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Democracy Quotes

Barack Obama and the Nigerian president Bola Tinubu have the most entries, with H. L. Mencken and Franklin Roosevelt behind them, so a lot of the page is speeches. For the dry material go to Mencken in Smart Set (1910), who called democracy the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard; Shaw’s Maxims for Revolutionists (1903), on election by the incompetent many instead of appointment by the corrupt few; and Disraeli’s Lothair (1870).

“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch” is credited to Benjamin Franklin and flagged misattributed. The earliest version in the notes is a Usenet post from 23 April 1990. The line that democracy is the most vile form of government, credited to Madison, is flagged too.

Random quote on Democracy

Most quoted on democracy:

The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy!

H. L. Mencken Notes on Democracy (1926)

Democracy has turned out to be not majority rule but rule by well-organized and well-connected minority groups who steal from the majority.

Lew Rockwell

A fanatical belief in democracy makes democratic institutions impossible.

Bertrand Russell Unpopular Essays (1950)

If Despotism failed only for want of a capable benevolent despot, what chance has Democracy, which requires a whole population of capable voters?

George Bernard Shaw Man and Superman (1903)

The public, therefore, among a democratic people, has a singular power, which aristocratic nations cannot conceive; for it does not persuade others to its beliefs, but it imposes them and makes them permeate the thinking of everyone by a sort of enormous pressure of the mind of all upon the individual intelligence.

Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America, Volume II (1840)

My political ideal is Democratic ... Force always attracts men of low morality.

Albert Einstein

It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this.

Alexander Hamilton

Let all people come in, and vote fairly; it is to support one or the other party, to deny any man's vote.

John Holt Ashby v. White (1703)

If an election can cause us to lose everything, what is it exactly that we have in the first place?

Michael Horton What Are Evangelicals Afraid of Losing? (2018)

Puritanism, believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy.

James Russell Lowell Literary Essays, vol. II (1870)

He who dreamed of democracy, far back in a world of absolutism, was indeed heroic, and we of today awaken to the wonder of his dream.

Louis Sullivan

The way people in democracies think of the government as something different from themselves is a real handicap. And, of course, sometimes the government confirms their opinion.

Lewis Mumford Philosophers of the Earth : Conversations with Ecologists (1972)

We can’t let the integrity of our elections be undermined, for that is a path to chaos.

Joe Biden

Let us not commit ourselves to the absurd and senseless dogma that the color of the skin shall be the basis of suffrage, the talisman of liberty.

James A. Garfield Oration at Ravenna, Ohio (1865)

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

George Bernard Shaw Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

The freeman casting with unpurchased hand
The vote that shakes the turrets of the land.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

I believe in democracy, but in real democracy, not a phony democracy in which just powerful people can speak. For me, in a democracy everyone speaks.

Augusto Boal

Since 1995 what the data says is each new generation of young people has become successively less supportive of democracy than the generation that preceded it.

Sue Gardner

I court not the votes of the fickle mob.

Horace

Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.

George Jean Nathan

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