Jean Herskovits Quotes

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.

People say law but they mean wealth.

Wealth is a form of power in our society. With great power comes great responsibility. If you have too much wealth, ipso facto, you have too much power -- therefore you have too much responsibility -- and you're a kind of dictator.

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

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.

'Plutocracy.' It has a perfect nuance: chilly, inaccessible, icy-rich.

There's a small amount of super-wealthy people that want to maintain their billions and billions of dollars. Those are the people who are really making the decisions.

I believe that cronyism is nothing more than welfare for the rich and powerful, and should be abolished.

Dictators, unlike Democrats, depend on a small coterie to sustain their power. These backers, generally drawn from the military, the senior civil service, and family or clan members, have a synergistic relationship with their dictator. The dictator delivers opportunities for them to become rich, and they protect him from being overthrown.

But I can tell you that the issue, on one side, boils down to money - a lot of money. And it boils down to people and their connections with this money, and that's the portion that, even with this book, has not been mentioned to this day.

We need wealthy dogs off the seats of power. They're taking us back to feudalism and I really don't want that. But I'm very far from being a socialist.

Big government inevitably drives an upward distribution of wealth to those whose wealth, confidence and sophistication enable them to manipulate government.

It is a fact that around the world the elites of every country are making money.

Money distorts the democratic process in a fundamental way.

We have more billionaires than any country but the United States. And Putin can imprison any one of them at a moment’s notice. Do you think he is poor?

Traditional autocrats leave in place existing allocations of wealth, power, status, and other re-sources which in most traditional societies favor an affluent few and maintain masses in poverty. But they worship traditional gods and observe traditional taboos. They do not disturb the habitual rhythms of work and leisure, habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of family and personal relations.

As long as inheritance lasts, there will be hereditary economic inequality—not the natural inequality of individuals, but the artificial inequality of classes—which will necessarily continue to be expressed in hereditary inequality of the development and cultivation of intelligence and will remain the source and sanction of all political and social inequality.

…well-ordered republics have to keep the public rich and their citizens poor…

The financial interests have captured the government institutions.

Organized crime has a corrupting influence on all Bulgarian institutions including the government, parliament and judiciary. In an attempt to maintain their influence regardless of who is in power, organized crime figures dominate all the major political parties. As these figures have expanded into legitimate businesses, they have attempted—with some success—to buy their way into the corridors of power….

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

Our nation’s political spectrum is not left to right, but top to bottom. People can locate themselves on this rich-to-poor pole for this is not a theoretical positioning: It’s based on our actual experience with money and power.

The problem is that when government controls the economy, those who can influence government keep winning, and everybody else just stays the same.

The only way to gain the kinds of often-generational wealth that the 1% has been able to gain is through controlling the populations it relied on to make its wealth.

Britain has no divine right to be one of the richest countries in the world.