Wealth & Money Quote by Imelda Marcos

"It’s the rich you can terrorize. The poor have nothing to lose" lands like a cold aside overheard at the edge of a champagne reception: not a moral claim, a tactical one. Imelda Marcos frames fear as a luxury product. Wealth, in her telling, is built on attachments - property, status, a future worth protecting. That makes the rich governable through anxiety. The poor, stripped of buffer and stake, become harder to manage by intimidation because the threats on offer are just Tuesday.

The subtext is more corrosive: it isn’t sympathy for the poor, it’s a recognition of their political volatility. If you can’t frighten people with loss, you have to bargain with them or crush them. Marcos’s line implies a regime’s blunt calculus: stability depends on keeping enough people invested (or trapped) in the system that fear will work. It’s an admission that inequality doesn’t just wound; it changes the physics of control.

Context matters because Imelda Marcos isn’t just a public figure with a microphone; she’s an emblem of kleptocratic glamour, the First Lady of an authoritarian era that mixed spectacle with repression. Heard through that history, the quote reads like a glimpse behind the curated image - a moment where governance becomes crowd management and human security is reduced to leverage. It’s chilling precisely because it’s not theatrical. It’s practical, almost bored, the voice of someone for whom terror is a policy tool and poverty is not tragedy but a strategic variable.