Joseph Pulitzer Quotes

It is no accident that in America today the gap between the very rich and everyone else is wider than at any time since the Gilded Age. Now, as then, the titans are seeking an even greater political voice to match their economic power. Now, as then, the inevitable danger is that they will confuse their own self-interest with the common good.

Be alike independent of crowned-kings. money-kings, and land-kings.

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

The rich are hijacking American democracy.

Washington is dominated by big money.

The mistake the apartheid government made was they gave the black people nothing, so they had nothing to lose. But now a lot of the former freedom-fighters are big-time capitalists. They've been given directorships in every major company. They're billionaires!

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

In our political system, money is power. And that means a few can have a lot more power than the rest. That's bad news for everyone else - and for our democracy itself.

Obviously no one wants to give members of Congress a lot of money, because they barely do anything, and many of them are terrible, but a Congress that is made up of rich-but-not-super-rich people is going to be more corruptible than a Congress of really rich people.

The investigation has shown, let us hope, privilege at its worst. The trail is one of dishonesty, greed, violation of law, secrecy, concealment, evasion, falsehood, and cunning. It is a trail of betrayals by trusted and presumably honorable men--betrayals of a government, of certain business interests and the people who trusted and honored them; it is a trail showing a flagrant degree of the exercise of political power and influence, and the power and influence of great wealth upon individuals and political parties; it is the trail of despoilers and schemers, far more dangerous to the well-being of our Nation and our democracy than all those who have been deported

Where some people are very wealthy and others have nothing, the result will be either extreme democracy or absolute oligarchy, or despotism will come from either of those excesses.

Money distorts the democratic process in a fundamental way.

Our democracy has been marred by imperialism.

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

Democracy! Savage and Wild!—thou who wouldst bring down the virtuous to the level of folly and guilt! Thou child of squinting envy and self-tormenting spleen.

You don't want Congress peopled by millionaires.

Money speaks louder than words in Washington.

…national wealth, especially when carefully accumulated in the hands of a few individuals, is dangerous in the extreme to human liberty.

Very great riches in private men are always dangerous to states, because they create greater dependence than can be consistent with the security of any sort of government whatsoever; they place subjects upon too near a level with their sovereigns; make the nobility stand upon too great an inequality in respect of one another; destroy amongst the Commons, that balance of property and power, which is necessary to democracy, or the democratic part of any government, overthrow the poise of it, and indeed alter its nature, though not its name.

We're not a democracy. It's a terrible misunderstanding and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us that. In reality, we're a plutocracy: a government by the wealthy.

… lobbyist-larded Washington

Only powerful people have liberty.

America is less democratic than it might be because the preferences of the ultra wealthy often outweigh the preferences of everyone else.

Plutocracy too long tolerated leaves democracy on the auction block, subject to the highest bidder.

Every man who is worth thirty millions and is not wedded to them, is dangerous to the government.