Andrew Jackson Quotes

Those who control the wealth of this society have an influence over political life far in excess of their number.

The state is an instrument in the hands of the ruling class for suppressing the resistance of its class enemies.

What we call Monopoly is Business at the end of its journey. The concentration of wealth, the wiping out of the middle classes, are other names for it. To get it is, in the world of affairs, the chief end of man.

The rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated.

Controlling capitalism has proved far more difficult than controlling anything else, because capitalism is based on the control of the many by the few—the reverse of the conventional definition of political democracy.

The struggle for power in our day lies not between Crown and people, or between a caste of nobles and a bourgeoisie, but between the classes who have property and the classes who have none.

'The Deuce' takes a look at the remarkable paradigm of capitalism and labor: where money goes and how it's routed; who has power and who doesn't; who is exploited and who's not.

Politicians learned hundreds of years ago that people who had little material wealth were incredibly jealous of those who had more than they did. This deep-seated envy was ripe for exploitation - and the exploitation has been running rampant for generations.

The rich don't have to kill to eat. They employ people, as they call it. The rich don't do evil themselves. They pay. People do all they can to please them, and everybody's happy.

The higher the unemployment rate, the more leverage I have to 'encourage' you to 'do what it takes' to keep your job. And so you work even more hours, pushing unemployment up and wages down. And that, my friends, is one of the little tricks that keeps you poor and me rich.

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

The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.

If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don't mean to.

The industrial society... recognises nothing except the power to acquire... No other kind of hope or satisfaction or pleasure can any longer be envisaged within the culture of capitalism.

If work was a good thing, the rich would have it all and not let you do it.

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

The strongest bulwark of the capitalistic system is the ignorance of its victims.

All the rivalries of nations have been reduced to this one - a degraded struggle for their share of the spoils of barbarous countries to be used at home for the purpose of increasing the riches of the rich and the poverty of the poor.

Workers cannot buy with their salaries what they have produced and at the same time copiously nourish the swarm of idlers who live upon their work.

the plain fact that throughout the world today organized groups of men by monopoly of economic and physical power, legal enactment and intellectual training are limiting with determination and unflagging zeal the development of other groups; and that the concentration of particularly economic power today puts the majority of mankind into slavery to the rest. But one thing is sure and that is that these ancestors of mine and their descendants have had a common history; have suffered a common disaster and have one long memory.

The oppression of a majority by a minority, and the demoralization inevitably resulting from it, is a phenomenon that has always occupied me and has done so most particularly of late …. The reason for the astonishing fact that a majority of working people submit to a handful of idlers who control their labour and their very lives is always and everywhere the same — whether the oppressors and oppressed are of one race or whether, as in India and elsewhere, the oppressors are of a different nation.

Since the equality of fortunes reigns in the North, and slavery does not exist there, man finds himself absorbed with those same material wants which the white man disdains in the South. He knows it admirable to take advantage of nature and men to produce riches.

Although the ideal of free enterprise could, indeed, lend itself to the uplifting of the human condition, when it is practiced for profit alone, it becomes but a license for the powerful to further enslave the weak.

The politicians... needed the rural people and used them as ruthlessly as Negroes were used when they were needed. They needed to play voter against voter and all of them against "the Negro" -- and they needed the poor whites' approval of acts which the dominant group's more informed minds could not wholly approve. They needed poor whites to be their yes-men, moral henchmen quieting their leaders' uneasy consciences.

A power over a man's subsistence amounts to a power over his will.