“The close relationship between politics and economics is neither neutral nor coincidental. Large governments evolve through history in order to protect large accumulations of property and wealth.”
Source: Democracy for the Few (2010 [1974]), sixth edition, Chapter 1, p. 4
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Michael Parenti 57
American academic 1933Related quotes

Barcelona and Beyond: How Politicians & Policy Wonks Play God With Your Life http://dailycaller.com/2017/08/21/barcelona-and-beyond-how-politicians-wonks-play-god/, Daily Caller, August 21, 2017.
Barcelona and Beyond: How Politicians & Policy Wonks Play God With Your Life http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/08/barcelona_and_beyond_how_politicians_and_policy_wonks_play_god_with_your_life_.html, American Thinker, August 20, 2017.
2010s, 2017

Interview by Yifat Susskind, August 2001 http://www.madre.org/articles/chomsky-0801.html.
Quotes 2000s, 2001
Context: Take the Kyoto Protocol. Destruction of the environment is not only rational; it's exactly what you're taught to do in college. If you take an economics or a political science course, you're taught that humans are supposed to be rational wealth accumulators, each acting as an individual to maximize his own wealth in the market. The market is regarded as democratic because everybody has a vote. Of course, some have more votes than others because your votes depend on the number of dollars you have, but everybody participates and therefore it's called democratic. Well, suppose that we believe what we are taught. It follows that if there are dollars to be made, you destroy the environment. The reason is elementary. The people who are going to be harmed by this are your grandchildren, and they don't have any votes in the market. Their interests are worth zero. Anybody that pays attention to their grandchildren's interests is being irrational, because what you're supposed to do is maximize your own interests, measured by wealth, right now. Nothing else matters. So destroying the environment and militarizing outer space are rational policies, but within a framework of institutional lunacy. If you accept the institutional lunacy, then the policies are rational.

Do Books Matter? (ed. Brian Baumfield), ISBN 0705700143, p. 19
Do Books Matter?

“Politics is largely governed by sententious platitudes which are devoid of truth”

UNESCO 1999
Attributed

Masthead, from Bellamy's newspaper The New Nation. Quoted in Charles Allan Madison, Critics and Crusaders: Political Economy and the American Quest for Freedom, Transaction Publishers, 1948.

Twenty Years of Mr. Justice Holmes' Constitutional Opinions, 36 HARV. L. REV. 909, 931 (1923).
Other writings