#racy

In a well-functioning democracy, the state constitution is considered more important than God's holy book, whichever holy book that may be, and God matters only in your private life. ↗

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

#god #government #holy-book #islam #muslim

Better for real things to be uncontrollable, better for one's life to be undecipherable and intellectually impenetrable than to attempt to make casual sense of what is unknown with a fantasy that is mad. Better, I thought, that the events of these past three days should remain incomprehensible to me forever than to posit, as I had just been doing, a conspiracy of foreign intelligence agents who are determined to control my mind. We've all heard that one before. ↗

— Philip Roth

#control-my-mind #indecipherable #intelligence

It occurred to Susan that men were always waiting for something cataclysmic--love or war or a giant asteroid. Every man wanted to be a hot-headed Bruce Willis character, fighting against the evil foreign enemy while despising the domestic bureaucracy. Men just wanted to focus on one big thing, leaving the thousands of smaller messes for the women around them to clean up. ↗

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

#bureaucracy #cataclysm #focus #men #women

Our safety, our liberty, depends upon preserving the Constitution of the United States as our fathers made it inviolate. The people of the United States are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution. ↗

— Abraham Lincoln

#government #judicial-power #republicanism #separation-of-powers #men

[The militia experts] accuse antigoverment agitants of paranoia, yet they spin around and claim that militias speak in coded phrases, have underground bunkers, and are secretly conspiring to take over the world and enslave minorities. They say it`s lunacy that men at the pentagon can conspire, yet they`re certain that farmers out on the plain are plotting as we speak. They depict the United Nations as weak und ineffectual, yet they portray raggedy-ass backwoodsmen as the world`s biggest organized military threat. ↗

— Jim Goad

#conspiracy #domestic-terrorism #militia #militia-experts #millitias

Two glittering eyes peered at the three young men and the catawyld clicked the back of its tongue in warning. “I hate these things,” Bracy growled ↗

— Nicole Sager

#bracy #fate-of-arcrea #ignispat #men

democracy is about the conditions that make it possible for ordinary people to better their lives by becoming political beings and by making power responsive to their hopes and needs. What is at stake in democratic politics is whether ordinary men and women can recognize that their concerns are best protected and cultivated under a regime whose actions are governed by principles of commonality, equality, and fairness, a regime in which taking part in politics becomes a way of staking out and sharing in a common life and its forms of self-fulfillment. Democracy is not about bowling together but about managing together those powers that immediately and significantly affect the lives and circumstances of others and one’s self. ↗

— Sheldon S. Wolin

#power #equality

it is the people who control the Government, not the Government the people. ↗

— Winston Churchill

#democracy

Democracy is the worship of jackals by jackasses. ↗

— H.L. Mencken

#democracy

Listening to the Gospel on Palm Sunday, it struck me that many people criticise Pontius Pilate for his role in the affair while letting the multitude go scot free. Pilate did what little he could to dissuade them from the extremely unpleasant course of action on which they were set, but the multitude kept shouting for a crucifixion. Pilate could not have done more without provoking a riot. The crucifixion when it happened was a victory for direct democracy against the effete, liberal paternalism of Pilate. If I am right, and the crucifixion be seen as an early victory for the principle of direct democracy, then it must follow...that good men should struggle to confound and frustrate the multitude whenever possible. ↗

— Auberon Waugh

#direct-democracy #men