Leland Stanford Quotes

The way the bankers have kind of toppled the way money is distributed, and taken most of it into their own hands, is as good as Stalin or Hitler.

Liberals are concerned about the concentration of wealth because it almost inevitably leads to a concentration of power that undermines democracy.

Greater economic power will be in the hands of too few.

Men make more money but have lower net worths.

If one man in the country could take all the money, what was the use of passing any bills about it?

The Negro today perhaps has more political power than ever before and he is worse off than ever before. It is not votes but dollars that count in this civilization.

There’s just too much money in the hands of too few.

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

Our revenue laws have operated in many ways to the unfair advantage of the few, and they have done little to prevent an unjust concentration of wealth and economic power.

No matter how we name and dissect inequality, we must keep explaining the larger downside of such concentrated extreme wealth.

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

It means that the men who hold the means of life control our lives, and, because we workingmen have tried to get some measure of justice, some measure of betterment, they deny the right of the human being to associate with his fellow.

Money creates a power relationship between the payer and the payee.

The more money you take away from families is the less power that family has. And that's a basic power.

Wall Street has too much wealth and political power.

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.

The biggest problem is that the rich people paying the bills do not share the same goals as the poor people they are trying to help. The wealthy have weak incentives to get the right amount of the right thing to those who need it; the poor are in no position to complain if they don’t.

It is the unvarying law that the wealth of the community will be in the hands of the few ...

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

Money is like manure. If it's concentrated in a big pile it really begins to stink, but if it's spread around a lot, it can do a lot of good.

One must denounce the economic, financial, and social mechanisms and structures that are manipulated by the rich and powerful for their own benefit at the expense of the poor

We have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity.

All the measures of government are directed to the purpose of making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

Great accumulations of wealth cannot be justified on the basis of personal and family security. In the last analysis such accumulations amount to the perpetuation of great and undesirable concentration of control in a relatively few individuals over the employment and welfare of many, many others.

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.