“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”
― Winston Churchill
“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.”
— Benjamin Franklin
“Democracy is an abuse of statistics.”
— Jorge Luis Borges
“Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they’ve told you what you think it is you want to hear.”
— Alan Coren
“Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.”
— Plato
“The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.”
— John F. Kennedy
“Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.”
— H. L. Mencken
“A democracy is no more than an aristocracy of orators. The people are so readily moved by demagogues that control must be exercised by the government over speech and press.”
— Thomas Hobbes
“Democracy is not the law of the majority but the protection of the minority.”
— Albert Camus
“Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.”
— Oscar Wilde
“Democracy degenerates into ochlocracy [mob rule], as the people, intoxicated with power, lose all sense of restraint.”
— Polybius
“Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.”
— George Bernard Shaw
“Democracy is the process by which people choose the man who’ll get the blame.”
— Bertrand Russell
“A democracy is a volcano which conceals the fiery materials of its own destruction.”
— Fisher Ames
“Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.”
— Aristotle
“The tendency of democracy is to make all things uniform and to reduce men to a common level of mediocrity.”
— John Stuart Mill
“In the end, democracy is only a form of weakness, a dilution of the will to power, where the herd triumphs over the exceptional.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
— John Adams
“Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-canceling business; and gives in the long run a net result of zero.”
— Thomas Carlyle
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.”
— Alexander Fraser Tytler
“I swear to the Lord,
I still can’t see,
why Democracy means,
everybody but me.”
— Langston Hughes
