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Oligarchy Quotes

Browse 153 quotes about Oligarchy.

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Oligarchy Quotes

“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.”

PovertyFreedom Of SpeechDemocratic SocietyOligarchyEconomic JusticeEconomic DisparityTax The RichLayoffsCorporate LawTwitter Takeover
Book:Esperanza Impossible: 100 Sonnets of Ethics, Engineering & Existence
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“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.”

PoliticsWealthFreedomPoorDemocracyUnityCorruptionFascismOligarchy
Author:Jennifer DeLucy
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“Because [Jeff Bezos] and [Mark Zuckerberg] own $100 billion in the current state of the legal system, the current state of the fiscal system, the current way the international economy is organised, people say, ‘OK, $100 billion, exactly the right level.’ But with a different legal system, different international taxation, it could be 200, it could be 50. So what would be the story? Any level that they will attain, it will be the best? This kind of sacralisation of special individuals is a form of religious thought. People who use this kind of argument: ‘He's great, therefore –‘ therefore what? Therefore we should subsidize him so that he's even richer?”

WealthMoneyEconomicsGreedOligarchyIncome InequalityPlutocracyWealth Inequality
Author:Thomas Piketty
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“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.”

PeopleDemocracyStateOligarchyRepublicsOchlocracyCommunal Servitude
Book:Tomiétrèla
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“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…”

FreedomDemocracyOligarchyUs ConstitutionAutocracyDogeRules Of LawDystopian AmericaFederal Workers Mass FiringTrump Administrationstration
Book:Democratic Dilemmas and Divine Inspiration: On leadership and the fate of freedom in America
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“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.”

PoliceInequalityOligarchyCopagandaThe Mafia In BluePolice As Soldiers For The ElitePolice In Bed With The Far RightSelective Enforcement
Book:Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News
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“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.”

CapitalismInequalityOligarchyClass WarfareCopagandaGenerational TheftWealth Hoarding
Book:Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News
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“Hope Gone Sour (American Sonnet) America is not a country, America is an abomination. America is a scourge on the fabric of time, the ideal tale of precaution. America is a living record of humans regressing to animal. America is a perfect specimen of democracy cleverly dismantled. America is a nation built by terrorists for the terrorists. America holds world record for humanity's worst of atrocities. America is a promise of hope gone sour. America is plague amongst fellowship of powers.”

DemocracyAmerican DreamTotalitarianismDonald TrumpRepublicansOligarchyNeonaziMagaElon MuskMake America Great Again
Book:Azad Earth Army: When The World Cries Blood
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“(O)n a whole range of issues, there has been a massive popular shift in public opinion toward a progressive critique of the current political economic system. It is, of course, largely subliminal, not carefully worked out, and lacks a coherent vision for what needs to be done -- but there can be little doubt that this shift has happened, and is deepening. People are increasingly disenchanted, and they are hungry for alternatives.”

NewsPropagandaDoomPolitical ScienceOligarchyMainstream MediaCurrent EventsGovernment Cover UpsCurrent AffairsClass WarCorporatocracyGovernment DeceptionNews Analysis
Author:Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed introduction to Censored 2013
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“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.”

Social JusticeHuman RightsCivil RightsFundamentalismHumanitarianismPeace ActivistWorld Is FamilyOligarchyDemilitarizationAnti Fascism
Book:Neurosonnets: The Naskar Art of Neuroscience
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“The current demonization of Russia will be used, and is indeed being used"..."to justify unjust wars that destroy the lives of poor people abroad; to sacrifice the lives of our poor, who are largely recruited into the armed force for economic reasons; to deplete this country's rich resources on the continental build-up of our over-bloated military to the detriment of much-needed infrastructure and social spending; and to greatly increase our carbon foot print.”

PoliticsCapitalismPatriotismNationalismFascismPoliticiansStatismOligarchyMilitary BudgetClass War
Book:The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Russia
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“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.”

InnovationArtificial IntelligenceOligarchyPseudoscienceSocial Media AddictionEconomic DisparityTechnology Existential RisksBig TechCon ArtistsHumanitarian Science Poetry
Book:Corazon Calamidad: Obedient to None, Oppressive to None
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“The vast growth of the proletariat, the concentration of ownership into the hands of a few owners, and the exploitation by those owners of the mass of the community, had no fatal or necessary connection with the discovery of new and perpetually improving methods of production. The evil proceeded in direct historical sequence, proceeded patently and demonstrably, from the fact that England, the seed-plot of the Industrial System, was already captured by a wealthy oligarchy before the series of great discoveries began.”

CapitalismDistributionOligarchyDistributismServile State
Book:The Servile State
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“The Russian oligarchic system is the quintessence of statist depravity, where all industry is controlled by a small number of men ruthless enough to rise to the top of a corrupt patronage system, where government serves the interests of elites, money and privilege flow to the top, the people are exploited through a venomous cocktail of brutality and graft, and truth is the enemy of the state. Russian oligarchy is economic survival of the fittest, the ultimate, balls-out Darwinian experiment in wealth consolidation by the most wicked, immoral and dishonest ― government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich at the expense and misery of everyone else.”

RussiaPutinGovernment QuotesOligarchyGovernment CorruptionOligarchsVladimir PutinPutinismPutin QuotesThe Rich Quotes
Book:No: No
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“You said they were a…religious…?” “Oligarchy,” he finishes. “Ruled by five high priests, who are in turn elected by smaller delegations of regular priests, one for each sub-country. Though the common belief is that each high priest is chosen by God himself.” “God?” Artemisia asks. “They’re monotheistic, yes,” he says. She rolls her eyes. “Just say there’s only one. You aren’t in court, your fancy words don’t impress anyone.”

ReligionOligarchyTheodosiaArtemisiaSørenFancy Words
Book:Lady Smoke
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“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.”

TaxesCorruptionTaxationOligarchyCity Of LondonKleptocracyMoney LaunderingTax EvasionFinancial SectorCredit Suisse
Book:Kleptopia How Dirty Money is Conquering the World & The Looting Machine By Tom Burgis 2 Books Collection Set
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“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.”

CorruptionOligarchyKleptocracyTony BlairNazarbayev
Book:Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World
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“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.”

CorruptionNazismHitlerSwitzerlandOligarchyCity Of LondonKleptocracyTony BlairBsi BankEfg Bank
Book:Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World
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“Twit & Trash (The Sonnet) There is nothing more cataclysmic than a sea of unarmed citizens out for justice - even the richest oligarchic leeches, armed with billions of robots, tanks and satellites, would crumble like twigs. Born to privilege, most tech giants are tech trash, loaded with more nuts than the Enigma machine. In the salacious pursuit of the silicon dream, these nutters are the antithesis of Tesla and Turing. Tech giants are giants by the will of people, takes less than a month to bankrupt their worth. Any giant who thinks they are above the people, are the puniest form of termites on earth. Clockwork mice and clockwork minds both can run great distances with no sense of why? Children of earth still sleep without food, yet colonizer kids are headed for the sky!”

CapitalismColonialismImperialismRobotsOligarchyAlgorithmTechnology Existential RisksBillionairesTax The RichTech Giants
Book:Little Planet on The Prairie: Dunya Benim, Sorumluluk Benim
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“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.)”

CorruptionOligarchyFree Market IdeologyTony BlairNazarbayevTony JudtPeter Mandelson
Book:Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World
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“There are three kinds of constitution, and an equal number of deviation-forms--perversions, as it were, of them. The constitutions are monarchy, aristocracy, and thirdly that which is based on a property qualification, which it seems appropriate to call timocratic, though most people are wont to call it polity. The best of these is monarchy, the worst timocracy. The deviation from monarchy is tyranny; for both are forms of one-man rule, but there is the greatest difference between them; the tyrant looks to his own advantage, the king to that of his subjects. For a man is not a king unless he is sufficient to himself and excels his subjects in all good things; and such a man needs nothing further; therefore he will not look to his own interests but to those of his subjects; for a king who is not like that would be a mere titular king. Now tyranny is the very contrary of this; the tyrant pursues his own good. And it is clearer in the case of tyranny that it is the worst deviation-form; but it is the contrary of the best that is worst. Monarchy passes over into tyranny; for tyranny is the evil form of one-man rule and the bad king becomes a tyrant. Aristocracy passes over into oligarchy by the badness of the rulers, who distribute contrary to equity what belongs to the city-all or most of the good things to themselves, and office always to the same people, paying most regard to wealth; thus the rulers are few and are bad men instead of the most worthy. Timocracy passes over into democracy; for these are coterminous, since it is the ideal even of timocracy to be the rule of the majority, and all who have the property qualification count as equal. Democracy is the least bad of the deviations;”

DemocracyMonarchyAristocracyOligarchyTirannyTimocracy
Book:Nicomachean Ethics
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“Assassinating a tyrant is not the solution, it only makes them a martyr to their followers. Stand up to them, strip them of their position, then throw 'em in jail. There's nothing more torturous to a megalomaniacal tyrant than rotting behind bars like a two-bit criminal.”

Social JusticeTyrannyOppressionNonviolenceOligarchyHumanitarian CrisisTyrantWar CriminalsCrime Against HumanityOppression And Government
Book:Either Reformist or Terrorist: If You Are Terror I Am Your Grandfather
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“...why is there so little concern about the real hold that the retrograde monarchy of Saudi Arabia has over the United States? President after President, Trump included, inexplicably continue to partner with the Saudi monarchy despite its suppression of women's rights, and its authoritarian nature, despite the fact that Saudi Arabia does more than any other country to spread Islamist terrorism, including in the form of Al Qaeda, and despite the fact that fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 attackers were Saudi. One might think this deserves some looking into. This is not even to mention the biggest elephant in the room, which is never to be spoken of, and that is Israel and its outsized influence over US foreign policy.”

PoliticsCapitalismTerrorismNationalismForeign PolicyPoliticiansOligarchyOil WarsResource Wars
Book:The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Russia
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“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.”

CorruptionOligarchyTony BlairJp MorganNazarbayevSir Dick EvansGlencoreJonathan Aitken
Book:Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World
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“Meanwhile, the US House of Representatives voted in favor of a military budget even bigger than Trump had asked for. And, as Erik Sherman at Forbes magazine eloquently pointed out, 60 percent of the Democrats voted for this outsized military budget which totals $695.5 billion. As Sherman explains, "{i}n other words, of the party that supposedly opposes rampant military spending and the Trump administration, 60% voted for this bill," at a time "{w}hen income inequality combines with systemic and systematic redistribution of virtually all income growth to the wealthiest while their taxes are reduced." Sherman of course hints at a truth which must be accepted- that Democrats are not, and never really have been, a party which "opposes rampant military spending." There is a bi-partisan consensus on such spending, and there is very little debate on lowering it. And this is for a number of reasons, one of which being that military spending is very lucrative for the arms manufacturers who bilk the quite willing Pentagon, and by extension the taxpayers; indeed, these are the biggest welfare cheats who few will acknowledge.”

PoliticsCapitalismNationalismPoliticiansStatismOligarchyPlutocracyMilitary BudgetCorporate WelfareRedistributive Militarism
Book:The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Russia
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“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.”

CorruptionOligarchyTony BlairNazarbayevSir Dick EvansAstana AirBae SystemsSerious Fraud Office
Book:Kleptopia How Dirty Money is Conquering the World & The Looting Machine By Tom Burgis 2 Books Collection Set
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“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.”

CorruptionOligarchyCity Of LondonTony BlairMargaret ThatcherNew Labour
Author:Tom Burgis
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