"Oligarchic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sense of the immediate danger with which the failure of the religious sanction threatens social order and morality. As we have said already, the men of whom we specially speak are far above anything like social Jesuitism. We have not a doubt but they would regard with abhorrence any schemes of oligarchic illuminism for guarding the pleasures of the few by politic deception of the multitude. But they have probably begun to lay to heart the fact that the existing morality, though not dependent on any special theology, any special view of the relations between soul and body, or any special theory of ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... authority] politics &c 737.1. 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^; 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 of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... liberals in England, in France, and in this country have always objected to democracy as so understood, because of the possible sanction it affords for the substitution of a popular despotism in the place of the former royal or oligarchic despotisms. From their point of view individual liberty is the greatest blessing which can be secured to a people by a government; and individual liberty can be permanently guaranteed only in case political liberties are in theory and practice subordinated to civil ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... 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 distant one ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... FOR THE PURPOSES OF SAFETY, OF LOCAL INFORMATION, AND OF DIFFUSIVE SYMPATHY WITH THE WHOLE SOCIETY, they will counteract their own views by every addition to their representatives. The countenance of the government may become more democratic, but the soul that animates it will be more oligarchic. The machine will be enlarged, but the fewer, and often the more secret, will be the springs by which its motions are directed. As connected with the objection against the number of representatives, may properly be here noticed, that which has been suggested against the number made ...
— The Federalist Papers
... was intolerance; though strict justice might add, that these "Illuminati" were as unconscious of their special cant as smokers are of the perfume of their weed, and that a professed declaration of universal independence turned out in practice to be rather oligarchic. ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... 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 them ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... Mr. Hope devotes so much serious and sympathetic study to the man called Tristram of Blent, a man who throughout burning boyhood thought of nothing but a silly old estate, we feel even in Mr. Hope the hint of this excessive concern about the oligarchic idea. It is hard for any ordinary person to feel so much interest in a young man whose whole aim is to own the house of Blent at the time when every other young ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... works to perpetrate, Which [like all Bills this favoured statesman frames, And clothes with tapestries of rhetoric Disguising their real web of commonplace] Though held as shaped for English bulwarking, Breathes in its heart perversities of party, And instincts toward oligarchic power, Galling the many to ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... good, when it is the only possible form of government; legitimate it is never. Neither heredity, nor election, nor universal suffrage, nor the excellence of the sovereign, nor the consecration of religion and of time, can make royalty legitimate. Whatever form it takes,—monarchic, oligarchic, or democratic,—royalty, or the government of man by man, is illegitimate ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... hands this sympathy with the cause of Labour is in great danger of becoming one of the most insidious temptations that can attack a religious body. The Church of England has been freely accused of too great complaisance to the powers that be, when those powers were oligarchic. Some of the clergy are now trying to repeat, rather than redress, this error, by an obsequious attitude to King Working-man. But the Church ought to be equally proof against the vultus instantis tyranni and the civium ardor prava iubentium. The position of a Church which should sell ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge |
