Quotes about Elite Oppression

Walter Bagehot

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 …

Marquis de Lafayette

We still are pestered by two parties: the aristocratic, which is panting for a counter revolution, and the factious, which aims at the division of the empire and destruction of the authority - and perhaps of the lives - of the reigning branch, both of which parties are fomenting troubles.

Franklin Foer

It's very un-American to say nice things about elites. Elites are often terrible. It's not like we've ever had a perfect set of benevolent democratic elites ruling over our country. But the fact of the matter is that a representative system of democracy delegates power to elites.

Eugene Jarecki

Reagan himself, for much of his life, was devoted against the elites. His antagonism to the Soviet Union is antagonism against oppression by the elites of the many.

H. L. Mencken

All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him.

H. L. Mencken

All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man.

Ignatius Donnelly

Trouble began in 1868 where my sometimes querulous nature earned me powerful enemies among those whom I had vigorously denounced as the "the few who seek to grasp all power and wealth". These same men, mainline Republicans, soon saw to the termination of my political career.

Henry James Sumner Maine

It is true that the aristocracies seem to have abused their monopoly of legal knowledge; and at all events their exclusive possession of the law was a formidable impediment to the success of those popular movements which began to be universal in the western world.

P. J. O'Rourke

You can't destroy America by destroying our elite. Think about America's elite. Think about it down through history. Destroy our elite, and about half the time, you're doing us a favor.

H. L. Mencken

The only kind of freedom that the mob can imagine is freedom to annoy and oppress its betters, and that is precisely the kind that we mainly have.

Casimira Rodriguez

Now that we are in power, we must ask ourselves, ‘how can we develop a truly just system rather than do to the elite what they have done to us?’

Rodriquez was an indigenous Indian who came to power with the startling victory of Evo Morales, also an Indian in a country where the Indians comprise the majority of the population but have had virtually no political power and been discriminated against by Bolivian governments since the country became independent of Spain. Many whites feared the new elective revolution fearing that the Indian’s in government would turn the tables and do exactly what they had done in distributing the nation’s limited wealth—namely direct it primarily to the whites and elites to the relative exclusion of the Indians. Rodriguez claimed that the intention of their administration was otherwise.

Joseph Sobran

Politics is the conspiracy of the unproductive but organized against the productive but unorganized.

Henry Demarest Lloyd

If our civilization is destroyed it will not be by ... barbarians from below. Our barbarians come from above.

Stephen Kinzer

Relationships based on deals between leaders or ruling elites tend to collapse amid popular anger.

Elite Oppression Quotes