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Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.

— G. K. Chesterton

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Democracy

More quotes by G. K. Chesterton

The humorous look of children is perhaps the most endearing of all the bonds that hold the Cosmos together.

The Defendant (1901)

Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.

Briefly, you can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.

There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great.

Charles Dickens (1906)

The truth is that it is our attitude towards children that is right, and our attitude towards grown-up people that is wrong.

The Defendant (1901)

All G. K. Chesterton quotes →

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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: G. K. Chesterton (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.