"Oligarchical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Assemblies oligarchical Please her by their decorum fixed, The rigour of cold pride and all Titles and ages intermixed. But who in that choice company With clouded brow stands silently? Unknown to all he doth appear, A vision desolate and drear Doth seem to him the festal scene. Doth his brow wretchedness ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... shall have the right to vote unless he possesses an annual income of $1,000, and holds real estate to the amount of five hundred acres. Every one sees that that would exclude multitudes of all classes of citizens, making the State no longer republican, but oligarchical. Yet gentlemen say that under the Constitution Congress is bound to see to it that each State shall have a republican ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... functions had been assigned. The main tasks before the new rulers were not constitution-making but administration and defence. Moreover, the later constitution shows some recognition of the place due to the knights of the shire and their constituents. It is less closely oligarchical than the previous scheme. This may partly be due to the continued divisions of the greater barons, but it is probably also in large measure owing to the preponderance of Simon of Montfort. The young Earl of Gloucester and the simple ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... map period, about 100,000 years ago, that the Akkadians finally overthrew the Semite power. This 6th sub-race were a much more law-abiding people than their predecessors. Traders and sailors, they lived in settled communities, and naturally produced an oligarchical form of government. A peculiarity of theirs, of which Sparta is the only modern example, was the dual system of two kings reigning in one city. As a result probably of their sea-going taste, the study of the stars became ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... primary assembly and an assembly of notables. It is curious to see Englishmen passing from one of these alternatives to the other. But it was only for a moment. The protest of the Watertown men came in time to check these proceedings, which began to have a decidedly oligarchical look. To settle the immediate question of the tax, two deputies were sent from each settlement to advise with the Board of Assistants; while the power of choosing each year the governor and assistants was resumed by the freemen. Two years later, ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... hill-fort defended by lake and forest, becoming "castrum puellarum," becoming a Roman and an Arthurian citadel, a mediaeval stronghold of innumerable sieges, a centre of autocratic and military dictatures, oligarchic governments, at length a museum of the past. So in the city itself. Here the narrow ridge crowded into a single street all the essential organs of a capital, and still presents with the rarest completeness of concentration a conspectus of modern civic life and development; and this alike ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... 737a. be governed by, be in the power of, be a subject of, be a citizen of. Adj. regal, sovereign, governing; royal, royalist; monarchical, kingly; imperial, imperiatorial[obs3]; princely; feudal; aristocratic, autocratic; oligarchic &c. n.; republican, dynastic. ruling &c. v.; regnant, gubernatorial; imperious; authoritative, executive, administrative, clothed with authority, official, departmental, ex officio, imperative, peremptory, overruling, absolute; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... now remained between the Scandinavians and the Slavs—between a democratic and courageous race and an oligarchic and diplomatic one. Then our Castle—our own—for had we not conquered it?—was built on the frontier to resist the inroads of the Slavs. But again the Russians were triumphant. Sweden succumbed, while Russia took the remainder ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... was stereotyped as a rigid oligarchy. Previous to the year 1296, a great council had existed, created first in the reign of Pietro Ziani (1172); but this council was really democratic in character, not oligarchic; it was elected each September, and its members were chosen from the whole body of the citizens. Earlier still than the reign of Ziani, the population used to meet tumultuously and express their opinion upon matters ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... liberty, or rights, or popular institutions he recked nothing; but not the less was he supposed to be on the people's side. Sulla, on the other hand, had been born a patrician, and affected to preserve the old traditions of oligarchic rule; and, indeed, though he took all the power of the State into his own hands, he did restore, and for a time preserve, these old traditions. It must be presumed that there was at his heart something of love for old Rome. The proscriptions began toward ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... Johnson, were considered eccentrics. The French Revolution was a riot that broke up the very formal funeral of Christianity; and was followed by various other complications, including the corpse coming to life. But the scepticism was no mere oligarchic orgy; it was not confined to the Hell-Fire Club; which might in virtue of its vivid name be regarded as relatively orthodox. It is present in the mildest middle-class atmosphere; as in the middle-class masterpiece about "Northanger ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... Athens, like New England, was a commercial centre, and therefore a prominent naval power; and this naval prominence, in each instance, was so great as to give a decisive superiority over a non-commercial rival. Sparta used her influence and power to establish oligarchic institutions in the various provinces of Greece, which generally corresponded to our Territories,—in which latter the South has, with an equally unworthy zeal, been for several years seeking to establish her peculiar institutions. Epidamnus proved ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... them are liable to every sort of misconception. A republic means, properly, a polity in which the state, with its all, is at every man's service, and every man, with his all, at the state's service—(people are apt to lose sight of the last condition), but its government may nevertheless be oligarchic (consular, or decemviral, for instance), or monarchic (dictatorial). But a democracy means a state in which the government rests directly with the majority of the citizens. And both these conditions ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... and domesticity, that the freedom of the autocrat appears to be necessary to her. She is never responsible until she is irresponsible. In case this sounds like an idle contradiction, I confidently appeal to the cold facts of history. Almost every despotic or oligarchic state has admitted women to its privileges. Scarcely one democratic state has ever admitted them to its rights The reason is very simple: that something female is endangered much more by the violence of the crowd. In short, ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... State—involves relationships into which friendship enters. The relationships in the family correspond to those in states; monarch to subjects as father to children, tyrant to subjects as master to slaves; autocratic rule to that of the husband, oligarchic rule to that of the wife; what we call Timocracy to the fraternal relation, and Democracy to the entirely unregulated household. In some kinds of association, friendship takes the form of esprit de corps. It may be seen that quarrels arise most ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... Thus were formed two leagues which divided all the Greek cities: the league of the rich, or Oligarchy, the league of the poor, or Democracy. This regime began during the Peloponnesian War. Athens supported the democratic party, Sparta the oligarchic. The cities in which the poor had the sovereignty allied themselves with Athens; the cities where the rich governed, with Sparta. Thus at Samos when the poor gained supremacy they slew two hundred of the rich, exiled four hundred of them, and confiscated their lands ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... work accomplished by the Revolution of 1909, to bring back the previous maladministration, and to satisfy their passionate hate for the People's Chosen Leader. Thou art the victim of military advisers of limited perceptions and of oligarchic principles. Thou hast become the victim of thy admiration for Germany, in whose victory thou hast believed, hoping through that victory to elbow aside our {110} free Constitution and to centre in thy hands the whole authority of the State." After enumerating the disastrous ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... implore your commiseration, Captain BASIL. 'Oh, tempora! oh, mores!' Have mercy, illustrious and praise-bespattered, and almost Sir-Waltered BOZ. Do not, under the uneasy weight of glory, and in the intoxicating consciousness of a right to the oligarchic exclusiveness of the goose-quill 'haute volee,' strike right and left among your sturdy democratic adorers, because they choose to convert their mandibles into quid-grinders, and their [Greek: chasmat' odonton] into ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... later, Boris made another bid for oligarchic favor. He issued a rigorous fugitive-serf law, and even wrenched liberty from certain free peasants who had entered service for wages before his edicts. This completed the work, and Russia, which never had the benefits of feudalism, had now fastened upon her feudalism's worst curse,—a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... oblivion to which they seemingly had been consigned, continued to nurse the bitterness of their downfall into an implacable hatred of that Republic which had paralyzed the bloody hands of Rebellion, and shattered all their ambitious dreams of Oligarchic rule, if ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... two species: one, of those which are established upon proper principles; of which there may be one or two sorts: the other, which includes all the different excesses of these; so that we may compare the best form of government to the most harmonious piece of music; the oligarchic and despotic to the more violent tunes; and the democratic to ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... pass from Australia to New Guinea we find that, though the natives stand at a far higher level of culture than the Australian aborigines, the constitution of society among them is still essentially democratic or oligarchic, and chieftainship exists only in embryo. Thus Sir William MacGregor tells us that in British New Guinea no one has ever arisen wise enough, bold enough, and strong enough to become the despot even of a single district. "The nearest approach to this has been the very ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... factor in an existing social state secures all the advantages which might be secured if instead of that factor there were some other. We are speaking of all the various kinds of dissidents, who think that the current theology, or an established church, or a monarchy, or an oligarchic republic, is a bad thing and a lower form, even at the moment while they attribute provisional merit to it. They can mean nothing by classing each of these as bad things, except that they either bring with ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... who guarded your disordered retreat from Hyde Park (so called from your hiding there), those three Knights after whom Knightsbridge is named. Nor will it forget the day of your re-emergence, purged in the fire of calamity, cleansed of your oligarchic corruptions, when, sword in hand, you drove the Empire of Hammersmith back mile by mile, swept it past its own Broadway, and broke it at last in a battle so long and bloody that the birds of prey have left their name upon it. Men have called it, with ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... I was kept in ignorance of a book which painted the great world of Rome with a touch more intimate than even that of St. Simon. Cicero in his Letters makes the most dramatic moment in Roman history, the end of the Oligarchic Republic, live before one. Even Macaulay's account of the Revolution of 1688 seems tame when ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... whole community be considered in its entirety, not merely in the present but in the future, as far as the eye can reach. The interest of the public, viewed in this far-sighted manner, is the end to which all the rest must be subordinate, and for which a constitution provides. A constitution, whether oligarchic, monarchist, or aristocratic, is simply an instrument, good if it attains this end, and bad if it does not attain it, and which, to attain it, must, like every species of mechanism, vary according to the ground, materials, and circumstances. ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine |
