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The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.

— Robert Maynard Hutchins

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Democracy

More quotes by Robert Maynard Hutchins

The great problem of our time is moral, intellectual, and spiritual.

Education for Freedom (1943)

Criticisms that I have mentioned come to the same thing: that liberal education is too good for the people.

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Many colleges of liberal arts and the researches of many scholars in the humanities and the social studies are important only to those whose livelihood depends upon them.

The Great Conversation (1952)

The aim of human beings and human societies, if there is one, is material comfort. Freedom is simply doing what you please. The only common principle that we are urged to have is that there are no principles at all.

Education for Freedom (1943)

The rise of experimental science has not made the Great Conversation irrelevant. ... Science itself is part of the Great Conversation.

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

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