Wealthy Donors Quotes

The donor party is the 2 million people who contribute more than $5000 to political candidates. Unless you are elected by the donor party, you cannot run for major office.

People correctly perceive that the most powerful thing in Washington is money.

The fundamental problem with the immigration system in our country is that it serves the needs of wealthy donors, political activists and powerful, powerful politicians. It's all you can do.

Washington is dominated by big money.

Obama supporters pretended that his 2008 campaign was some sort of populist uprising even as Wall Street overwhelmingly supported his candidacy.

Our number one agenda is to get money out of politics, to drain the swamp, but not in the way that Trump said. He stacked his cabinet full of Goldman Sachs guys.

Mitt Romney had a fundraiser in Israel with a bunch of diamond merchants, we don't know the names of them.

Have you ever seen a candidate talking to a rich person on television?

A fool and his money are soon elected.

What the Supreme Court did in Citizens United is to say to these same billionaires and the corporations they control: 'You own and control the economy, you own Wall Street, you own the coal companies, you own the oil companies. Now, for a very small percentage of your wealth, we're going to give you the opportunity to own the United States Government.' This is the essence of what Citizens United is all about - and that's why it must be overturned.

In the last presidential election Obama and Romney raised about $1 billion each. The Koch brothers, the second wealthiest family in America, now say they will raise nearly $1 billion for the 2016 elections. When one family can raise as much as an entire party, the system is broken. This is oligarchy, not democracy. We must overturn Citizens United.

The cost of fielding a candidate has become so astronomical that the concept of a people’s candidate is just an abstraction.

Planned Parenthood and Human Rights Campaign they're not really the establishment. I can't obviously speak for Senator Bernie Sanders or about Planned Parenthood. But what we do see, and we've seen for years in America, is that the establishment, that is, the big banks and the executives and the wealthy do support a lot of non-profits and make the non-profits basically walk to the tune of the establishment.

It's hard for them to run away from their record. The Kochs are businessmen.

Many of these [big political] donors are my friends. Those people are not like charities ... They Want. These are total tough cookies. When they give millions and millions of dollars, they're not doing it for the good of the American Cancer Society. They're doing it for themselves.

The way you have to campaign in this country is you have to beg for money from the very people who need to be brought under control.

It's gotta be hard when you are a newcomer to this kind of thing, this big political scene and you have somebody like Michael Bloomberg come in with hundreds of millions of dollars, dumping it in.

As a result of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, American democracy is being undermined by the ability of the Koch brothers and other billionaire families. These wealthy contributors can literally buy politicians and elections by spending hundreds of millions of dollars in support of the candidates of their choice. We need to overturn Citizens United and move toward public funding of elections so that all candidates can run for office without being beholden to the wealthy and powerful.

Money is power in American politics. It always has been.

As I see it, most major philanthropists have been bullied into giving. They feel social pressure to give. It has become a cost of doing business.

I never can pass by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without thinking of it not as a gallery of living portraits but as a cemetery of tax-deductible wealth.

May the time come when rich men and great men would think it an honor to support whole stations of missionaries in Africa, instead of spending their money on hounds and horses.

Members of state legislatures are owned by doctors and lawyers. That's why workers' compensation cannot be solved.

If Americans are worried about money in politics, there is no larger concern than the Clintons, who are cosseted in a world where rich people endlessly scratch the backs of rich people.

The reason that we have so many well-funded libertarians in America these days is not because libertarianism suddenly acquired an enormous grass-roots following, but because it appeals to those who are able to fund ideas. … Libertarianism is a politics born to be subsidized.