Tell me, dear friend, how tyranny arises. That it is an outgrowth of democracy is fairly plain. Is it, then, in a sense, in the same way in which democracy arises out of oligarchy that tyranny arises from democracy?

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The good that they proposed to themselves and that was the cause of the establishment of oligarchy—it was wealth, was it not?”

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The insatiate lust for wealth and the neglect of everything else for the sake of money-making was the cause of oligarchy's undoing.

- Plato’s Republic