Democracies Have Quotes - Page 2

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.

The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.

It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.

It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largesse out of the public treasure. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefit from the public treasury, with the result that democracy always collapses over a loose fiscal policy, always to be followed by a dictatorship, and then a monarchy.

There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship.

Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death.

It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority.

That government is best which governs least.

The issuing power [of money] should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.

Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.

Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.

As long as the differences and diversities of mankind exist, democracy must allow for compromise, for accommodation, and for the recognition of differences.

The ballot is stronger than the bullet.

Government is best which governs least

Liberalism and Western-style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today these two concepts have failed. Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems.

In nation after nation, democracy has taken the place of autocracy.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

Take not from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.

You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority.