Democracy | Some revealing quotes

"Laws are - even and especially in modern democracy - rarely instruments that enforce right against wrong, but mostly political tools with which the politically weak are exploited, robbed, suppressed and instrumentalized in favor of the politically strong." Roland Baader

"Give the people a toy to keep them busy long enough, give them 'political parties'! Then they will waste all their energy and wit on meaningless occupation with individuals and other trivialities. So they won't bother us anymore, and we can run our business at will. But to keep the toy from getting boring eventually and the population's discontent from boiling over, a ritual game with a cathartic function as a pressure valve must be inserted at regular intervals. We call it "parliamentary elections," which sounds important. Then there is peace for the next four years, especially since everyone believes they decided something themselves. The media? They play our game all by themselves—without realizing it. Occasionally we give them a morsel when we want to functionally neutralize a somewhat more alert, and thus unwelcome, person or group. Then they are satisfied, and so is the population; after all, they have something to gossip about. By splitting the voters through the political party system, we can get them to expend their energy fighting for battles over issues of no importance." Montagu Norman

"For if you give the state, the authority to grant you your rights....in that same breath, you have just given them the authority to also take them away" G. Edward Griffin

"Democracy is the method of implementing the will of the financial aristocracy in such a way that the people believe that humanity wanted it that way." Matthias Lubos

"Fascism is the bourgeoisie’s fighting organisation that relies on the active support of Social-Democracy. Social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism.... These organisations (i.e. Fascism and social democracy) are not antipodes, they are twins." Joseph Stalin

"Democracy, the modern world’s holy cow, is in crisis… every kind of outrage is being committed in the name of democracy. It has become little more than a hollow word, a pretty shell, emptied of all content or meaning. Democracy is the Free World’s whore, willing to dress up, dress down, willing to satisfy a whole range of tastes, available to be used and abused at will. Free elections, a free press and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market means they are on sale to the highest bidder." Arundhati Roy

"No State can commit so many follies and deeds of violence as the democratic State, for it alone has the organic consciousness of its infallibility, sanctity, and complete legitimacy. Even the most absolute monarchy has limitations of a hundred kinds, in the personal consciousness of responsibility of the ruler (which under democracy is always put on the intangible "will of the people"), in the court clique, in the Church, in the advisers and ministers and "government circles" that inevitably crystallize around every potentate. Moreover, the fear of dethronement, which is theoretically always possible, affects every sole-ruler. But a treacherous circular reasoning protects the rule of the "sovereign people" from any limitation — it is in the right because it is the collective will, and is the collective will because it is in the right." Egon Friedell

"Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought." Edward Bernays

"Give politicians power and it certainly will be abused eventually - if not by today's politicians, then by their successors." Harry Browne

"Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority." Ayn Rand

"As man seeks justice in equality, so society seeks order in anarchy." Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

"All politics, under democracy, resolves itself into a series of dynastic questions: the objective is always the job, not the principle." H. L. Mencken

"Voting is the next-to-last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge, of course, is giving your opinion to a pollster." Neil Postman

"One of the necessary accompaniments of capitalism in a democracy is political corruption." Upton Sinclair