Quotes About Majorities

History has never been dominated by majorities, but only by dedicated minorities who stand unconditionally on their faith," he says.

Whatever institutions or forms of government have been devised through the ages, the idea of liberty has remained constant: the right of each man to consult his conscience without reference to authorities or majorities, custom or opinion.

By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes to be his duty against the influences of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.

The American constitutional system had been devised to prevent easy capture of the government by popular majorities.

Time and again a close election leads to hand-wringing about the need for Electoral College reform; time and again, politicians and parties respond to the college's incentives, and more capacious and unifying majorities are born.

One great object of the Constitution was to restrain majorities from oppressing minorities or encroaching upon their just rights.

The search for majorities always results in either greater disfranchisement or wider suffrage, and in this case, leaders reached out to poor white men for their victories.

Even the reduced Six-County area which the unionists were now resignedly seeking to agree on for exclusion from Home Rule showed Sinn Fein majorities in two counties, Fermanagh and Tyrone.

This is the age in which thin and theoretic minorities can cover and conquer unconscious and untheoretic majorities.

Many populist victors continue to behave like victims; majorities act like mistreated minorities.

I have always believed that politics is first and foremost about ideas; Without a powerful commitment to goals and values, governments are rudderless and ineffective, however large their majorities.

When donors hold views we detest, we tend to see them as unfairly tilting policy debates with their money. Yet when we like their causes, we often view them as heroically stepping forward to level the playing field against powerful special interests or backward public majorities.

The fact disclosed by a survey of the past that majorities have been wrong must not blind us to the complementary fact that majorities have usually not been entirely wrong.

It was therefore understandable, Dahl said, "that the policy views dominant on the Court are never for long out of line with the policy views dominant among the lawmaking majorities of the United States.

I don't actually subscribe to the view that all power corrupts. But absolute power - when secured on the back of massive parliamentary majorities, which don't reflect the balance of political opinion in the country - can corrupt absolutely.

By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.

By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes is his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.

Triumphant vulgarity rules the world (it is said) because the democratic numbers and the market forces always win. Once you have markets, cultural democracy and freedom of opinion, questions about merit and meaning will always be settled by majorities and money. Bot majorities and money have no real authority on questions of value.

Majorities, no less than minorities, need the assurance that they are being treated fairly, otherwise they are sure to mobilize through democratic channels to affirm their interests. By not only tolerating but enshrining it in law, proportional representation is rapidly balkanizing the country along racial lines, destroying the confidence of citizens that the law will treat them equally and provoking a strong and largely justified backlash.

To say that majorities, as such, have a right to rule minorities, is equivalent to saying that minorities have, and ought to have, no rights, except such as majorities please to allow them.

Minorities are the stars of the firmament; majorities, the darkness in which they float.

Tradition with all its happy assumptions and necessary evils, all of its content majorities and stout killers, is not always a reliable guide.