Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority.
You can't have five wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
Neither current events nor history show that the majority rule, or ever did rule.
In a racially divided society, majority rule is not a reliable instrument of democracy.
The justification of majority rule in politics is not to be found in its ethical superiority.
One of the benefits of a properly functioning democracy is minority rights and majority rule.
The rights to life, liberty and property were not meant to be subject to the vagaries of majority rule.
A lynch mob is [unlimited] Majority Rule stripped of its fancy trappings and its facade of respectability.
Though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable.
When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong.
the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.
But government in which the majority rule in all cases can not be based on justice, even as far as men understand it.
Democracy, in any rational form, also imposes conditions on majority rule. That's what the Bill of Rights is about, for example.
It is unnatural for a majority to rule, for a majority can seldom be organized and united for specific action, and a minority can.
Democracy has turned out to be not majority rule but rule by well-organized and well-connected minority groups who steal from the majority.
America was founded on majority rule, not supermajority rule. Somehow, over the years, this has morphed into supermajority rule, and that changes things.
The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.
Majority rule rests on numbers; democracy rests on the well-grounded assumption that society is neither a collection of units nor an organism but a network of human relations.
It's characteristic of democracy that majority rule is understood as being effective not only in politics but also in thinking. In thinking, of course, the majority is always wrong.
By rejecting the authority of the individual and replacing it by the numbers of some momentary mob, the parliamentary principle of majority rule sins against the basic aristocratic principle of Nature.
Democracy is premised, in some measure, on majority rule, and democracy is difficult in a situation of concentrated inequalities in which a large, impoverished majority confronts a small, wealthy oligarchy.
It's precisely because America is not a democracy that we have survived! It's precisely because majority rule does have checks and balances on it. It's precisely because this is a representative republic that we have survived.
The young [Nazi] movement is in its nature and inner organization anti-parliamentarian; that is, it rejects... a principle of majority rule in which the leader is degraded to the level of mere executant of other people's wills and opinion.
Now majority rule is a precious, sacred thing worth dying for. But like other precious, sacred things .... it's not only worth dying for; it can make you wish you were dead. Imagine if all life were determined by majority rule. Every meal would be a pizza.
Good, law-abiding, value-oriented citizens are the ultimate in hypocrisy; "majority rules" and the law are exactly the same as being the biggest bully on the block with the biggest stick-it is only might that allows one group to force another to live by its code of conduct.
A fatal defect in majority rule is that by its very nature it abolishes itself. Majority rule must inevitably become minority rule: the majority is too big to handle itself; it organizes itself into committees ... which in their turn resolve themselves into a committee of one.
The Greeks... labored under the delusion that their democracy was a guarantee of peace and plenty, not realizing that unrestrained majority rule always destroys freedom, puts the minority at the mercy of the mob, and works at cross-purposes to the effective use of human energy and individual initiative.
I call government that works the best for people open society, which is basically just another more general term for a democracy that is - you call it maybe a liberal democracy. It's not only majority rule but also respect for minorities and minority opinions and the rule of law. So it's really a sort of institutional democracy.
Democracy, or "majority rules," is another trick of our society to force us to do things we don't want to do. Even if we actually lived in a pure democracy (and the system we do live in is not even close), where everyone got a single vote on every subject, forcing the minority to obey the majority is no different to one man, if he had the power, forcing everyone else to do what he wanted them to-simply because he could.
After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it.