“Those who ruled in high places, and had the making of the laws in their hands, were chiefly rich landowners and successful traders, and instead of trying to raise the people, create a higher standard of comfort and well-being, and better their general condition, they did their best or worst to keep them in a state of poverty and serfdom, of dependence and wretchedness.”

—  Joseph Arch

Source: The Story of his Life Told by Himself (1898), p. 11

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Those who ruled in high places, and had the making of the laws in their hands, were chiefly rich landowners and success…" by Joseph Arch?
Joseph Arch photo
Joseph Arch 12
British politician 1826–1919

Related quotes

Barack Obama photo
Joni Madraiwiwi photo
Francis Galton photo
Logan Pearsall Smith photo

“It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people.”

Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946) British American-born writer

In the World.
Afterthoughts (1931)

Leonid Brezhnev photo
Augusto Pinochet photo

“The rich people are those who create wealth, and you have to treat them well so they continue to give wealth.”

Augusto Pinochet (1915–2006) Former dictator of the republic of Chile

Speech (26 May 1988), quoted in "Las frases para el bronce de Pinochet."
1980s

“Expectations on the performance of race and gender are simultaneously high and low, depending on who is looking or asking. I prefer to keep all the options in the air, to try and better understand the conundrum that inequality creates---not just in culture, but internally.”

Kara Walker (1969) African American artist

On the expectations for an African American artist in “Art Talk with Kara Walker” https://www.arts.gov/art-works/2012/art-talk-kara-walker (National Endowment of the Arts; 2012 Feb 1)

Oscar Wilde photo
Frances Wright photo

“Better were the prospects of a people under the influence of the worst government who should hold the power of changing it, that those of a people under the best who should hold no such power.”

Frances Wright (1795–1852) American activist

Independence Day speech (1828)
Context: Where men then are free to consult experience they will correct their practice, and make changes for the better. It follows, therefore, that the more free men are, the more changes they will make. In the beginning, possibly, for the worse; but most certainly in time for the better; until their knowledge enlarging by observation, and their judgment strengthening by exercise, they will find themselves in the straight, broad, fair road of improvement. Out of change, therefore, springs improvement; and the people who shall have imagined a peaceable mode of changing their institutions, hold a surety for their melioration. This surety is worth all other excellences. Better were the prospects of a people under the influence of the worst government who should hold the power of changing it, that those of a people under the best who should hold no such power. Here, then is the great beauty of American government.

Theodore Roosevelt photo

“It is a bad thing for a nation to raise and to admire a false standard of success; and there can be no falser standard than that set by the deification of material well-being in and for itself.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1910s, Citizenship in a Republic (1910)

Related topics