"Plutocracy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Ohnet must have immortal qualities in himself, even though flayed and roasted alive by the critics. He is most assuredly an artist in form, is endowed with a brilliant style, and has been named "L'Historiographe de la bourgeoise contemporaine." Indeed, antagonism to plutocracy and hatred of aristocracy are the fundamental theses in almost every ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... that curious suet pudding which our estimable Mrs. Meecher is apt to give us on Fridays. In my professional career I have seen many cases of what I may term the Lady Friend in the role of star, but Miss Hobson eclipses them all. I remember in the year '94 a certain scion of the plutocracy took it into his head to present a female for whom he had conceived an admiration in a part which would have taxed the resources of the ablest. I was engaged in her support, and at the first rehearsal I recollect saying ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... when the unprecedented increase of gigantic and rapidly acquired fortunes has deeply infected both English and American society with the characteristic vices of a Plutocracy, the profound feeling of sorrow and admiration elicited by the death of Queen Victoria is an encouraging sign. It shows that the vulgar ideals, the false moral measurements, the feverish social ambitions, the love of the ostentatious and the factitious, ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... lives, and her mother, Rachel, almost eclipses her in this same quality of tragic vitality. The whole tale is a tragedy of empty and meaningless lives passed in an atmosphere of too much money and too little significance. The "society" of a Northern manufacturing plutocracy, the display and rivalry, the marriages between the enriched families, the absence of any standard except wealth—all these things are set down with the minute realism that must come, I am sure, of intimate personal knowledge. Sylvia is the offspring of one such family, and mated ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 15, 1914 • Various
... development during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. In the conquest of business by trusts and "the resulting private fortunes of great magnitude," the Populists and the Democrats had seen a grievous danger to the republic. "Plutocracy has taken the place of democracy; the tariff breeds trusts; let us destroy therefore the tariff and the trusts"—such was the battle cry which had been taken up by Bryan ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... is justified the United States troops may be sent to the scene of turmoil. After the period of great labor troubles culminating in the Pullman strike, many States reorganized their militia into national guards. The armories built for the accommodation of the guard were called by the unions "plutocracy's bastiles," and the mounted State constabulary organized in 1906 by Pennsylvania were at once dubbed "American Cossacks." Several States following the example of Pennsylvania have encountered the bitterest hostility on the part of the labor unions. ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... of popular liberty against autocracy. If the bourgeoisie itself will not fight for a democracy, reasoned the revolutionary socialists, why have such a democracy at all? Have we not seen the democratic form of government lend itself to ill-concealed plutocracy in Europe and America? Why run at all the risk of corruption of the post-revolutionary government at the hands of the capitalists? Why first admit the capitalists into the inner circle and then spend time and effort in preventing them ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... susceptible to the influence of the Press than the people educated by public elementary schools. On the contrary, our Democrats are more fool-proof than our Plutocrats; and the ravings our Junkers send to the papers for nothing in war time would be dear at a halfpenny a line. Plutocracy makes for war because it offers prizes to Plutocrats: Socialism makes for peace because the interests it serves are international. So, as the Socialist side is the democratic side, we had better democratize our diplomacy ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... damage to the body politic. I believe that our people are too sane, too self-respecting, too fit for self-government, ever to adopt such an attitude. This Government is not and never shall be government by a plutocracy. This Government is not and never shall be government by a mob. It shall continue to be in the future what it has been in the past, a Government based on the theory that each man, rich or poor, is to be treated simply and solely on his worth as ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... not democracies. In form, they are quasi-oligarchies composed of representatives and executives; but in fact they are frequently complete oligarchies, composed in part of unending rings of politicians that directly control the law and the offices, and in part of the permanent plutocracy, who ...
— Direct Legislation by the Citizenship through the Initiative and Referendum • James W. Sullivan
... frankness he had latterly treated public opinion with scantiest courtesy—by his purchase of campaign committees, and legislatures, and courts, Dumont had made himself in the public mind an embodiment of the "mighty and menacing plutocracy" of which the campaign orators talked so much. And the various phases of the scandal gave the press a multitude of texts for satirical, or pessimistic, or fiery discourses upon the public and private ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... crowded season; much animation in Parliament, where the government, to its own amazement, had rather gained than lost ground; industrial trouble at home, and foreign complications abroad; and in London the steady growth of a new plutocracy, the result, so far, of American wealth and American brides. In the first week of July, the outward things of the moment might have been thus summed ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... him with accretion through his father, who during a long life had quietly continued to lend money and never had margined a stock. Manderson, who had at no time known what it was to be without large sums to his hand, should have been altogether of that newer American plutocracy which is steadied by the tradition and habit of great wealth. But it was not so. While his nurture and education had taught him European ideas of a rich man's proper external circumstance; while they had rooted in him an instinct for quiet magnificence, the larger costliness which ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... delay matters by making lengthy speeches themselves. I propose to be quite brief in announcing PROFESSOR STEPHEN LEACOCK on Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (LANE). Conceive this arch-humourist let loose, if so rough a term may be applied to so delicate a wit, among the sordid and fleshly plutocracy of a progressive American city; imagine his polished satire expending itself on such playful themes as the running of fashionable churches on strictly commercial lines, dogma and ritualism being so directed and adapted ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 30, 1914 • Various
... and the shadow that is stealing over the American landscape partakes of a commercial character. In short, the shadow is of an unbridled plutocracy, caused, created and cemented in no slight degree by legislative, aldermanic and congressional action; a plutocracy that is far more wealthy than any aristocracy that has ever crossed the horizon of the world's history, and one that has been produced in a shorter consecutive period; the names of whose members are emblazoned, not on the pages of their ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... England, that stir us by their beauty and by the sense of stability and permanence they convey, will no doubt disappear or be transformed. I am thinking of the great estates, some of which date from Norman times; I am thinking of the aristocracy, which we Americans repudiated in order to set up a plutocracy instead. Let us hope that what is fine in it will be preserved, for there is much. By the theory of the British constitution —that unwritten but very real document—in return for honours, emoluments, and titles, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... his candid infant's eyes and a fat angelic smile, had fascinated her. She had come to believe almost his theory of the future, since it was not repugnant to her prejudices. She disliked the new element of plutocracy in the social compound, and industrialism as a method of human development appeared to her singularly repulsive in its mechanical and unfeeling character. The humanitarian hopes of the mild Michaelis tended not towards utter destruction, but ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... lowest, from first to last, one invariable fact characterizes them all, and it may be laid down as an axiom that in a plutocracy the man who needs a dinner is the man who is never asked to dine. I do not say that he is not given a dinner. He is very often given a dinner, and for the most part he is kept from starving to death; but he is not suffered to sit at meat with his host, if the person ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... brutal, the most hideous, the most inhuman of inequalities will be the fruit of the passion for equality. What a result! Plutolatry—the worship of wealth, the madness of gold—to it will be confided the task of chastising a false principle and its followers. And plutocracy will be in its turn executed by equality. It would be a strange end for it, if Anglo-Saxon individualism were ultimately swallowed ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... enemy, were intensely irritating, the meeting became disorderly. One or two wise men, however, were able to secure order long enough to have the resolution passed for forming a Local Interests Committee whose duty it would be to see that the people were not sacrificed to a "soulless plutocracy." While the names of those who were to form the Committee were being selected, in a storm of disorder arising from the Manitou section of the crowd, the sky overhead grew suddenly brighter and the sun came out, bringing an instant change. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... and the women of fashion were equally fine. Other women were there, wives of men important but poor, who walked unabashed in high-neck home-made frocks; and their pretty daughters, were as simple as themselves. One wore a cheese-cloth frock, and another a blue merino. The dames of the Plutocracy were there, blazing with converted capital,—Westerners for the most part, with hogsheads of money, who had come to the City of Open Doors to spend it. It was seldom they were in the same room with the Old Washingtonians, and when they were they ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... and Harbours Bill' is engineered, with more or less friction, through the Congress of the United States. It is regularly and diplomatically fought over between the two houses until an agreement about it is come to between the opposing forces, described by a recent American writer as 'the plutocracy at one end and the mobocracy at the other end' of our national legislature. In short, it has now become an 'institution,' and like other institutions it has its legendary hero, in a western legislator who is reputed to have re-elected ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... long as blind partyism prevails men will get into heated political discussions that only widen the gulf of misunderstanding. Misleading newspaper articles will make the gulf deeper, and the cunning hand of plutocracy and coercion will widen the waters of the gulf into a vast restless ocean, without even the signs of a rainbow to tell them that the great storm of poverty and human slavery to the money power, that knows ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus
... dollars a year, including the three balls. This enables young men starting in life to be members without going into extravagance, and is in accord with the best social tradition of Charleston, where the difference between an aristocracy and a plutocracy is well understood. Most of the rules of the organization are unwritten. One is that men shall not smoke on the premises during a ball; another is that divorced persons shall not be members or guests of the society. In this respect the St. Cecilia Society may be said, in effect, to be applying, ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... privileged classes surrendered their powers to the monarch, the third estate was coming into its own. Not until the war of independence, however, was it able to withstand the combination of bureaucracy and plutocracy that made common cause with the central government against the local rights of the cities and the customary privileges of the gilds. Almost everywhere the prince was able, with the tacit support of the wealthier burghers, to substitute for ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... were not looking at me but at my uncle, and calculating consciously or unconsciously how they might use him and assimilate him to their system, the most unpremeditated, subtle, successful and aimless plutocracy that ever encumbered the destinies of mankind. Not one of them, so far as I could see, until disaster overtook him, resented his lies, his almost naked dishonesty of method, the disorderly disturbance of this trade and that, caused by his spasmodic operations. I can see them now about him, ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... praise. The villa was for the pleasure and pride of one family, but it signified, even in its beauty, nothing but patrician splendor, which is a poor thing at best; and the quarter is now for the pleasure and pride of great numbers of tourists, mostly of that plutocracy from which a final democracy is inevitably to evolve itself. I could see no cause to beat the breast in this; and in humbler instances, even to very humble, I could not find that things were nearly as bad in Rome as they have ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... extremely inadequate apprehension of the needs and aspirations of the rapidly increasing millions over whom they exercised authority. Hence one can understand that opposition to the policy of Stuart king, or Whig nobility, or Tory plutocracy, readily took the form of antagonism to the State as such. Thus the political theory of Milton and the Puritans not only justified resistance to Charles I, it also proclaimed a doctrine of the natural rights of the individual fatal to all types of government. Similarly the political theory of ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... has abandoned faith in its duty, it is conscious of no solemn obligations, it takes no interest in art, it is indifferent to science, it is sick of effort, it has surrendered gladly and gratefully to the materialism of plutocracy. ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... legislation—through the referendum and initiative. The referendum and initiative does not mean more laws, but fewer, shorter, simpler, and more understandable ones."[599] "What is wanted is neither aristocracy, plutocracy, nor demagoguecracy, but democracy—the one governing system which never has been tried. The people must learn that the game of politics is not an unfathomable science, but a struggle of rival interests in which no delegate can so well ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... Augier produced in France; and in everything except the mechanics of construction superior to the plays of Sardou and Dumas. The dialogue has the most admirable accent of truth. It is not unnaturally witty or brilliant; but exhibits exactly the traits which Norwegians of the higher commercial plutocracy are likely to exhibit. All the poetic touches which charmed us in Bjoernson's saga dramas were conspicuous by their absence. Scarcely a trace was there left of that peculiar and delightful language of his early novels, which can only be described ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... as a somewhat debased type. In a despotism he will become a courtier and obtain favour by obsequious and often dishonourable services to a prince. In an old-fashioned oligarchy he will adopt the same attitude towards some powerful noble. In a parliamentary plutocracy, like our own, he will proceed in fashion with which we are only too familiar, will make himself the paid servant of those wealthy men who finance politicians, and will enrich himself by means of "tips" from financiers and bribes from Government contractors. ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... leaders of the proletariat would be killed. The 11th of November, 1887, taught her differently. She realized that no mercy could be expected from the ruling class, that between the Tsarism of Russia and the plutocracy of America there was no difference save in name. Her whole being rebelled against the crime, and she vowed to herself a solemn vow to join the ranks of the revolutionary proletariat and to devote all her ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... Mammon, lucre, filthy lucre; loaves and fishes^. rich man, moneyed man, warm man; man of substance; capitalist, millionaire, tippybob [Slang], Nabob, Croesus, idas, Plutus, Dives, Timon of Athens^; Timocracy, Plutocracy; Danae. V. be rich &c adj.; roll in wealth, roll in riches, wallow in wealth, wallow in riches. afford, well afford; command money, command a sum; make both ends meet, hold one's head above water. become rich &c adj.; strike it rich; come into a sum of money, receive a windfall, receive an inheritance, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the commonest themes of the French Press instead of wishing for a more intense revival of commercial relations with Germany, frightens the ignorant public with stories of German penetration; and the very plutocracy in France and Italy—though not to the same extent in Italy—abandons itself to the identical error. So to-day we find spread throughout the peninsula a sense of lively discontent which is conducive to a wider acceptance of the exaggerations of the Socialists and the Fascists. But the phenomenon ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... judging from its size and appointments, must have been the dwelling of one of the richest members of the ancient plutocracy, and the traces of a splendid luxury were to be seen on all sides. The colored marbles underfoot, the gilding overhead, the gorgeous, albeit torn and weather-stained tapestries that covered the walls—these things were eloquent of a pristine magnificence that could hardly have been ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... the slavocracy back of him and catered to it, he did not have plutocracy back of him. If he had been a demagogue he would have done the bidding of some faction. He did the bidding of no faction. His mind was budding with railroads now, for the Far West. What he was now doing made for a money control of the country in the future; but that was not apparent to him. ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... conditions. His theory is that robbery is all right so long as the people do not rebel thereby imperiling the system by which they are despoiled. From his fashionable pulpit and sumptuous home he hurls forth his anathema-maranatha at those who would presume to abridge the prescriptive rights of the plutocracy—who doubt that grinding penury in a land bursting with fatness is pleasing to the All-Father! He would by no means curtail the wealth of Dives or better the condition of Lazarus; but thinks it good policy for the former to refrain from piling his ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... independent traditions and self-respect; and for the same reason that an essentially worn-out aristocracy may so long preserve a considerable degree of vigour and even of social utility under certain circumstances by means of tenacious pride in its own order, a new plutocracy is demoralised from the very beginning of its existence by want of a similar kind of pride in itself, and by the ignoble necessity of craving the countenance of an upper class that loves to despise and humiliate it. Besides the more obvious evils of a position ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... type of Australian plutocracy need hardly be discussed. Of plebeian tradesmen grown wealthy every community has its proportion. It may, however, be said that the owners of luxurious villas in the suburbs of Melbourne have individually a good deal more ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... caused, as we saw, a revolution in his life. But, while Christian dogma was the heart of the enemy's position, there were out-works which might also be usefully attacked:—there were alcohol and meat, the causes of all disease and devastating passion; there were despotism and plutocracy, based on commercial greed; and there was marriage, which irrationally tyrannising over sexual relations, produces unnatural celibacy and prostitution. These threads, and many others, were all taken up in his first ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... the New York of to-day is quite different from the New York of 1847. It still retained some of the knickerbocker customs of the olden time. The site of the Fifth Avenue Hotel was then a stone- yard where grave stones were cut. All north of Twenty-third street, now the seat of plutocracy, was then sparsely occupied by poor houses and miserable shanties, and the site of Central Park was a rough, but picturesque body of woodland, glens and rocky hills, with a few clearings partly cultivated. Even then the population of New York was about ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... waters of American socialism like a vision—from those waters so fiercely restrained from breaking into storm over since the extraordinary social revolution under Mr. Hearst's disciples, a century ago. That had been the end of plutocracy; the famous old laws of 1914 had burst some of the stinking bubbles of the time; and the enactments of 1916 and 1917 had prevented their forming again in any thing like their previous force. It had been the salvation of America, undoubtedly, even if that salvation ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... came to her. "Plutocracy," she said, "is perfectly detestable, don't you think so, Mr. Brumley?" ... And then, "I can't imagine how a man who deals in bread and confectionery can manage to go about ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... pricking a drum, his quietude seemed to kill all the noise of our loud plutocracy and publicity. In all this he was supremely the scholar, with not ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... of the plutocracy's cruel grip upon the nation had ended by exasperating the people. There must be a limit somewhere to the turpitudes of a degenerate class of nouveaux riches. The day of reckoning was fast approaching for the grafters and among the first to taste ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... itself. The thirst for lucre became the leading force in the State; for its sake the Classes more and more trampled down the Masses; and entrance to the Classes was a matter no longer of birth, but of money alone. And all history testifies that the State which becomes a plutocracy is doomed indeed. Of all possible forms of government—autocracy, oligarchy, democracy—that is the lowest, that most surely bears within itself the seeds of its ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... force. In the sixteenth century it proclaimed Henry VIII the Supreme Head of the Church; in the seventeenth century it passionately upheld the 'right divine of kings to govern wrong'; in the eighteenth and nineteenth it was the obsequious supporter of the squirearchy and plutocracy; and now it grovels before the working-man, and supports every scheme of plundering the minority. In fact, we must distinguish sharply between ecclesiasticism, theology, and religion. The future of ecclesiasticism is a political question. In the opinion of some good judges, ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... in 1907 and after, society pressure was the chief force. It is hard to stand up against the flattery of a gracious duchess. Weak men's heads are turned in an evening, and there are few who can resist long. We were dined and wined by royalty and aristocracy and plutocracy and always the talk was of empire, empire, empire. I said to Deakin in 1907 that this was one reason why we could not have a parliament or council in London; we can talk cabinet to cabinet, but cannot send Canadians or Australians ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe |
