Top 106 Oligarchy Quotes & Sayings

Hillary Clinton will nominate justices to the Supreme Court who are prepared to overturn Citizens United and end the movement toward oligarchy that we are seeing in this country.

Monarchy hardens into despotism. Aristocracy contracts into oligarchy. Democracy expands into the supremacy of numbers.

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

I did not think the Oligarchy would allow Trump to win. However, it seems that the oligarchs were deceived by their own media propaganda.

We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels.

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.

We need to change the power structure in America, we need to end the political oligarchy.

All systems are oligarchy. There is no other.

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.

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.

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.

Democracy appears to be safer and less liable to revolution than oligarchy. For in oligarchies there is the double danger of the oligarchs falling out among themselves and also with the people; but in democracies there is only the danger of a quarrel with the oligarchs. No dissension worth mentioning arises among the people themselves. And we may further remark that 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.

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.

Who says meritocracy says oligarchy.

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.

The perversions are as follows: of royalty, tyranny; of aristocracy, oligarchy; of constitutional government, democracy.

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.

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.

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.

The fear is that we'll move in the direction from being a democracy to an oligarchy.

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.

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.

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.

There are still two forms besides democracy and oligarchy; one of them is universally recognized and included among the four principal forms of government, which are said to be (1) monarchy, (2) oligarchy, (3) democracy, and (4) the so-called aristocracy or government of the best. But there is also a fifth, which retains the generic name of polity or constitutional government.

The interesting thing about that is one of the greatest critics of socialism and leftwing writings was Robert Michels who wrote a series of essays called "The Iron Law of Oligarchy" and in these essays he discusses how no matter what sorts of freedoms are advertised or put into a society structure, that all societies, all form of governments - whether they be a Roman republic, whether they be a democracy, whether they be a Russian communist system, whatever, a tribe... a tribal council - all of the continuously, throughout the ages, have all converted back into an oligarchy.

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.

Power that controls the economy should be in the hands of elected representatives of the people, not in the hands of an industrial oligarchy.

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.

A slave government is an oligarchy; and one, too, of the most arbitrary and criminal character.

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.

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.

Please don't begin to believe that the American political establishment is anything but a corrupt puppet of oligarchy.

Socialism is a fundamentally different social system where the world's resources are not controlled by a greedy, undemocratic oligarchy. This is not the same as the capitalist welfare states that have existed in some European countries.

If Republican leaders are willing to enable Trump's autocratic enthusiasms in return for oligarchy, American democracy will die.

Democracy is not compatible with financial oligarchy, with discrimination against Blacks and outrages by the Ku Klux Klan.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the Laws it is maintained that the best constitution is made up of democracy and tyranny, which are either not constitutions at all, or are the worst of all. But they are nearer the truth who combine many forms; for the constitution is better which is made up of more numerous elements. The constitution proposed in the Laws has no element of monarchy at all; it is nothing but oligarchy and democracy, leaning rather to oligarchy.

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.

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

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.

A democracy when put to the strain grows weak, and is supplanted by Oligarchy.

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.

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.

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.

Marcus Crassus cannot, any more than Pompeius, be reckoned among the unconditional adherents of the oligarchy.

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.

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.

Democracy is not compatible with financial oligarchy.

In many respects, this country is becoming an oligarchy, with a tiny percentage of America owning the media, owning the country.

Monarchy degenerates into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into savage violence and chaos.

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.