, otherwise they would not be in those jobs.”
― Gore Vidal

“We certainly face, as did the ancient Greeks, the problem of oligarchy—ever more threatening as globalization increases differences in wealth.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“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 Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America

“Oligarchies, throughout past history, have always thought more of their own advantage than of that of the rest of the community. It would be foolish to be morally indignant with them on this account; human nature, in the main and in the mass, is egoistic, and in most circumstances a fair dose of egoism is necessary for survival. It was revolt against the selfishness of past political oligarchies that produced the Liberal movement in favour of democracy, and it was revolt against economic oligarchies that produced Socialism. But although everybody who was in any degree progressive recognised the evils of oligarchy throughout the past history of mankind, many progressives were taken in by an argument for a new kind of oligarchy. ‘We, the progressives’ — so runs the argument — ‘are the wise and good; we know what reforms the world needs; if we have power, we shall create a paradise.’ And so, narcissistically hypnotised by contemplation of their own wisdom and goodness, they proceeded to create a new tyranny, more drastic than any previously known.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society

“You do not have to think very hard to figure out what happens to a democratic society (more accurately a democratic republic) when long-standing interpretations of the 'rules of law' are mangled to reflect the personal desires of a handful of extremely wealthy people…”
― Aberjhani, Democratic Dilemmas and Divine Inspiration: On leadership and the fate of freedom in America

“Fascism is always about controlling the narrative of the public. Any bad incident or bad decision is never their fault. It is always someone else’s fault.
It is the opposition’s fault, it is foreign powers fault, or it is the minority population’s fault. As long as they control the narrative, they control the power.”
― Shon Mehta

“you call me anarchist. You, who have destroyed the government of the people”
― Jack London, The Iron Heel

“In addition to the authoritarian role that U.S. police play by selectively enforcing rules made by those with power in an unequal society, they also have a long history of both overtly supporting and actively being infiltrated by the far right.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“Here's a fact omitted in many article about growing numbers of poor people living on the street: if the U.S. had remained as equitable as it was in 1975 for the next forty-three years through 2018, the bottom 90 percent of Americans would have earned an extra $47 trillion. Instead that money went to people already at the top, who use that money, among other things, to influence the political system and to hoard real estate.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“The biggest delusion of the oligarch is the thought that the authority wealth offers will outlive the society that gave it to him.”
― Marxist Aphorism

“When mercenaries run a democracy,
the nation becomes a business,
and the public vote becomes a commodity
that can be bought and sold in a market.”
― Shon Mehta, The Uncharted Mind

“The malignant Tumor of the banking Organism, the Termite Infestation in this wooden System, the insatiable Lion in an Oligarchy ruled by Boars..”
― Sino Melo

“That Day I'll Call You Human (Sonnet)

I shall call you all human,
the day you bring down all borders,
like you brought down the Berlin wall.

I shall call you all human,
the day you abolish all military,
like you abolished the SS.

I shall call you all human,
the day you eradicate fundamentalism,
like you eradicated polio.

I shall call you all human,
the day you ban the oligarchs,
like you tackled corona.

If you can't be a tsunami, be a flash flood -
if you can't be a flash flood, be a garden hose,
and wash away the inhumanities around you.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Neurosonnets: The Naskar Art of Neuroscience

“We lay blame and fault on the government, because we can't control the capitalists, until the capitalists become the government, and then it is too late.”
― Lawrence Nault - The Mountain Hermit

“Жменька людей з яхтами є політично згуртованішою та могутнішою за величезну масу тих, хто яхт не має, — і ця жменька готова діяти, щоб так тривало й надалі.”
― Timothy Snyder (author), On Freedom

“Demo in democracy means nothing, as demo can mean people, public, or state.” The cat continued, “Democracy is just a system of power and oppression. All power becomes oligarchy or ochlocracy. Charles wanted a republic, not a democracy. He wanted a system that guarantees voting and communal servitude between the state and people. There was no power but social contract. But you wanted power compared to strength.”
― Kolter Sands, Tomiétrèla

“At the end of the century, fascism leaves no lasting mark on thousand year old civilizations, it's only the adolescent countries like the US that get wiped out of existence.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“I want to hope, because I want to live in a country where people are fed, and not bankrupted by illness, and not too focused on fighting over personal dogmatic beliefs to do any real good for this world, for their fellow brothers and sisters. But oh, those powers that be are SO good at stirring up rage and putting divisive blinders around our eyes while they lead us all off a bloody cliff.”
― Jennifer DeLucy

“one cannot ignore associating laboratory rats with the millions of deprived young people who suffer under the merciless political and administrative experiments carried out by dictators, multinationals and mercenary militias.”
― Hanan Jasim Khammas

“Economics 101: don’t take economy lessons from rich white men.”
― Abhijit Naskar, With Love From A Blue Rock

“The biggest delusion of the oligarch is the thought that the authority wealth offers will outlive the society that gave it to them.”
― Marxist Aphorism

“Democracy is not dying in the dark. It dies in the hands of oligarchs and cowards.”
― Lloyd Wedes

“You want workers to have more control, that is fine, capitalism allows that, go start your own company or co-op and just be better than the gigantic machine designed to maximize profit at the expense of the very goal you have selected. If we do not grow, somebody else will, if we do not win the AI race, somebody else will. Worry not about the environment, look at this picture of how nicely we cleaned up after strip mining the hills and clear cutting the forests and pumping out every last drop of profitable liquid or gas or solid we could find.”
― Patrick Zelinski, One Big Oligarchy: How the Few Rule the Many

“Are you piloting a ton of metal down the road at high speed? Now you can do that while hearing one ad on the car radio, looking at another one in the form of a billboard (after all it is not particularly important where you look while driving!), and getting a notification on your phone of a third ad at the same moment, while the Netflix movie playing to your kids in the back seat pauses the product placement ads to replace them with a commercial break. If you are 'distracted' by those ads, you can get forced into a cage, but the firms trying very hard to distract you will never be reprimanded.”
― Patrick Zelinski