The other day, someone told me the difference between a democracy and a "people's democracy." It's the same as the difference between a jacket and a straitjacket. Ronald Wilson Reagan

• freedom
• communism
• democracy

It has been pointed out that the days of democracy are numbered once the belly takes command of the head. When the less affluent feel the urge to break a commandment and begin to covet that which their more affluent neighbors possess, they are tempted to use their votes to obtain instant satisfaction. Then equal opportunity at the starting line becomes an extended guarantee of at least a tie at the finish of the race. Under the euphamism "the greatest good for the greatest number," we destroy a system which has accomplished just that and move toward the managed economy which strangles freedom and mortgages generations yet to come. Ronald Wilson Reagan

• taxes
• democracy
• welfare

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

• democracy

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. H. L. Mencken

• democracy

Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve. George Bernard Shaw

• democracy

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. H. L. Mencken

• government
• democracy

The ability for self-government is arrived at only through an extensive training and education. Calvin Coolidge

• education
• government
• democracy

The real danger of democracy is that the classes which have power under it will assume all the rights and reject all the duties - that is, that they will use the political power to plunder those who have. William Graham Sumner

• government
• democracy

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. Alexander Fraser Tyler

• democracy
• taxes
• government

If by the mere force of numbers a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might, in a moral point of view, justify revolution - certainly would if such a right were a vital one. Abraham Lincoln

• constitution
• government
• democracy

A Bill of Rights that means what the majority wants it to mean is worthless. Antonin Scalia

• freedom
• law
• democracy
• rights

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

• liberty
• democracy
• freedom

If you establish a democracy, you must in due time reap the fruits of a democracy. You will in due season have great impatience of the public burdens, combined in due season with great increase of the public expenditure. You will in due season have wars entered into from passion and not from reason; and you will in due season submit to peace ignominiously sought and ignominiously obtained, which will diminish your authority and perhaps endanger your independence. You will in due season find your property is less valuable, and your freedom less complete. Benjamin Disraeli

• government
• democracy

How did it happen? How did our national government grow from a servant with sharply limited powers into a master with virtually unlimited power? In part, we were swindled. There are occasions when we have elevated men and political parties to power that promised to restore limited government and then proceeded, after their election, to expand the activities of government. But let us be honest with ourselves. Broken promises are not the major causes of our trouble. Kept promises are. All too often we have put men in office who have suggested spending a little more on this, a little more on that, who have proposed a new welfare program, who have thought of another variety of 'security.' We have taken the bait, preferring to put off to another day the recapture of freedom and the restoration of our constitutional system. We have gone the way of many a democratic society that has lost its freedom by persuading itself that if 'the people' rule, all is well. Barry Goldwater

• politics
• freedom
• government
• democracy

Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. Oscar Wilde

• democracy

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 Card

• politics
• democracy