Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.
Democracy: In which you say what you like and do what you're told.
Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.
The worst thing I can say about democracy is that it has tolerated the Right Honorable Gentleman for four and a half years.
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.
The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry.
Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.
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.
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.
The ship of Democracy, which has weathered all storms, may sink through the mutiny of those aboard.
The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity.
When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong.
Nor is the people's judgment always true: the most may err as grossly as the few.
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.
Two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.
Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.
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.
Democracy! Bah! When I hear that word I reach for my feather Boa!
The soviet people want full-blooded and unconditional democracy.
Democracy is the wholesome and pure air without which a socialist public organization cannot live a full-blooded life.
Everybody's for democracy in principle. It's only in practice that the thing gives rise to stiff objections.
The freeman, casting with unpurchased hand the vote that shakes the turrets of the land.
I swear to the Lord, I still can't see, why Democracy means, everybody but me.
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.
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.
Democracy without morality is impossible.
Chinks in America's egalitarian armor are not hard to find. Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.
Democracy with its semi-civilization sincerely cherishes junk. The artist's power should be spiritual. But the power of the majority is material. When these worlds meet occasionally, it is pure coincidence.
Democracy means the opportunity to be everyone's slave.
Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions -- it only guarantees equality of opportunity.
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.
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.
As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.
No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent.
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.
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.
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.
Democracy give every man the right to be his own oppressor.
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.
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.
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.
The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what They want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
Democracy is also a form of religion. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses.
I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd.
There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship.
Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.
The best way of learning to be an independent sovereign state is to be an independent sovereign state.
Everything that is right or natural pleads for separation. The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, 'Tis time to part.
In a democracy everybody has a right to be represented, including the jerks.
Let the people think they govern and they will be governed.
Democracy is a process by which the people are free to choose the man who will get the blame.
Democracy is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequal alike.
— Plato
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
Freedom without obligation is anarchy. Freedom without obligation is democracy.
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.
Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
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.
Democracy encourages the majority to decide things about which the majority is blissfully ignorant.
All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.
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.
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.
Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin.
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.
I believe in democracy, because it releases the energies of every human being.
Democracy is not so much a form of government as a set of principles.
America is the place where you cannot kill your government by killing the men who conduct it.
That a peasant may become king does not render the kingdom democratic.
The world must be made safe for democracy.