Michael Coppedge Quotes

You need just the right amount of protection for the rich under democracy: too little and the elite will not agree to democracy; too much and the poor will go ahead and have the revolution...

Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.

Democracy really depends not only on not just having a middle class but having wealth distributed relatively evenly across the society so that people buy into the legitimacy of the system

Capitalism is very undemocratic. Capitalism gives you power according to your wealth while democracy gives you power according to your existence.

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.

It's no sin to make a critical study of Brazil's reality. A small percentage own land. Most people don't.

Do what is best for most people, not just a few. Prevent your elites and growing middle class, those who often benefit most from growth and development, from turning into a special interests group that blocks reforms.

Capitalism and democracy are the opposite of each other. Capitalism is a system that guarantees that a few are going to do very well, and everybody else is going to serve the few. Democracy means everybody has a seat at the table. Everybody.

It would be nice if the poor were to get even half of the money that is spent in studying them.

The American polity is infected with a serious imbalance of power between elites and masses, a power which is the principal threat to our democracy.

An imbalance between the rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.

Envy is the basis of democracy.

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 …

Many will see [globalization] as little more than a mask used by certain economic elites for taking away the voice of the individual citizen.

A true democracy has never existed, and never will exist. It is against natural order that the great number should govern and that the few should be governed.

We can have a democracy or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.

In the democratic forms of government the operation of universal suffrage tends toward the selection of the average man for public office rather than the man qualified by birth, education, and integrity.... From a racial point of view, it will inevitably increase the preponderance of the lower types and cause a corresponding loss of efficiency in the community as a whole

An Islamic democracy is not intended to be a "theo-democracy," but a democratic system founded upon an Islamic moral framework, devoted to preserving Islamic ideals of pluralism and human rights as they were introduced in Medina, and open to the inevitable process of political secularization. There can be no question as to where sovereignty in such a system would rest. A government of the people, by the people, and for the people can be established or demolished solely through the will of the people. After all, it is human beings who create laws, not God. Even laws based on divine scripture require human interpretation in order to be applied in the world. In any case, sovereignty necessitates the ability not just to make laws but to enforce them. Save for the occasional plague, that is a power God rarely chooses to wield on earth.

Democracy has shown us that what is evil are the grosses têtes, the big heads, all big heads are greedy for money and power, they are ambitious that is the reason they are big heads and so they are at the head of the government and the result is misery for the people

Huge inequality gaps in a democratic society will tend to erode the respect for and security of doctrines of private property. The large majority must either own property or have reasonable prospects of attaining property if they are to support and maintain private property laws and traditions.

The problems of elites is an old one for which Americans have found no solid answer.

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.

Liberty is impossible if 36 thousand families at the top of the economic pyramid get as much income as 12 million families at the bottom.

After thirty years of a collapsing middle class,” he writes, “after thirty years of an economy designed to stack the deck in favor of the big guys; after thirty years of a political and constitutional system increasingly rigged to work for economic elites — after all this, the people revolted.

Democracy is always harmful to elite interests. Almost by definition.