16 quotes
Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob's fear. It is piped into central factories, and there it is flavoured and coloured and put into cans.
Notes on Democracy (1926)
The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy!
Notes on Democracy (1926)
He can hope for little help from other men of his own kind, for they have battles of their own to fight.
Notes on Democracy (1926)
Liberty means self-reliance, it means resolution, it means enterprise, it means the capacity for doing without.
Notes on Democracy (1926)
No man, I suppose, ever admits to himself candidly that he gets his living in a dishonourable way.
Notes on Democracy (1926)
Democratic man, dreaming eternally of Utopias, is ever a prey to shibboleths.
Notes on Democracy (1926)
Democratic man can understand the aims and aspirations of capitalism; they are, greatly magnified, simply his own aims and aspirations.
Notes on Democracy (1926)
The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. The demaslave is one who listens to what these idiots have to say and pretends to believe it himself.
Notes on Democracy (1926)
Democracy always seems bent upon killing the thing it theoretically loves. I have rehearsed some of its operations against liberty, the very cornerstone of its political metaphysic.
Notes on Democracy (1926)
Democracy, in fact, is always inventing class distinctions, despite its theoretical abhorrence of them.
Notes on Democracy (1926)
My business is not prognosis, but diagnosis. I am not engaged in therapeutics, but in pathology.
Notes on Democracy (1926)
It is [a politician's] business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying; if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground.
Notes on Democracy (1926)
It is moral by his code to get into office by false pretences. It is moral to change convictions overnight. Anything is moral that furthers the main concern of his soul, which is to keep a place at the public trough.
Notes on Democracy (1926)
For what democracy needs most of all is a party that will separate the good that is in it theoretically from the evils that beset it practically, and then try to erect that good into a workable system. What it needs beyond everything is a party of liberty.
Notes on Democracy (1926)
What is not true, as everyone knows, is always immensely more fascinating and satisfying to the vast majority of men than what is true. Truth has a harshness that alarms them, and an air of finality that collides with their incurable romanticism.
Notes on Democracy (1926)
Democracy is shot through with this delight in the incredible, this banal mysticism. I have alluded to its touching acceptance of the faith that progress is illimitable and ordained of God - that every human problem, in the very nature of things, may be solved.
Notes on Democracy (1926)