Helen Keller Quotes

Rich people are powerful in wealth but few in votes.

The relationship between the policy desires of the wealthiest 10 percent of the population and the actual Federal public policy over recent decades often corresponded to a plutocracy rather than a democracy.

In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme.

Exxon, Coca-Cola, BHP Billiton and News Corporation have much more say in organising the global agenda than the planet's 5 billion mature-age voters without a ballot box.

The whole argument with the anti-suffragists, or even the critical suffragist man, is this: that you can govern human beings without their consent.

If allowed to run free of the social system, capitalism will attempt to corrupt and undermine democracy, which is after all not a natural state.

Remember, until the 1970s, the spread of democracy has always been accompanied by the decline of inequality. The more democratic our societies have been, the more equal they have been becoming. Now we have the reverse tendency. The spread of democracy now is very much accompanied by the increase in inequality.

The biggest lie of all is that capitalism is democracy. We have no way of understanding democracy outside of the market, just as we have no understanding of how to understand freedom outside of market values.

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.

The best political community is formed by citizens of the middle class.

The function of a parliamentary democracy, under universal suffrage, historically considered, is to expose wealth-privilege to the attacks of the people.

Remove poverty from politics.

Under universal suffrage the elected are those who know best how to take in the masses. The minority, which may happen to be the half minus one, is sacrificed.

One-fourth of the children in this country are poor—and they don't vote.

Since the poor don’t vote, and the rich are too few to mention, the middle class chooses all by itself who runs the country.

Political power is now widely diffused; and whatever may be the evils of democracy, this good has come of it, that it has forced men to open their eyes to the misery of the masses, and to inquire more zealously as to the possibility of a better distribution of wealth.

When democracy creates wealth on a broad scale there is no tension between it and capitalism. But when that is not the case, the value of democracy becomes less clear to some. There are tremendous tensions between democratic national sovereignty, open global markets and mass migration.

Democracy is becoming collateral damage in a world where global risks have been ignored or exacerbated by those with the power to act.

We live in a nation that spent centuries denying the right to vote to the poor, to women, and to people of color.

[James] Madison pointed out in the discussion of the constitutional debates - the constitutional convention - that democracy would be a danger. He used England of course as the model and said suppose that in England everyone had the free right to vote; the poor, the propertyless - who are the great majority - would use their voting power to take away the rights of property owners to carry out what we would call land reform.

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.

... while one-half of the people of the United States are robbed of their inherent right of personal representation in this freestcountry on the face of the globe, it is idle for us to expect that the men who thus rob women will not rob each other as individuals, corporations and Government.

England shouldn't have the real freedom of vote and we shouldn't either. Because as [James Madison] put it, one of the primary goals of government was to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority, to make sure the opulent maintain their rights. The constitutional system was structured to ensure that outcome.

Popular suffrage is in itself no guarantee of freedom. People can vote themselves into slavery.

Is not the very beginning of privilege, monopoly and industrial slavery this erecting of the ballot-box above the individual?