Democracy | Some revealing quotes

"ANARCHY, or the government of each man by himself or as the English say, self -government." Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

"A democracy which fails to concentrate authority in an emergency inevitably falls into such confusion that the ground is prepared for the rise of a dictator." Walter Lippmann

"We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society." Edward Bernays

"One of the most interesting reactions to come out of 1968 was in the first publication of the Trilateral Commission, which believed there was a 'crisis of democracy' from too much participation of the masses." Noam Chomsky

"Grant women, in addition to their legitimate influence in the family, political suffrage, and the triumph of reaction is assured; for even where they think and feel revolutionary as a mass, their revolutionary aspirations are generally still only in the service of reaction." Eduard von Hartmann

"Civics is not only how to run the country before it's your turn to run the country; it is, in fact, the study of power, practical political power. And you must start that process at an age level when kids' brains are still open and malleable." Richard Dreyfuss

"This dullness of vision regarding the importance of the general welfare to the individual is the measure of the failure of our schools and churches to teach the spiritual significance of genuine democracy." Henry A. Wallace

"The market is sovereign and in the magic economy of the small entrepreneur there is no authoritarian center... in the political sphere... the equilibrium of powers prevails, and hence there is no chance of despotism." Charles Wright Mills

"The tyranny of the many would be when one body takes over the rights of others, and then exercises its power to change the laws in its favor." Voltaire

"I do not care whether you're a Democrat or you're a Republican or an independent. We must pull for the people who are wearing the uniform of the armed forces. These people weren't drafted. They enlisted, because they believe." Tommy Lasorda

"Any contemporary political re-statement of liberal and socialist goals must include as central the idea of a society in which all men would become men of substantive reason, whose independent reasoning would have structural consequences for their societies, its history and thus for their own life fates." Charles Wright Mills

"Who will govern the governors? There is only one force in the nation that can be depended upon to keep the government pure and the governors honest, and that is the people themselves. They alone, if well informed, are capable of preventing the corruption of power, and of restoring the nation to its rightful course if it should go astray. They alone are the safest depository of the ultimate powers of government." Thomas Jefferson

"If you go to one demonstration and then go home, that's something, but the people in power can live with that. What they can't live with is sustained pressure that keeps building, organisations that keep doing things, people that keep learning lessons from the last time and doing it better the next time." Noam Chomsky

"I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or it they try, they will shortly be out of office." Milton Friedman