Skip to content

Democracy will prevail when men believe the vote of Judas as good as that of Jesus Christ.

— Thomas Carlyle Attributed

Another quote →

Source, in full

"The Scholar in a Republic", centennial anniversary address to Phi Beta Kappa of Harvard College, Cambridge, Massachusetts (June 30, 1881). Reported in Carlos Martyn and Wendell Phillips, The Agitator (1890), p. 581. Reported as unverified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).

Topics

Democracy

More quotes by Thomas Carlyle

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.

Notebooks (1830)

No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.

Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840)

The great law of culture is: Let each become all that he was created capable of being.

Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827)

A well-written Life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.

Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827)

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827)

All Thomas Carlyle quotes →

You may also like

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