#racy

I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for superior men if they ran for office, but there can be no doubt that such men do not run. ↗

— Alexis de Tocqueville

#men

My people are going to learn the principles of democracy the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go. Let them worship as they will, every man can follow his own conscience provided it does not interfere with sane reason or bid him act against the liberty of his fellow men. ↗

— Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

#religion #secularism #men

She was simple, not being able to adorn herself, but she was unhappy, as one out of her class; for women belong to no caste, no race, their grace, their beauty and their charm serving them in place of birth and family. Their inborn finesse, their instinctive elegance, their suppleness of wit, are their only aristocracy, making some daughters of the people the equal of great ladies. ↗

— Guy de Maupassant

#class #beauty

Stand here, he thought, and count the lighted windows of a city. You cannot do it. But behind each yellow rectangle that climbs, one over another, to the sky - under each bulb - down to there, see that spark over the river which is not a star? - there are people whom you will never see and who are your masters. At the supper tables, in the drawing rooms, in their beds and in their cellars, in their studies and in their bathrooms. Speeding in the subways under your feet. Crawling up in elevators through vertical cracks around you. Jolting past you in every bus. Your masters, Gail Wynand. There is a net - longer than the cables that coil through the walls of this city, larger than the mesh of pipes that carry water, gas and refuse - there is another hidden net around you; it is strapped to you, and the wires lead to every hand in the city. They jerked the wires and you moved. You were a ruler of men. You held a leash. A leash is only a rope with a noose at both ends. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#democracy #follower #leader #living #masses

There might be cheats or possible cheats amongst them, men who beat their wives, men with perverse instincts, greedy men, cowardly men, lying men; but the elegance of the room invested each one with a kind of aristocracy. ↗

— Ian Fleming

#cards #cheaters #elegance #men

This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum. ↗

— Elbert Hubbard

#illiteracy #reading #money

The flood of money that gushes into politics today is a pollution of democracy. ↗

— Theodore White

#democracy #flood #into #money #pollution

Charity is today a 'political charity.'. . . it means the transformation of a society structured to benefit a few who appropriate to themselves the value of the work of others. This transformation ought to be directed toward a radical change in the foundation of society, that is, the private ownership of the means of production. ↗

— Gustavo Gutiérrez

#egalitarian #equality #freedom #change

People who want to understand democracy should spend less time in the library with Aristotle and more time on the buses and in the subway. ↗

— Simeon Strunsky

#buses #democracy #less #library #more

I really am a pessimist. I've always felt that fascism is a more natural governmental condition than democracy. Democracy is a grace. It's something essentially splendid because it's not at all routine or automatic. Fascism goes back to our infancy and childhood, where we were always told how to live. We were told, Yes, you may do this; no, you may not do that. So the secret of fascism is that it has this appeal to people whose later lives are not satisfactory. ↗

— Norman Mailer

#fascism #nature