Democracy | Some revealing quotes

"Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil." Hannah Arendt

"Through money, democracy becomes its own destroyer, after money has destroyed intellect." Oswald Spengler

"To-day we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its masterpiece so well that the object's sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has ever existed." Oswald Spengler

"In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself." Henry A. Wallace

"Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise." Henry A. Wallace

"Politics means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state." Max Weber

"Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half." Gore Vidal

"Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic. But Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s. "We have a single system," he wrote, and "in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses."" Gore Vidal

"The people have the power. All we have to do is awaken the power in the people." John Lennon

"Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them -- and then, the opportunity to choose." Charles Wright Mills

"Only those understand politics who have the possibility at any given time to realize their ideas of the policies to be made, that is, those who are in power." Heinrich Böll

"A free society is a society in which all traditions have equal rights and equal access to the centers of power. A tradition receives these rights not because the importance the cash value, as it were) it has for outsiders but because it gives meaning to the lives of those who participate in it." Paul Feyerabend

"It doesn't actually make any difference whether the President is Republican or Democrat. The genius of the American ruling class is that it has been able to make the people think that they have had something to do with the electing of presidents for 200 years when they've had absolutely nothing to say about the candidates or the policies or the way the country is run." Gore Vidal

"It makes no difference who you vote for - the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people." Gore Vidal