Goliath Quotes

“To choose wisely, we must unlearn much of the history we have been taught. Many of us learned a version of our history as one of inevitable progress, goodness, and triumph. Many of us learned the inverted version, that our history is one of inevitable sin, racism, conquest, greed. Neither of these is true, because both versions airbrush out our own free will. The truth is, America is a battle, a struggle for justice. And we choose, every generation, who wins.”
― Matt Stoller, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy

“Virtually the entire commercial order of late-nineteenth-century America was oriented around small and midsized proprietorships, from independent farmers to drugmakers, pharmacists, printers, stationers, booksellers, manufacturers, specialty producers of brand-name foodstuffs, grocers, and distillers.”
― Matt Stoller, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy

“In 1860, an oligarchy of eight thousand men ruled over millions of enslaved blacks, and poor whites, in the South.22 The wealthiest men in the country were cotton kings; half the millionaires in 1850 lived in one town in Mississippi.23 Slave cotton was at the center of a global financial and trading system, one stretching from Mississippi to Wall Street to the looms in Manchester across the sea.”
― Matt Stoller, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy

“Data about your thoughts goes into a database owned by Google, what you buy into Amazon or Walmart, and what you owe into Experian or Equifax. You live in a world structured by concentrated corporate power.”
― Matt Stoller, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy

“Power always thinks it has a great Soul, and vast Views, beyond the Comprehension of the Weak, and that it is doing God’s Service, when it is violating all his Laws.”
― Matt Stoller, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy

“Dutton was the perfect specimen of the emerging corporate lib-eral. He had helped conceive of Earth Day when working for John F Kennedy, but would later become an oil lobbyist. In his view, the future would be a Democratic coalition of African Americans, feminists, and affluent college-educated whites, many of whom would work for giant, technologically sophisticated, progressive corporations. Dutton's strategy was a break from the basic class-conscious Democratic coalition of independent farmers, shopkeepers, and unionized workers that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had structured in the 1930s. For Dutton, this new Democratic Party coalition, born in affluence, had moved beyond material needs. The "balance of political power," he argued, had shifted "from the economic to the psychological to a certain ex-tent-from the stomach and pocketbook to the psyche, and perhaps sooner or later even to the soul." To Dutton, the small businessman. and blue-collar worker represented the past.”
― Matt Stoller, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy

“There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money, and I can’t remember the second.”
― Matt Stoller, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy

“Every small business is at the beck and call of a credit card and payments cartel.”
― Matt Stoller, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy