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

“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

“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.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“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

“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

“Awake, arise, and treat the Putin pandemic, like you treated the Covid pandemic.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“Your desire for unrestrained comfort is the oligarch's superpower. Cut yourself off from luxury, and you'll cut off the oligarchs from their powers.”
― Abhijit Naskar, High Voltage Habib: Gospel of Undoctrination

“You know that big government doesn't hurt big corporations. They've got the best lawyers and accountants in the world. You know who gets destroyed by big government? It's the little guys.”
― Marco Rubio

“After long years tolerating tax evasion by their fellow members of the ruling class, the political leaders of the big Western economies had been forced by the cost of the bank bailouts, the subsequent recession and increasingly widespread hostility to cuts in public services to go after those missing tax revenues. Hence the Americans' pursuit of UBS, Credit Suisse, BSI and the rest. But the City was in a different position. It was not the UK Treasury that the City's clients were primarily cheating. It was everyone else's. And there was one more fact, so huge and so obvious that everyone ignored it the way only problems of such magnitude could be ignored. Tax evasion deprived governments of revenue. Money laundering was the other side of the same coin. Like tax dodging, it was a subversion of money's role as a token of reciprocal altruism that allowed large and diverse societies to function. But while tax evasion sucked money out, money laundering pumped money in. If you could stop yourself thinking about its origins, those inflows of dirty money from around the world were just another source of investment into otherwise declining economies.”
― Tom Burgis, Kleptopia How Dirty Money is Conquering the World & The Looting Machine By Tom Burgis 2 Books Collection Set

“The perceptive in the City could see that their long run of ever more perfect freedom, beginning with Margaret Thatcher’s big bang and advancing, to their pleasant surprise, under Tony Blair’s New Labour, was facing a prolonged interruption when the masses worked out that they had been left with the bill for the incipient crisis. The new moneymen of the former Soviet Union shared with the libertarians of the City a loathing for the state. They had done splendid business together, the industrial triumphs of the proletariat laid out in lavish stock market prospectuses.”
― Tom Burgis

“To pursue its missing billions, BTA retained Trefor Williams’ private intelligence company Diligence, Portland, a PR consultancy founded by Tony Blair’s old media strategist Tim Allan, and a firm of the finest London lawyers, Hogan Lovells, where the flinty and brilliant partner Chris Hardman took up the case.”
― Tom Burgis

“Adjusting the public record in the West was certainly more complicated than it was at home, and vastly more expensive. Tony Blair guarded the financial details of his consultancy work as jealously as Nazarbayev guarded the details of his kickbacks, but the three-term prime minister’s services were said to cost Kazakhstan $13 million a year. Blair understood when to use light, when darkness. Back in 2006, investigators from the Serious Fraud Office chasing down bribery related to the sale of British fighter jets to Saudi Arabia had tried to inspect the middlemen’s Swiss accounts. The House of Saud had sent word that such interference in their affairs would cause them to cancel the next multibillion-dollar batch of planes from BAE Systems, formerly British Aerospace. Blair’s government halted the SFO investigation, on the grounds of Saudi Arabia’s invaluable assistance in heading off attacks by adherents of the jihadism the kingdom itself sponsored. For Sir Dick Evans, a lifelong arms dealer who had risen to the chairmanship of BAE and been questioned by the SFO’s bribery investigators as they homed in on their targets, this represented a bullet dodged at the last second. His next profitable course would lead to Kazakhstan, to set up an airline, Astana Air.”
― Tom Burgis, Kleptopia How Dirty Money is Conquering the World & The Looting Machine By Tom Burgis 2 Books Collection Set

“Nazarbayev had learned that Westerners could be just as adept as he was in turning money into power and power back into money. Some, like Dick Evans and Jonathan Aitken, went about it from positions at the top of business and government. Others had to wait until they had left office to monetise their access and influence. They had to get theirs from what they called ‘consultancy’. Blair was said to have made $1 million from Ivan Glasenberg’s Glencore for three hours spent talking the Qatari prime minister out of blocking its merger with a mining company. JP Morgan, the Wall Street bank that had won the financial crisis, retained him too, as did a Swiss insurance company, the government of Kuwait and Abu Dhabi’s investment fund. Some days he was a business consultant, others a philanthropist, or a governance guru, or a peacemaker. His money sat in a web of companies that almost rivalled the complexity and opacity Nazarbayev’s Swiss bankers had devised. By one estimate, less than a decade after he resigned as prime minister, his fortune stood at $90 million.”
― Tom Burgis, Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World

“Nazarbayev found that he and his regime had a certain chemistry with figures from Blair’s strand of Western politics: the Third Way. It was a system that purported to wed the humanity of the left to the dynamism of the markets. Its proponents possessed, as Tony Judt put it following Blair’s election, ‘blissful confidence in the dismantling of centralised public services and social safety nets’. They felt themselves to be part of a new, transnational elite that would harness the miracles of globalisation. Peter Mandelson, Blair’s strategist, announced the end of the left’s anxieties about the hoarding of wealth. ‘We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich,’ he said. (He added, ‘as long as they pay their taxes’, though the caveat was often forgotten, perhaps because they did not.)”
― Tom Burgis, Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World

“It was to Blair that Nazarbayev turned for counsel at this delicate moment. The information blackout on Zhanaozen had been insufficient to prevent the basic details leaking out. It was as though someone had spoken aloud a forbidden truth: for the kleptocrat, ruling by licensing theft rather than seeking consent, money can achieve most of what needs to be done. For everything else, there is violence. And so, as he arrived in Cambridge, Mecca of the rational, to deliver his speech, Nazarbayev resolved to follow Blair’s advice. For these Westerners, anxious after years of war and terrorism and, lately, the financial crisis, he would be the bringer of stability to a troubled world.”
― Tom Burgis, Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World

“BSI’s London office lay equidistant from the Bank of England and St Paul’s, bang in the centre of the City of London, the aorta of the global financial system. The unremarkable building stood on Cheapside, the City thoroughfare laid down by the Romans, where medieval merchants sold sheep’s feet and eels. The Stocks Market at its east end became known for the appalling stench of rotting fare. Around the corner was the Lord Mayor’s residence, the Mansion House. There Tony Blair had leavened a speech about unjust global trade with a reaffirmation that the City ‘creates much of the wealth on which this British nation depends’.

From the start, the Swiss financiers who created Banco della Svizzera Italiana, or Swiss-Italian Bank, saw their task as helping money cross national borders. Construction of what was then the world’s longest tunnel, through the St Gotthard massif in the Alps, was under way. It would carry a railway to connect northern and southern Europe. When the work was completed, the Swiss president declared that ‘the world market is open’. The Italian-speaking Swiss city of Lugano lay on the new railway’s route. It was there that BSI’s founders opened a bank in 1873, to capitalise on the new trade route. They did well, expanding in Switzerland and sending bankers abroad. The bank came through one world war. In the second, BSI’s bankers did what many Swiss bankers did: they collaborated with the Nazis. At the same time, they did what they would start to do for their rich clients: they spun a story that reversed the truth. As Swiss bankers and their apologists told the tale, the reason that Switzerland made it a crime to violate bank secrecy was to help persecuted Jews protect their savings. In fact, the law was first drafted in 1932, the year before Hitler came to power. The impetus came not from altruism but self-interest. It was the Great Depression. Governments badly needed to collect taxes.”
― Tom Burgis, Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World

“Soon after the marriage of Miss Meg, George, the third son, and youngest of the family, was placed in the counting house of one of the most eminent West Indian merchants at that period in Glasgow. This incident was in no other respect important in the history of the Lairds of Grippy, than as serving to open a career to George, that would lead him into a higher class of acquaintance than his elder brothers: for it was about this time that the general merchants began to arrogate to themselves that aristocratic superiority over the shopkeepers, which they have since established into an oligarchy, as proud and sacred, in what respects the reciprocities of society, as the famous Seignories of Venice and Genoa.”
― John Galt, The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

“AI Con (The Sonnet)

Everybody is concerned about psychics conning people,
How 'bout the billionaires who con people using science!
Con artists come in all shapes and sizes,
Some use barnum statements, others artificial intelligence.
Most scientists speak up against only the little frauds,
But not the big frauds who support their livelihood.
Am I not afraid to be blacklisted by the big algorithms!
Is the sun afraid, its light will offend some puny hoods!
I come from the soil, I'll die struggling in the soil.
My needs are less, hence my integrity is dangerous.
I am here to show this infantile species how to grow up.
I can't be bothered by the fragility of a few spoiled brats.
Reason and fiction both are fundamental to build a civilization.
Neither is the problem, the problem is greed and self-absorption.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Corazon Calamidad: Obedient to None, Oppressive to None

“Takeover Twattery (The Sonnet)

Oligarchs don't even care about the welfare of their employees,
And you want them to care about social welfare! Keep dreaming!
Oligarchs have no regard for the struggles of human life,
And you think they'll transform the world! Keep dreaming!
I thought Mark was bad for not treating facebook's health issues,
But the chief twat makes Zuck look like an incompetent simpleton.
Oligarchs are poster boys for regress, not crusaders for freedom,
Better to have a CEO without answers than one who answers to none.
However, like corrupt politicians, oligarchs are made by people,
If anybody is to blame it's the morons who put them in pedestal.
If you had the common sense to question your pavlovian attraction,
Spoiled brats could never treat society as daddy's mine of emerald.
Now more than ever it is imperative to ban large scale takeovers.
Moreover, it is vital to legally shun the rise of billionaires.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Esperanza Impossible: 100 Sonnets of Ethics, Engineering & Existence

“Not all terrorists live in the shadows, some own rocket companies, and provide fellow terrorists unhindered, "above-the-law" access to all the exposure they could dream of.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Centurion Sermon: Mental Por El Mundo

“Capitalism is exploitation of the people by billionaires.

Billionaires are enemies of the people.

In a better world, billionaires wouldn't exist.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, Inside The Mind of an Introvert

“Where do oligarchs come from?
They come from people's shallowness.
When people stop being shallow,
no oligarch shall get to grow,
to spread their life-crushing tentacles.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Either Right or Human: 300 Limericks of Inclusion

“найнедосконаліша форма урядування із законних — це демократія; а із свавільних форм урядування вона найкраща: бо в першому випадку вона мало робить добра, а в другому — мало робить лиха; отже, демократія гірша від монархії й аристократії, але краща від тиранії та олігархії. Отже, форми урядування стосовно їх корисности стоятимуть в такому порядку: закон - монархія, аристократія, демократія; сваволя - демократія, олігархія, тиранія.”
― Pamfil Yurkevych, Історія філософії права. Філософія права. Філософський щоденник

“Одна з цих цілей полягає в тому, щоб використовувати фашистську тактику лицемірно, розмахуючи жупелом націоналізму перед білими людьми середнього достатку та робітничого класу, щоб спрямовувати державні кошти в руки олігархів. Водночас як і в епоху Джима Кроу в Сполучених Штатах, політики продовжують запевняти своїх прихильників, що національна ідентичність (яку вони визначають по-різному) забезпечує статус і гідність, які є «безцінними».”
― Jason F. Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

“It was morbidly fascinating to hear rich people discuss what to do with the rest of us.”
― Byrd Nash, Delicious Death

“Democracy becomes a de facto oligarchy not because of the rich but because of the poor. They allow their votes to be bought and purchase entertainment products, which creates a new class of merciless rich from the ranks of the most vicious of the poor. These are not aristocrats; they are the opposite.”
― Brett Stevens, Power Nihilism: A Case for Moral & Political Nihilism