Quotes About Demagogue

Plato feared the "false and braggart words" of the demagogue, and suspected democracy might be nothing more than a staging point on the road to tyranny.

They were silent for a moment, each of them contemplating Anthony Comstock, a demagogue with too much power for such a limited understanding and narrow mind. Many saw him as nothing more than a sanctimonious buffoon, but those who paid attention knew him to be malicious and calculating.

The easy lilt of a military anthem, the sexual glamour of uniforms, the evangelical fervor of a demagogue — the Berliners recognized the dangers because they had become susceptible themselves.

A demagogue must be neither an educated nor an honest man; he must be ignorant and a rogue.

Far too often in the political realm, we demonize success; we demagogue against it. What we should be doing is incentivizing success.

This is why the Third Way is also authoritarian. It assumes that the right man—or, in the case of Leninists, the right party—can resolve all of these contradictions through sheer will. The populist demagogue takes on the role of the parent telling the childlike masses that he can make everything "all better" if they just trust him.

It is infinitely harder to ask questions in such a way that the audience is led not to the answers (the province of the demagogue) but to new perceptions.

(Of Jesus): "A parish demogogue."

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

There were still too many people who were afraid of a technology that eluded them, still more who would never have access and resented and feared it in equal measures. Mobilize those groups just once, find a demagogue-and there always were demagogues-and the nets would find themselves destroyed.

The hack is like a politician who consults the polls before he takes a position. He's a demagogue. He panders.

I remember Dick Russell used to say to beware of any man who will demagogue behind closed doors.

Without their charismatic demagogue to lead them, the chattering monkeys would disperse and find some other idiotic superstition to believe in.

So next time you hear a raving demagogue counseling hatred for other, slightly different groups of humans, for a moment at least see if you can understand his problem: He is heeding an ancient call that—however dangerous, obsolete, and maladaptive it may be today—once benefitted our species.

democracy can also be subverted more thoroughly through the products of science than any pre-industrial demagogue ever dreamed.

The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so that they believe they are as clever as he

The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so they believe they are clever as he.

If you take a guy who loves the sound of his own voice and give him power, he becomes a demagogue. If you give him money, he becomes a show-off. Give him the internet, and he's a ceaselessly flaming activist; give him an Internet of Things, and he becomes a wrangler, a guy for whom every possible relationship to any possible object or service is some ever-ramifying, well-nigh metaphysical hacker session.

Politeness, I learned at her salon, is a demanding discipline; to convince others without recourse to the tricks of the demagogue or bully requires a high level of intelligence, especially when the audience is learned and intelligent.

Everyone wants to demagogue everyone else. That may be good politics, but it's awful policy.

When wheat prices soar, for example, nothing is easier for a demagogue than to cry out against the injustice of a situation where speculators, sitting comfortably in their air-conditioned offices, grow rich on the sweat of farmers toiling in the fields for months under a hot sun. The years when the speculators took a financial beating at harvest time, while the farmers lived comfortably on the guaranteed wheat prices paid by speculators, are of course forgotten.

This is where Melville is perhaps the most profound in his portrait of Ahab as the demagogue and dictator. In the end, even the fiercest of tyrants is done in, not by his own sad, used-up self, but by his enablers, the so-called professionals, who keep whispering in his ear.

This is where Melville is perhaps the most profound in his portrait of Ahab as the demagogue and dictator. In the end, even the fiercest of tyrants is done in, not by his own sad, used-up self, but by his enablers, the so-called professionals, who keep whispering in his ear. p.105

The demagogue, who is always an idiote, is not a freak or social mutation. The demagogue expresses the society's zeitgeist.