#democracy

We like to stress the commonness of heroes. Essences seem undemocratic. We feel oppressed by the call to greatness. We regard an interest in glory or perfection as a sign of mental unhealthiness, and have decided that high achievers, who are called overachievers, owe their surplus ambition to a defect in mothering (either too little or too much). We want to admire but think we have a right not to be intimidated. We dislike feeling inferior to an ideal. So away with ideals, with essences. The only ideals allowed are healthy ones -- those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#ambition #democracy #egalitarianism #equality #essence

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of 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

#intellectual #political #willful-ignorance #life

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all. ↗

— Adam Smith

#democracy #freedom #history #hope #individualism

A vote is like a rifle: its usefulness depends upon the character of the user. ↗

— Theodore Roosevelt

#democracy #elections #voters #character

But collective thinking is usually short-lived. We're fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a great gift for self-destruction. ↗

— Suzanne Collins

#humanity #public-opinion #games

Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it. ↗

— Howard Zinn

#civil-disobedience #democracy #dissent #law #protest

Democracy is not just the right to vote, it is the right to live in dignity. ↗

— Naomi Klein

#politics #voting #dignity

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state. ↗

— Noam Chomsky

#democracy #propaganda #state #totalitarian #totalitarian state

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

— H.L. Mencken

#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

#democracy