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In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed - they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love and five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!

— Orson Welles

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Democracy

More quotes by Orson Welles

Ignorance, there is no authority in the world like it.

An audience is not so much a complement to an actor's ego, as a challenge to his capacities.

speaking in an episode of Orson Welles Sketch-Book (1955)

If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.

Race hate isn't human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature.

A long-playing full shot is what always separates the men from the boys. Anybody can make movies with a pair of scissors and a two-inch lens.

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