Jose Saramago Quotes

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.

It doesn't matter who you vote for. It's still the same billionaires that run the world.

We have allowed an unholy alliance of government - the new monarchy - and corporate influence - the new aristocracy - to take control of events in a way that would have made our Founders shudder.

Middle-class democracy has proved the best camouflage of the political dominance of big capital.

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.

It is economic power that determines political power, and governments become the political functionaries of economic power.

The rich and the well-born, according to the Federalist Papers, was greatly feared by the founders.

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

It means that, in fact, it's - whether fascist is the right word I don't know - more of a plutocracy than anything resembling a democracy; it has become a nation controlled by a very small, very wealthy elite.

In our political system, money is power. And that means a few can have a lot more power than the rest. That's bad news for everyone else - and for our democracy itself.

The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.

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

Andrew Mellon [Treasury Secretary and multi-millionaire] is today the real President of the United States. Calvin Coolidge is merely the man who occupies the White House.

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

America’s super-elite has been particularly effective at using the tools of a political democracy to protect its minority privilege.

The rich are hijacking American democracy.

In the 1820s, westerners and political outsiders worried that rich men in the east had commandeered the government for their own ends.

Our democracies are increasingly captured by a ruling class that seeks to perpetuate its privileges.

Liberals are concerned about the concentration of wealth because it almost inevitably leads to a concentration of power that undermines democracy.

Whenever the very rich hold views at odds with those of the entire population, the federal government tends to do the rich's bidding.

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.

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.

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

The political battle is between big money combines who spend a thousand pounds or more on every constituency they fight… when they speak democracy, they don't mean government by the people...they mean financial democracy, in which money counts and nothing but money.

The paradox of American democracy has been that its slogan of equal opportunity has meant, often, equal opportunity to get power over your fellows.