Democracy Quotes – Reflections on Political Structures

"Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into--what else?--another piece of news. Thus we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing."

Neil Postman

"Human beings act in a great variety of irrational ways, but all of them seem to be capable, if given a fair chance, of making a reasonable choice in the light of available evidence. Democratic institutions can be made to work only if all concerned do their best to impart knowledge and to encourage rationality. But today, in the world's most powerful democracy, the politicians and the propagandists prefer to make nonsense of democratic procedures by appealing almost exclusively to the ignorance and irrationality of the electors."

Aldous Huxley

"Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses."

H. L. Mencken

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance."

Henry Louis Mencken

"Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage."

Henry Louis Mencken

"In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs."

Walter Lippmann

"What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority."

Walter Lippmann

"The first principle of a civilized state is that the power is legitimate only when it is under contract."

Walter Lippmann

"No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people."

Walter Lippmann

"Democracy is just a filler for textbooks! Do you actually believe that public opinion influences the government?"

Voltaire

"It can't happen here is always wrong: a dictatorship can happen anywhere."

Karl Popper

"Democracy can survive anything except Democrats"

Robert A. Heinlein

"No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and cliches and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders."

Edward L. Bernays

"Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom."

Friedrich August von Hayek

"Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. 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. Each man's rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints. It may seem an exaggeration to say that the American public gets most of its ideas in this wholesale fashion. The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine."

Edward L. Bernays

"Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual)."

Ayn Rand

"In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with college degrees."

Thomas Sowell

"The present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis in journalism."

Walter Lippmann