William Jennings Bryan Quotes

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

We don't have to sit by and watch our meritocracy be replaced by a permanent aristocracy, and our democracy be undermined by dynastic wealth.

Each class of society has its own requirements; but it may be said that every class teaches the one immediately below it; and if the highest class be ignorant, uneducated, loving display, luxuriousness, and idle, the same spirit will prevail in humbler life.

[Addressing Nelson Rockefeller:] You thought that, because you were a Rockefeller, you were owed the presidency. You weren't. It's one of the beauties of America.

The monarchy and aristocracy have all possible motives for endeavoring to obtain unlimited power over the persons and property of the community. The consequence is inevitable: they have all possible motives for combining to obtain that power.

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

If the rabble were lopped off at one end and the aristocrats at the other, all would be well with the country.

Because in Russia you were able to triumph with the help of a large class of poor peasants, you represent things in such a way, as if we in Western Europe are also going to have that help.

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.

Evolution is what it is. The upper classes have always died out; it's one of the most charming things about them.

I don't think there's a whole lot of class literature at all. I think most of that has become racially based, and people don't think of it as being class literature.

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

Every society naturally divides itself into classes. The author of nature has bestowed on some greater capacities than on others--birth, education, talents and wealth, create distinctions among men as visible and of as much influence as titles, stars and garters. In every society, men of this class will command a superior degree of respect--and if the government is so constituted as to admit but few to exercise the powers of it, it will, according to the natural course of things, be in their hands.

Aristocracy is naturally abhorrent to me, and adored equality is my idol.

The rich don’t want the poor to get ahead of them.

Our democracy may have an aristocracy of talent, as Jefferson said – which is fine – but we don’t want everyone else to be left out. Something like that seems to be happening, though.

There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents;... The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy.

The House of Commons is full of fat and pompous plutocrats…Public schools are cradles of sickening snobbery.

A political combination of the lower classes … is an evil of the first magnitude …. Their supremacy in the state means the supremacy of numbers over knowledge …

There is no society, however free and democratic, where wealth will not create an aristocracy.

In no place, even Paris, was the social part of the government carried to such excess.

A person born in the middle class, as I was, educated in bourgeois institutions, … is poorly prepared to take a leading part in revolutionary activity.

Keep up the middle class; lop off aristocracy on the one hand, and a rabble at the other; let the middle class ... have the power.

It is quite plain that your government will never be able to restrain a distressed and discontented majority. For with you the majority is the government, and has the rich, who are always a minority, absolutely at its mercy.

Let wealth and commerce, laws and learning die, But leave us still our old nobility.