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The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority.
-Lord (John Emerich Edward Dalberg) Acton
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Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing. Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the People, who have... a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean the characters and conduct of their rulers. There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free 'government' ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty. Liberty cannot be preserved without general knowledge among people.
-John Adams
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So long as we have enough people in this country willing to fight for their rights, we'll be called a democracy.
-Roger Baldwin
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Democracy: In which you say what you like and do what you're told.
-Dave Barry
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Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.
-Jean Baudrillard
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The worst thing I can say about democracy is that it has tolerated the Right Honorable Gentleman for four and a half years.
-Aneurin Bevan
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We once worried that democracy could not survive if an undereducated populace knew too little. Now we worry if it can survive us knowing too much.
-Robert Bianco
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The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry.
-William F. Buckley
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In a democracy the majority of citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority...and that oppression of the majority will extend to far great number, and will be carried on with much greater fury, than can almost ever be apprehended from the dominion of a single sceptre. Under a cruel prince they have the plaudits of the people to animate their generous constancy under their sufferings; but those who are subjected to wrong under multitudes are deprived of all external consolation: they seem deserted by mankind, overpowered by a conspiracy of their whole species.
-Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790
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Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.
-G. K. Chesterton
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Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.
-Sir Winston Churchill
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At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man walking into the little booth with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper. No amount of rhetoric or voluminous discussion can possibly diminish the overwhelming importance of that point.
-Sir Winston Churchill
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No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
-Sir Winston Churchill, Speech in the House of Commons, November 11, 1947
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The ship of Democracy, which has weathered all storms, may sink through the mutiny of those aboard.
-Grover Cleveland
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It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny.
-James Fenimore Cooper
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The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity.
-James Fenimore Cooper
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Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what it is you want to hear.
-Alan Coren
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When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong.
-Eugene Debs
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Democracy don't rule the world, you better get that in your head; this world is ruled by violence, but I guess that's better left unsaid.
-Bob Dylan
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Two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.
-E. M. Forster
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Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.
-Harry Emerson Fosdick
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In a democracy dissent is an act of faith. Like medicine, the test of its value is not in its taste, but in its effects.
-J. William Fulbright
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When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It's a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it.
-John Kenneth Galbraith
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Democracy! Bah! When I hear that word I reach for my feather Boa!
-Allen Ginsberg
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The soviet people want full-blooded and unconditional democracy.
-Mikhail Gorbachev
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Democracy is the wholesome and pure air without which a socialist public organization cannot live a full-blooded life.
-Mikhail Gorbachev
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Everybody's for democracy in principle. It's only in practice that the thing gives rise to stiff objections.
-Meg Greenfield
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The freeman, casting with unpurchased hand the vote that shakes the turrets of the land.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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I swear to the Lord, I still can't see, why Democracy means, everybody but me.
-Langston Hughes
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I swear to the Lord
I still can't see
Why Democracy means
Everybody but me.
-Langston Hughes, The Black Man Speaks
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It is not enough to merely defend democracy. To defend it may be to lose it; to extend it is to strengthen it. Democracy is not property; it is an idea.
-Hubert Humphrey
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The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population -- the intelligent ones or the fools? I think we can agree it's the fools, no matter where you go in this world, it's the fools that form the overwhelming majority.
-Henrik Ibsen
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It is the common failing of totalitarian regimes that they cannot really understand the nature of our democracy. They mistake dissent for disloyalty. They mistake restlessness for a rejection of policy. They mistake a few committees for a country. They misjudge individual speeches for public policy.
-Lyndon B. Johnson, Answering North Vietnamese charge that US could not endure a long, inconclusive war, address at San Antonio, Texas, September 29, 1967
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Democracy without morality is impossible.
-Jack Kemp
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Chinks in America's egalitarian armor are not hard to find. Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.
-Florence King
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The Silent majority is silent, and that is best for everybody.
-Gerhard Kocher
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Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions -- it only guarantees equality of opportunity.
-Irving Kristol
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You must drop all your democracy. You must not believe in the people. One class is no better than another. It must be a case of Wisdom, or Truth. Let the working classes be working classes. That is the truth. There must be an aristocracy of people who have wisdom, and there must be a Ruler: a Kaiser: no Presidents and democracies.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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The more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent.
-Abraham Lincoln
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As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.
-Abraham Lincoln
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...Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.
-Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863
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What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority.
-Walter Lippmann
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This is one of the paradoxes of the democratic movement -- that it loves a crowd and fears the individuals who compose it -- that the religion of humanity should have no faith in human beings.
-Walter Lippmann
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Unless democracy is to commit suicide by consenting to its own destruction, it will have to find some formidable answer to those who come to it saying: I demand from you in the name of your principles the rights which I shall deny to you later in the name of my principles.
-Walter Lippmann
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Democracy give every man the right to be his own oppressor.
-James Russell Lowell
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Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing. What is necessary now is one thing and one thing only that democracy become again democracy in action, not democracy accomplished and piled up in goods and gold.
-Archibald MacLeish
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A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.
-Norman Mailer
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We go by the major vote, and if the majority are insane, the sane must go to the hospital.
-Horace Mann
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It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive.
-Thomas Mann
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The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
-H. L. Mencken
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Democracy is the theory that the common people know what They want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
-H. L. Mencken
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Democracy is also a form of religion. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses.
-H. L. Mencken
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I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
-H. L. Mencken
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If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
-John Stuart Mill
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It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd.
-Henry Miller
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There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship.
-Ralph Nader
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Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.
-Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness
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The best way of learning to be an independent sovereign state is to be an independent sovereign state.
-Kwame Nkrumah
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The legacy of Democrats and Republicans approaches: Libertarianism by bankruptcy.
-Nick Nuessle
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Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst off-sloughings of the planet are the ingredients of sovereignty. Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy the whores are us.
-P. J. O'Rourke
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Everything that is right or natural pleads for separation. The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, 'Tis time to part.
-Thomas Paine
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In a democracy everybody has a right to be represented, including the jerks.
-Chris Patten
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Let the people think they govern and they will be governed.
-William Penn
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Democracy is a process by which the people are free to choose the man who will get the blame.
-Laurence J. Peter
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Democracy is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequal alike.
-Plato
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These, then, will be some of the features of democracy... it will be, in all likelihood, an agreeable, lawless, parti-colored commonwealth, dealing with all alike on a footing of equality, whether they be really equal or not.
-Plato
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But you have to understand, American democracy is not like the system you have. We're not an ocean liner that sails across the ocean from point A to point B at 30 knots. That's not American democracy. American democracy is kind of like a life raft that bobs around the ocean all the time. Your feet are always wet. Winds are always blowing. You're cold. You're wet. You're uncomfortable -- but you never sink.
-Colin Powell
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-John Renesch
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Freedom without obligation is anarchy. Freedom without obligation is democracy.
-Earl Riney
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The ballot is stronger than bullets.
-Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
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Democracy is a political method, that is to say, a certain type of institutional arrangement for arriving at political -- legislative and administrative -- decisions and hence incapable of being an end in itself.
-Joseph Schumpeter
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I talk democracy to these men and women. I tell them that they have the vote, and that theirs is the kingdom and the power and the glory. I say to them You are supreme: exercise your power. They say, That's right: tell us what to do; and I tell them. I say Exercise our vote intelligently by voting for me. And they do. That's democracy; and a splendid thing it is too for putting the right men in the right place.
-George Bernard Shaw
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Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
-George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, The Revolutionist's Handbook
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Democracy encourages the majority to decide things about which the majority is blissfully ignorant.
-John Simon
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All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.
-Alfred E. Smith
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There is a limit to the application of democratic methods. You can inquire of all the passengers as to what type of car they like to ride in, but it is impossible to question them as to whether to apply the brakes when the train is at full speed and accident threatens.
-Leon Trotsky
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I am a democrat only on principle, not by instinct -- nobody is that. Doubtless some people say they are, but this world is grievously given to lying.
-Mark Twain
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Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin.
-Gore Vidal
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Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
-Gore Vidal
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Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White, New Yorker, July 3, 1944
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I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.
-Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas
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Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.
-Oscar Wilde
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Democracy, finally, rests on a higher power than Parliament. It rests on an informed and cultivated and alert public opinion. The Members of Parliament are only representatives of the citizens. They cannot represent apathy and indifference. They can play the part allotted to them only if they represent intelligence and public spiritness.
http://www.nalis.gov.tt/Independence/IndepSpeech.htm
-Dr. Eric Eustace Williams, Speech, First day of Trinidad and Tobago's independence from Great Britain., August 31, 1962
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I believe in democracy, because it releases the energies of every human being.
-Woodrow Wilson
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Democracy is not so much a form of government as a set of principles.
-Woodrow Wilson
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America is the place where you cannot kill your government by killing the men who conduct it.
-Woodrow Wilson
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That a peasant may become king does not render the kingdom democratic.
-Woodrow Wilson
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The world must be made safe for democracy.
-Woodrow Wilson
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Books about Democracy
