Chrystia Freeland Quotes

Politics isn't about left versus right; it's about top versus bottom.

I understand politicos gotta make bank. But cloistering with the Hollywood elite is not how you prove you're a man of the people.

I look at my people, and I look at those who control them - the political elite. And the sad thing is that the elites are just not interested in the welfare of the people.

The U. S. business class is highly class conscious and its members have long seen themselves as fighting a bitter class war, except that they don’t want anybody to know about it.

As a rule, large capitalists are Republicans and small capitalists are Democrats, but workingmen must remember that they are all capitalists, and that the many small ones, like the fewer large ones, are all politically supporting their class interests.

With the people, for the people, by the people. I crack up when I hear it; I say, with the handful, for the handful, by the handful, cause that's what really happens.

There isn't much discussion of ruling class in America even in Boston, probably one of the most class-conscious cities in the country?

The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.

The fundamental weakness in the Tea Party machine is the stark difference between what the leaders of the Tea Party elite - plutocrats like the Koch Brothers -want and what the average grassroots Tea Party follower wants.

No real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist.

I remember an article, I can't recall who by, it was after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which said that now the Wall was down, there could be no more class war. Only someone with money could ever say such a thing.

If I still lived in Russia, I'd be dead... or a really effective oligarch.

The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.

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.

The Cabinets who rule the destinies of nations from the various capitals of Europe are but the tools of the moneyed interest. Their quarrels are not dictated by sentiments of national pride or honor, but by the avarice and lust of power on the part of the class to which they belong.

In today’s America the working class is paid to fight wars that the powerful would never risk.

Allow the rich (no matter under what pretext, whether of philanthropy, or patriotism, or interest) to prescribe the education of the poor, and they prescribe their condition and relative importance.

America is like a melting pot. The people at the bottom get burned, and the scum floats to the top.

There are two great enemies of thought and progress, the aristocracy of royalty and the aristocracy of gold.

In British tradition, the American elite expected the lower classes to fight their wars.

The problem is never the populist’s imperfect capacity to represent the people’s will; rather, it’s always the institutions that somehow produced the wrong outcomes. So even if they look properly democratic, there must be something going on behind the scenes that allows corrupt elites to continue to betray the people. Conspiracy theories are thus not a curious addition to populist rhetoric; they are rooted in and emerge from the very logic of populism itself.

Sadly, the system in this country is rigged in favor of wealthy elites who have purchased tremendous influence in our government.

The fact of the matter is the Arab elites are more inclined to accommodate our wishes because of certain overlapping interests that are often financial. That is not the case with the Arab masses.

People are starting to notice the great divide. The Tea party sees the aloofness in a political elite that thinks it knows best and orders the rest of America to fall in line. The Occupy movement sees it in an economic elite that lives in mansions and flies on private jets.

The elites have become international, and they've ceased to have a primary loyalty to the nation-state.