Quotes About Democracy

Western democracies managed to fight without imposing restrictions on freedom of speech. Instead of Orwell's 'war atmosphere', there was an anti-war atmosphere.

Citizens exercised parrhesia, which translates as 'all speech', or sometimes 'true speech'.

hope I am not making the insulting error of pretending that democracies are as oppressive as dictatorships – such comparisons are the self-pitying and self-dramatising whines of spoilt Western children.

Tolerance means to have the heart open to all differences; it is the honorable attitude of receiving another's opinion in order to appreciate it; it is the generous willingness to reach an agreement for the common good. Tolerance is the most precious virtue of democracy.

As soon as politicians have learnt to buy political support from the 'public purse', and conditioned electorates to embrace looting and bribery, the democratic process reduces itself to the formation of (Mancur Olson's) 'distributional coalitions' – electoral majorities mortared together by common interest in a collectively advantageous pattern of theft.

Democracy and 'progressive democracy' are synonymous, and indistinguishable from the expansion of the state, Since winning elections is overwhelmingly a matter of vote buying, and society's informational organs (education and media) are no more resistant to bribery than the electorate, a thrifty politician is simply an incompetent politician, and the democratic variant of Darwinism quickly eliminates such misfits from the gene pool.

I still find it hard to really cover some of the events of this period properly. Roger was probably still my closest friend, and we were able to enjoy each other's company. But our friendship was increasingly put under strain as Roger struggled to modify what had been an ostensibly democratic band into the reality of one with a single leader.

The only dangerous thing about ignoramuses is when they vote for ignoramuses.

The two terms of the democratic alternative today—oppressive bureaucracy or repugnant plutocracy—are canceling each other out. Combining into a single term: opulent bureaucracy. At once repugnant and oppressive.

The cause of democracy's stupidities is confidence in the anonymous citizen; and the cause of its crimes is the anonymous citizen's confidence in himself.

Voor de democraat staat vrijheid niet gelijk aan alles kunnen zeggen wat je denkt, maar aan niet over alles hoeven nadenken wat je zegt.

Het volkse verwarren met het democratische is de strategie van de democraat.

Good manners, in the end, are nothing but the way in which respect is expressed. Since respect, in its turn, is a feeling inspired by the presence of an admitted superior, wherever hierarchies are absent—real or fictitious, but revered—good manners die out. Rudeness is a democratic product.

Universal suffrage in the end does not recognize any of the individual's rights except the "right" to be alternately oppressor or oppressed.

By means of the notion of "cultural evolution," the democratic anthropologist tries to avoid questions of biology.

The contemporary anthropologist, under democrats' severe gaze, skips quickly over ethnic differences like over hot coals.

To find oneself at the mercy of the people's whims, thanks to universal suffrage, is what liberalism calls the guarantee of freedom.

Frustration is the distinctive psychological characteristic of democratic society. Where all may legitimately aspire to the summit, the entire pyramid is an accumulation of frustrated individuals.

The three hypostasis of egoism are: individualism, nationalism, collectivism. The democratic trinity.

Feudal anarchy" is the word which democratic terrorism uses to slander the only period of tangible freedom known to us.

Der Reaktionär irrt, wenn er annimmt, daß der Demokrat sein Gründe ablehnt, aber seinen Widerwillen teilt. Der moderne Welt ist ein Schweinestall, in dessen Morast der Mensch von heute sich fröhlich wälzt.

In order to transform the idea of the "social contract" into an eminently democratic thesis, one needs the sophism of suffrage. Where one supposes, in effect, that the majority is equivalent to the totality, the idea of consensus is twisted into totalitarian coercion.

Da nicht einmal das Böse auf Erden rein ist, hat jede der drei demokratischen Wellen dem Menschen eine klarere Vorstellung gebracht: Die erste die von der Seele, die zweite die vom transzendenten Gott, die dritte die von der Geschichte: Platonismus, alexandrinische Theologie, Romantik.

The modern world resulted from the confluence of three independent causal series: the demographic expansion, democratic propaganda, the industrial revolution.