#y

In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy. ↗

— Matt Taibbi

#democracy #elections #government #greed #wall-street

In a democracy, someone who fails to get elected to office can always console himself with the thought that there was something not quite fair about it. ↗

— Thucydides

#elections #fairness #losing #office #democracy

The widespread abuse of prisoners is a virtually foolproof indication that politicians are trying to impose a system--whether political, religious or economic--that is rejected by large numbers of the people they are ruling. Just as ecologists define ecosystems by the presence of certain "indicator species" of plants and birds, torture is an indicator species of a regime that is engaged in a deeply anti-democratic project, even if that regime happens to have come to power through elections. ↗

— Naomi Klein

#democracy

What an author doesn't know could fill a book. ↗

— Holly Black

#books #knowledge #authority

Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe. ↗

— Thomas Jefferson

#every #every man #free #man #press

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary. ↗

— Reinhold Niebuhr

#democracy #inclination #injustice #justice #makes

Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#independent-thought #reading #independence

I am unaware of his plans but I shall never stop believing in them because I cannot fathom them and I prefer to mistrust my own intellectual capacities than his justice. ↗

— Alexis de Tocqueville

#democracy

No, there are no special places in hell. Hell is a democracy. ↗

— Mike Carey

#lucifer #democracy

Chastity—the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions, he added parenthetically, out of Remy de Gourmont. ↗

— Aldous Huxley

#perversion #sex #authority