"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 (1814)

"...(O)ur sages in the great (constitutional) convention ... intended our government should be a republic which differs more widely from a democracy than a democracy from a despotism. The rigours of a despotism often oppress only a few, but it is the very
essence and nature of a democracy, for a faction claiming to oppress a minority, and
that minority the chief owners of the property and truest lovers of their country."

Fisher Ames, American statesman, 1805

"If liberty and equality, as is thought by some are chiefly to be found in democracy, they 
will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost."

Aristotle, Source: Politics, 343 BC

"After each war there is a little less democracy to save."

Brooks Atkinson 

"In a democracy the majority of citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority ...and that oppression of the majority will extend to far great number, and will be carried on with much greater fury, than can almost ever be apprehended from the dominion of a single sceptre. Under a cruel prince they have the plaudits of the people to animate their generous constancy under their sufferings; but those who are subjected to wrong under multitudes are deprived of all external consolation: they seem deserted by mankind, overpowered by a conspiracy of their whole species."

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

"If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side."

Orson Scott Card
"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."

Winston Churchill
"It is the besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which the masses of men exhibit their tyranny."

James Fenimore Cooper, "The American Democrat" (1838)

"Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what you think it 
is you want to hear."

Alan Corenk

"The founders understood that democracy would inevitably evolve into a system of legalized plunder unless the plundered were given numerous escape routes and constitutional protections such as the separation of powers, the Bill of Rights, election of senators by state legislators, the electoral college, no income taxation, most governmental functions performed at the state and local levels, and myriad other constitutional limitations on the powers of the central government."

Thomas J. DiLorenzo

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have 
for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!"

Get this and other great bumper stickers at LibertyStickers.com!
"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?"

Mahatma Gandhi (Mohandas Karamchand) (1869-1948) Indian Social Reformer and Spiritual Leader, in Non-Violence in Peace and War [1949]

"Democracy is the Ouija board theory of government."

James Hart
"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."

F.A. Hayek

"Fifty-one percent of a nation can establish a totalitarian regime, suppress minorities and still remain democratic."

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

"..(T)here are two opposite reasons for being a democrat. You may think all men so good that they deserve a share in the government of the commonwealth, and so wise that the commonwealth needs their advice. That is, in my opinion, the false, romantic doctrine of democracy. On the other hand, you may believe fallen men to be so wicked that not
one of them can be trusted with any irresponsible power over his fellows."

C.S. Lewis, "Membership" Sobernost #31 (June 1945)

"Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death."

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

H.L. Mencken

"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

Baltimore Evening Sun on 26 July 1920

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

H.L. Mencken

"(D)emocracy may be a self-limiting disease, like measles. It is, perhaps, something more: it is self-devouring. One cannot observe it objectively without being impressed by its curious distrust of itself - its apparently ineradicable tendency to abandon its whole philosophy at the first sign of strain. I need not point to what happens invariably in democratic states when the national safety is menaced. All the great tribunes of democracy, on such occasions, convert themselves, by a process as simple as taking a deep breath, into despots of an almost fabulous ferocity."

from 'Politics', in 'The American Scene, A Reader' Knopf, 1965, p. 234-235

"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule--and both commonly succeed, and are right... The United States has never developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an intelligentsia really intelligent. Its history is simply a record of vacillations between two gangs of frauds."

H.L. Mencken

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

H.L. Mencken

"Democracy is a form of government where you can say what you think even if you don't think."

Phillip's Treasury of Humourous Quotations
 
"A democracy is a state in which the poor, gaining the upper hand, kill some and banish
others, and then divide the offices among the remaining citizens equally, usually by lot."
Plato, from A New Dictionary of Quotations: On Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources
"Democracies are prone to war, and war consumes them."

W.H. Seward, Eulogy on John Quincy Adams [1848] 
"Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve."

George Bernard Shaw
"Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt 
few."

George Bernard Shaw

"To include freedom in the very definition of democracy is to define a process not by its 
actual characteristics as a process but by its hoped for results. This is not only 
intellectually invalid, it is, in practical terms, blinding oneself in advance to some of 
the unwanted consequences of the process."

Thomas Sowell
"Democracy is necessitated by the fact that all men are sinners; it is made possible by 
the fact that we know it. ..."

Elton Trueblood, (1900-1994)
"Democracy is based on the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are
right more than half of the time."

E.B. White

"In democracy, as quaintly understood, voters pick their representatives. American
democracy increasingly reverses that.  Legislative districts are drawn to protect
incumbents who, effectively, pick their voters."

George Will
"Democracy is more dangerous than fire. Fire can't vote itself immune to water." 

Michael Z. Williamson


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