#racy

Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a very dangerous enemy indeed. ↗

— Anne Rice

#bibliophiles #book-lovers #willful-ignorance #zealotry #enemy

Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide. ↗

— John Adams

#political-philosophy #commitment

As Dio observed later, democracy sounded very well and good, “but its results are seen not to agree at all with its title. Monarchy, on the contrary, has an unpleasant sound, but is a most practical form of government to live under. For it is easier to find a single excellent man than many of them. ↗

— Stacy Schiff

#monarchy #politics #life

The Western post-Christian civilization has picked up the Christ without His Cross. But a Christ without a sacrifice that reconciles the world to God is a cheap, colorless, itinerant preacher who deserves to be popular for His great Sermon on the Mount, but also merits unpopularity for what He said about His Divinity on the one hand, and divorce, judgment, and hell on the other. This sentimental Christ is patched together with a thousand commonplaces, sustained sometimes by academic etymologists who cannot see the Word for the letters, or distorted beyond personal recognition by a dogmatic principle that anything which is Divine must necessarily be a myth. Without His Cross, He becomes nothing more than a sultry precursor of democracy or a humanitarian who taught brotherhood without tears. ↗

— Fulton J. Sheen

#democracy #jesus #secular-humanism #sermon-on-the-mount #the-cross

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." (Speech in the House of Commons, 11 November 1947) ↗

— Winston Churchill

#government #democracy

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

#justice #majority #minority #perspective #politics

Elections belong to the people. It's their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters. ↗

— Abraham Lincoln

#democracy #elections #voting #democracy

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return. ↗

— Gore Vidal

#criticism #democracy #oppression #democracy

Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. ↗

— Alexis de Tocqueville

#government #serious #democracy

Democracy is always an unfinished experiment, testing the capacity of each generation to live freedom nobly. ↗

— George Weigel

#experience