Democracy | Some revealing quotes

"War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other." Ambroise Paul Toussaint Jules Valéry

"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of today." Theodore Roosevelt

"Historically, the most terrible things - war, genocide, and slavery - have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience." Howard Zinn

"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

"Every socialist is a disguised dictator." Ludwig von Mises

"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

"War is when the government tells you who the bad guy is. Revolution is when you decide that for yourself." Benjamin Franklin

"The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people's money away quietly and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly." Thomas Sowell

"Our number-one enemy is ignorance. And I believe that is the number-one enemy of everyone. It’s not understanding what is actually going on in the world. It’s only once you start to understand that you can make effective decisions and effective plans. Now the question is: who is promoting this ignorance? […] It is bad media. It really is my opinion that the media in general are so bad we have to question whether the world wouldn’t be better off without them all together. They’re so distortive to how the world actually is that the result is we see wars and we see corrupt governments continue on. One of the hopeful things that I have discovered is that nearly every war that has started in the past 50 years has been a result of media lies. The media could have stopped it if they had searched deep enough — if they hadn’t reprinted government propaganda — they could have stopped it. But what does that mean? Well, that means, basically, populations don’t like wars. Populations have to be fooled into wars. Populations don’t willingly, with open eyes, enter into war. So, if we have a good media environment, we might also have a peaceful environment." Julian Assange

"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

"The very first thing we have to understand is that the mainstream media are not a mirror of reality. Not even a distorted mirror of reality, but provide us with a reality that is constructed according to its very own points of view. Which is made to influence us in a certain way." Prof. Dr. Michael Meyen

"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them." Philip K. Dick

"The majority is no proof of the truth." Lucius Annaeus Seneca