Lucy E. Parsons Quotes

Those who control the wealth of this society have an influence over political life far in excess of their number.

The real alternative to power of the rich is not power of the poor. It's just plain power.

Politics is the gentle art of obtaining votes from the poor and campaign contributions from the rich by promising to protect each from the other.

Rich people are powerful in wealth but few in votes.

The landed men are the true owners of our political vessel, the moneyed men are no more than passengers in it.

Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle.

There once was this powerful, both capital and political, class who cared about supporting and affirming a solid middle class in this country.

Our society will always remain an unstable and explosive compound as long as political power is vested in the masses and economic power in the classes. In the end one of these powers will rule. Either the plutocracy will buy up the democracy, or the democracy will vote away the plutocracy.

The most powerful forces in economics are not numbers or facts. They are prejudices and preferences. No amount of evidence will ever change the degree to which many of the rich and powerful prefer themselves to be richer and more powerful and others poorer and weaker.

The ability of the 1 percent to buy politicians and regulators is nothing new in American politics - just as inequality has been a permanent part of our economic system. This is true of virtually all political and economic systems.

While there's capitalism, there'll be socialism, because there is always a response to injustice.

'Plutocracy.' It has a perfect nuance: chilly, inaccessible, icy-rich.

Money often determines not only who gets elected, but what gets done. Which voices do lawmakers listen to, the banks or home owners, coal companies, or asthma sufferers, the CEOs or the unemployed?

Political battles are won when the rich favor them.

We need wealthy dogs off the seats of power. They're taking us back to feudalism and I really don't want that. But I'm very far from being a socialist.

Big corporations have money and power to make sure every rule breaks their way; people have voices and votes to push back.

Big government inevitably drives an upward distribution of wealth to those whose wealth, confidence and sophistication enable them to manipulate government.

Every class struggle is a political struggle

Every government that exists -- or ever existed, or ever will exist -- is a kleptocracy, meaning "rule by thieves". Competing ideologies merely provide different excuses to separate the Productive Class from what they produce.

Political institutions are a superstructure resting on an economic foundation.

The decision involves nothing less than a surrender of the taxing power to the moneyed class

Governments last as long as the undertaxed can defend them against the overtaxed.

How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the twentieth century.

Capitalists personally are often the mildest-mannered men that ever shattered a family or drained a workingman of his marrow.

Politicians are becoming mouthpieces for other forces justifying the status quo.