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One of the insidious facts about totalitarianism is its seeming "efficiency." …Democracy — with all of its inefficiency — is still the best system we have so far for enhancing the prospects of our mutual survival.

— Neil Postman Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969)

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Democracy

More quotes by Neil Postman

A definition is the start of an argument, not the end of one.

In a purely oral culture, intelligence is often associated with aphoristic ingenuity, that is, the power to invent compact sayings of wide applicability.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)

What ideas are convenient to express inevitably becomes the important content of a culture.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)

The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)

Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)

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Democracy is the wholesome and pure air without which a socialist public organization cannot live a full-blooded life.

Mikhail Gorbachev

The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!

Vladimir Lenin The State and Revolution (1917)

The law itself is the instrument of the ruling class; hence it is a logical impossibility for another class to assume power legally.

Oliver Cox Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (1948)

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of bourgeois stupidity.

Gustave Flaubert

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Neil Postman (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.