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Democracy will never be supplanted by a republic of experts – and that is a very good thing.

— Thomas Piketty

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Democracy

More quotes by Thomas Piketty

Capital is defined as the sum total of nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market.

Broadly speaking, the rise of the supermanager is largely an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon.

To put it bluntly, the discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics.

We know something about billionaire consumption, but it is hard to measure some of it. Some billionaires are consuming politicians, others consume reporters, and some consume academics.

When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.

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Democracy is the wholesome and pure air without which a socialist public organization cannot live a full-blooded life.

Mikhail Gorbachev

The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!

Vladimir Lenin The State and Revolution (1917)

The law itself is the instrument of the ruling class; hence it is a logical impossibility for another class to assume power legally.

Oliver Cox Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (1948)

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of bourgeois stupidity.

Gustave Flaubert

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Thomas Piketty (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.