It All Makes Sense Now

“Widespread intellectual and moral docility may be convenient for leaders in the short term, but it is suicidal for nations in the long term.” ― Carl Sagan, Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'” ― Isaac Asimov

"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." ― Winston Churchill

“The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.... A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.” ― Thomas Jefferson

“A vote is like a rifle; its usefulness depends upon the character of the user.” ― Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States of America, from 1901 to 1909

If you want to understand democracy, spend less time in the library with Plato, and more time in the buses with people. ― Simeon Strunsky

"You have to remember one thing about the will of the people: it wasn't that long ago that we were swept away by the Macarena.” ― Jon Stewart

"Democracy is a process by which the people are free to choose the man who will get the blame." ― Laurence J. Peter (1919 - 1988), US educator & writer

"Today, democracy is being allowed to vote for the candidate you dislike least." — Robert Byrne

“Sometimes it seems that everybody in the world is in favor of democracy, just as long as it gives them the result they want.”
― Jack Lessenberry

“People use democracy as a free-floating abstraction disconnected from reality. Democracy in and of itself is not necessarily good. Gang rape, after all, is democracy in action. Democracy is not a synonym for justice or for freedom.” ― Terry Goodkind, Naked Empire

“Democracy should always be viewed with a philosophical perspective rather than a political one, because after all democracy was born to a philosopher and murdered by a politician.” ― Aysha Taryam, The Opposite of Indifference: A Collection of Commentaries

“What good does it do me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish?

There are some nations in Europe whose inhabitants think of themselves in a sense as colonists, indifferent to the fate of the place they live in. The greatest changes occur in their country without their cooperation. They are not even aware of precisely what has taken place. They suspect it; they have heard of the event by chance. More than that, they are unconcerned with the fortunes of their village, the safety of their streets, the fate of their church and its vestry. They think that such things have nothing to do with them, that they belong to a powerful stranger called “the government.” They enjoy these goods as tenants, without a sense of ownership, and never give a thought to how they might be improved. They are so divorced from their own interests that even when their own security and that of their children is finally compromised, they do not seek to avert the danger themselves but cross their arms and wait for the nation as a whole to come to their aid. Yet as utterly as they sacrifice their own free will, they are no fonder of obedience than anyone else. They submit, it is true, to the whims of a clerk, but no sooner is force removed than they are glad to defy the law as a defeated enemy. Thus one finds them ever wavering between servitude and license.

When a nation has reached this point, it must either change its laws and mores or perish, for the well of public virtue has run dry: in such a place one no longer finds citizens but only subjects.”

― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, printed at New York, 1838

"In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom; we have to say, Like People like Government." - Thomas Carlyle (1795 - 1881), Scottish author, essayist, & historian ― Past and Present, 1843