We are thus in the position of having to borrow from Europe to defend Europe, of having to borrow from China and Japan to defend Chinese and Japanese access to Gulf oil, and of having to borrow from Arab emirs, sultans and monarchs to make Iraq safe for democracy. We borrow from the nations we defend so that we may continue to defend them. To question this is an unpardonable heresy called 'isolationism.'more Patrick J. Buchanan quotes |
We are so concerned to flatter the majority that we lose sight of how very often it is necessary, in order to preserve freedom for the minority, let alone for the individual, to face that majority down.more William F. Buckley, Jr. quotes |
There can be no assumption that today’s majority is “right” and the Amish or others like them are “wrong.” A way of life that is odd or even erratic but interferes with no right or interests of others is not to be condemned because it is different.more Justice Warren E. Burger quotes |
Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.more Edmund Burke quotes |
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To govern according to the sense and agreement of the interests of the people is a great and glorious object of governance. This object cannot be obtained but through the medium of popular election, and popular election is a mighty evil.more Edmund Burke quotes |
The government of the absolute majority is but the government of the strongest interests; and when not effectively checked, is the most tyrannical and oppressive that can be devised... [To read the Constitution is to realize that] no free system was ever farther removed from the principle that the absolute majority, without check or limitation, ought to govern.more John C. Calhoun quotes |
To maintain the ascendancy of the Constitution over the lawmaking majority is the great and essential point on which the success of the [American] system must depend; unless that ascendancy can be preserved, the necessary consequence must be that the laws will supersede the Constitution; and, finally, the will of the Executive, by influence of its patronage, will supersede the laws ...more John C. Calhoun quotes |
Stripped of all its covering, the naked question is, whether ours is a federal or consolidated government;
a constitutional or absolute one; a government resting solidly on the basis of the sovereignty of the States,
or on the unrestrained will of a majority; a form of government, as in all other unlimited ones, in which injustice, violence, and force must ultimately prevail.more John C. Calhoun quotes |
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If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side.more Orson Scott Card quotes |
Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-canceling buisness: and gives in the long run a net result of zero.more Thomas Carlyle quotes |
There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.more Andrew Carnegie quotes |
The Democratic constituency is just like a herd of cows. All you have to do is lay out enough silage and they come running. That’s why I became an operative working with Democrats. With Democrats all you have to do is make a lot of noise, lay out the hay, and be ready to use the ole cattle prod in case a few want to bolt the herd.more James Carville quotes |
The freedom to express varying and often opposing ideas is essential to a variety of conceptions of democracy. If democracy is viewed as essentially a process – a way in which collective decisions for a society are made – free expression is crucial to the openness of the process and to such characteristics as elections, representation of interests, and the like.more Jonathan D. Casper quotes |
There are two kinds of restrictions on human liberty -- the restraint of law and that of custom. No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.more Carrie Chapman Catt quotes |
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In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued - they may be essential to survival.more Noam Chomsky quotes |
Democracy is essentially coercive. The winner gets to use public authority to impose their policies on the losers.more John Chubb quotes |
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Our major mistakes have not been the result of democracy, but of the erosion of democracy made possible by the mass media’s manipulation of public opinion.more Robert Cirino quotes |
But we’re not a democracy. It’s a terrible misunderstanding and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us that. In reality, we’re a plutocracy: a government by the wealthy.more Ramsey Clark quotes |
The Bush administration continues to coddle China, despite its continuing crackdown on democratic reform, its brutal subjugation of Tibet, its irresponsible export of nuclear and missile technology... Such forbearance on our part might have made sense during the Cold War when China was the counterweight to Soviet power. It makes no sense to play the China card now when our opponents have thrown in their hand.more Bill Clinton quotes |
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The person who is right is the person who is the strongest, in this case, paradoxically, it's the cowards who are the brave ones, and they manage to impose their ideas on everyone else.more Paulo Coelho quotes |
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Every effort to confine Americanism to a single pattern, to constrain it to a single formula, is disloyalty to everything that is valid in Americanism.more Henry Steele Commager quotes |
The disposition of all power is to abuses, nor does it at all mend the matter that its possessors are a majority. Unrestrained political authority, though it be confided to masses, cannot be trusted without positive limitations, men in bodies being but an aggregation of the passions, weaknesses and interests of men as individuals.more James Fenimore Cooper quotes |
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Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what you think it is you want to hear.more Alan Corenk quotes |
We consistently have adhered to the principle that the will of the people is the paramount consideration. Our goal today…[is] to reach the result that reflects the will of the voters…. The laws are intended to facilitate and safeguard the right of each voter to express his or her will in the context of our representative democracy. Technical statutory requirements must not be exalted over the substance of this right.more Florida Supreme Court quotes |
Democracy needs more free speech for even the speech of foolish people is valuable if it serves to guarantee the right of the wise to talk.more David Cushman Coyle quotes |
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Having gathered all power to itself, [the State] has become the sole focus of all conflict, and it must construct totalitarian defences to match its total exposure.more Anthony de Jasay quotes |
People who live in states have as a rule never experienced
the state of nature and vice-versa, and have no practical
possibility of moving from the one to the other ...
On what grounds, then, do people form hypotheses
about the relative merits of state and state of nature? ...
My contention here is that preferences for political arrangements of society are
to a large extent produced by these very arrangements, so that
political institutions are either addictive like some drugs,
or allergy-inducing like some others, or both,
for they may be one thing for some people and the other for others.more Anthony de Jasay quotes |
Democracy, then, in the centralizing, pattern-making, absolutist shape which we have given to it is, it is clear, the time of tyranny's incubation.more Bertrand de Jouvenel quotes |
He is free who knows how to keep in his own hand the power to decide, at each step, the course of his life, and who lives in a society which does not block the exercise of that power.more Salvador de Madariaga quotes |
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True, it is evil that a single man should crush the herd, but see not there the worse form of slavery, which is when the herd crushes out the man.more Antoine De Saint-Exupery quotes |
If it be admitted that a man, possessing absolute power, may misuse that power by wronging his adversaries, why should a majority not be liable to the same reproach? Men are not apt to change their character by agglomeration; nor does their patience in the presence of obstacles increase with the consciousness of their strength. And for these reasons I can never willingly invest any number of my fellow creatures with that unlimited authority which I should refuse to any one of them.more Alexis de Tocqueville quotes |
[T]he main evil of the present democratic institutions of the united states does not raise, as is often asserted in Europe, from their weakness, but from their irresistible strength. I am not so much alarmed at the excessive liberty which reigns in that country as at the inadequate securities which one finds there against tyranny.more Alexis De Tocqueville quotes |
Quand donc je refuse d'obéir à une loi injuste, je ne dénie point à la majorité le droit de commander; j'en appelle seulement de la souveraineté du peuple à la souveraineté du genre humain. Il y a des gens qui n'ont pas craint de dire qu'un peuple, dans les objets qui n'intéressaient que lui-même, ne pouvait sortir entièrement des limites de la justice et de la raison, et qu'ainsi on ne devait pas craindre de donner tout pouvoir à la majorité qui le représente. Mais c'est là un langage d'esclave.more Alexis de Tocqueville quotes |
[Some people] have a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to lower the powerful to their own level, and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom. I believe that it is easier to establish an absolute and despotic government amongst a people in which the conditions of society are equal, than amongst any other; and I think that, if such a government were once established amongst such a people, it would not only oppress men, but would eventually strip each of them of several of the highest qualities of humanity. Despotism, therefore, appears to me peculiarly to be dreaded in democratic times.more Alexis de Tocqueville quotes |
In order to enjoy the inestimable benefits that the liberty of the press ensures, it is necessary to submit to the inevitable evils it creates…more Alexis de Tocqueville quotes |
All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it.more Alexis de Tocqueville quotes |
Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.more Alexis de Tocqueville quotes |
