Bidzina Ivanishvili Quotes

Great wealth took possession of the government. It was reflected in Mr. Harding's selection of a cabinet.

The people who own the country are now going to get to run it.

The Senate establishment is almost the antithesis of democracy. It is what might be called a self-perpetuating oligarchy with only mild overtones of a plutocracy.

Rather than living in a democracy, we are living in a benevolent oligarchy.

We're not a democracy. It's a terrible misunderstanding and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us that. In reality, we're a plutocracy: a government by the wealthy.

Oligarch is just a nonsense word. What does it mean? I don't like it.

There is nothing more dangerous than a government of the many controlled by the few.

Of course the biggest mafia in Russia has always been the government; in Soviet times, the Communist Party, and now a circle of former KGB and FSB.

I think very poorly of United Russia. United Russia is the party of corruption, the party of crooks and thieves.

Patrimonial capitalism's legacy is that many people see reform as a euphemism for corruption and self-dealing.

People live with the illusion that we have a democratic system, but it's only the outward form of one. In reality we live in a plutocracy, a government of the rich.

Political battles are won when the rich favor them.

The American citizen must be made aware that today a relatively small group of people is proclaiming its purposes to be the will of the People. That elitist approach to government must be repudiated.

Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.

If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it.

It matters not one iota what political party is in power or what President holds the rein of office. We are not politicians, or public thinkers; we are the rich; we own America; we got it, God knows how, but we intend to keep it if we can by throwing all our tremendous weight of our support, our influence, our money, our political connections, our purchased Senators, our hungry Congressmen, and our public-speaking demagogues, into the scale against any legislation, any political platform, any Presidential campaign that threatens the integrity of our estate.

Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions, and consequently of no use to a good king or a good ministry; for which reason Courts are so overrun with politics.

Democracy derailed …. An alternative form of government …. The initiative process has become a tool for millionaires and rich special interests.

… lobbyist-larded Washington

We all want prosperity, but not at the expense of liberty. Poverty is not as great a danger to liberty as is wealth, with its corrupting, demoralizing influences. Let us never have a Government at Washington owing its retention to the power of the millionaires rather than to the will of millions.

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

The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.

Democracy is just a word. You have to give it meaning. The US is not a democracy. Most Americans do not vote. We haven't had a real choice for a long, long time now. Wealth rules. Corporations rule. The US is a plutocracy - government by wealthy people. Certain people control multinational corporations. You couldn't get elected in the US without lots of money.

There is a long American tradition of suspicion of concentrated economic power because of its tendency to corrupt government and turn it from a democracy into a plutocracy.

Democracy cannot long survive when the people permit their lives to be dominated - economically or politically - by a powerful few.