Sourced and curated.

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.

Norman Mailer

1964

★ 1.8

The mystic reverence, the religious allegiance, which are essential to a true monarchy, are imaginative sentiments that no legislature can manufacture in any people.

Walter Bagehot

1867

★ 1.9

Magazine

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

E.B. White

1944

★ 1.9

We are not the masters. The people are the masters. We are the servants of the people... What the electorate gives, the electorate can take away.

Tony Blair

1997

★ 1.9

The cure for the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.

Jane Addams

1902

★ 1.9

Economic literature · Historical literature

Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it.

Joseph Schumpeter

Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy · 1942

★ 1.9

Communism is based on the belief that man is so weak and inadequate that he is unable to govern himself, and therefore requires the rule of strong masters. Democracy is based on the conviction that man has the moral and intellectual capacity, as well as the inalienable right, to govern himself with reason and justice.

Harry Truman

Second Inaugural Address of Harry Truman · 1949

★ 1.9

Film · Black comedy · Drama (film) · Comedy

You see, I believe in the voters. They understand that elections aren't just popularity contests. They know this country was built by people just like me who work very hard and don't have everything handed to them on a silver spoon.

Tracy Flick

Election · 1999

★ 1.9

A pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction.

We are now forming a republican government. Real liberty is neither found in despotism or the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments.

1787

★ 2.0

Speech

Alexander Hamilton

1787

★ 2.0

It is my firm conviction that the civilized world is tending toward republicanism, or government by the people through their chosen representatives, and that our own great Republic is destined to be the guiding star to all others.

Ulysses S. Grant

Second Inaugural Address of Ulysses S. Grant · 1873

★ 2.0

Essay · Magazine

Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.

Oscar Wilde

Fortnightly Review · 1891

★ 2.0

The life of a man is three-score years and ten: a little more, a little less. The life of a Nation is the fullness of the measure of its will to live.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

1941

★ 2.0

Secrecy and a free, democratic government don't mix.

Harry Truman

1972

★ 2.0

Since the turn of the century, the number of democracies in the world has grown fourfold. Human freedom is on the march, and nowhere more so than in our own hemisphere. Freedom is one of the deepest and noblest aspirations of the human spirit. People, worldwide, hunger for the right of self-determination, for those inalienable rights that make for human dignity and progress.

Ronald Reagan

Second Inaugural Address of Ronald Reagan · 1985

★ 2.0

Our democratic faith is more than the creed of our country, it is the inborn hope of our humanity, an ideal we carry but do not own, a trust we bear and pass along. And even after nearly 225 years, we have a long way yet to travel.

George W. Bush

First Inaugural Address of George W. Bush · 2001

★ 2.0

All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.

Thomas Jefferson

First Inaugural Address of Thomas Jefferson · 1801

★ 2.1

Democracy is the worst form of government. It is the most inefficient, the most clumsy, the most unpractical... It reduces wisdom to impotence and secures the triumph of folly, ignorance, claptrap, and demagogy... Yet democracy is the only form of social order that is admissible, because it is the only one consistent with justice.

Robert Briffault

1930

★ 3.4

Democracy is not tearing down; it is a building up. It is not denial of the divine right of Kings; it supplements that claim with the assertion of the divine right of all men. It does not destroy; it fulfills. It is the consummation of all theories of government, to the spirit of which all the nations of the Earth must yield. It is the great constructive course of the ages.

Calvin Coolidge

1916

★ 3.5

Essay · Magazine

Two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three.

E.M. Forster

1938

★ 3.5

Democracies cannot dispense with hypocrisy any more than dictatorships can with cynicism.

Georges Bernanos

1939

★ 3.5

Novel

In every well-governed state, wealth is a sacred thing; in democracies it is the only sacred thing.

Anatole France

1908

★ 3.5

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

H.L. Mencken

1916

★ 3.5

Political literature · Philosophical literature

Democracy is a method of finding proximate solutions for insoluble problems.

Reinhold Niebuhr

1944

★ 3.5

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.

Reinhold Niebuhr

1944

★ 3.5

Poem

Would it not be easier In that case for the government To dissolve the people And elect another?

Bertolt Brecht

1956

★ 3.5

Interview · Magazine

I would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the telephone directory than by the Harvard University faculty.

William F. Buckley

1961

★ 3.5

Supreme Court opinion · Legal opinion · Legal writing

In a democratic society like ours, relief must come through an aroused popular conscience that sears the conscience of the people's representatives.

Felix Frankfurter

Baker v. Carr · 1962

★ 3.5

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

Edmund Burke

1774

★ 3.6

Personal journal

After each war there is a little less democracy to save.

Brooks Atkinson

1951

★ 3.6

Political literature · Economic literature

No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.

Amartya Sen

Development as Freedom · 1999

★ 3.6

Supreme Court opinion · Legal writing

Campaign promises are-by long democratic tradition-the least binding form of human commitment.

Antonin Scalia

2002

★ 3.6

Speech · Political speech · Historical literature

Our constitution is named a democracy, because it is in the hands not of the few but of the many. But our laws secure equal justice for all in their private disputes, and our public opinion welcomes and honors talent in every branch of achievement, not for any sectional reason but on grounds of excellence alone. And as we give free play to all in our public life, so we care the same spirit into our daily relations with one another... Open and friendly in our private intercourse, in our public acts we keep strictly within the control of law. We acknowledge the restraint of authority, and to the laws, more especially to those which offer protection to the oppressed and those unwritten ordinances whose transgression brings admitted shame.

Pericles

Thucydides, Funeral Oration, History of the Peloponnesian War · 430 BC

★ 3.7

Letter

Among a people generally corrupt liberty cannot long exist.

Edmund Burke

1777

★ 3.7

Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.

Federalist 10 · 1787

★ 3.7

It is ESSENTIAL to such a government that it be derived from the great body of the society, not from an inconsiderable proportion, or a favored class of it; otherwise a handful of tyrannical nobles, exercising their oppressions by a delegation of their powers, might aspire to the rank of republicans, and claim for their government the honorable title of republic.

Federalist 39 · 1788

★ 3.7

We may define a republic to be, or at least may bestow that name on, a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people, and is administered by persons holding their offices during pleasure, for a limited period, or during good behavior.

It rests now with ourselves alone to enjoy in peace and concord the blessings of self-government, so long denied to mankind: to shew by example the sufficiency of human reason for the care of human affairs and that the will of the majority, the Natural law of every society, is the only sure guardian of the rights of man.

Federalist 39 · 1788

★ 3.7

Thomas Jefferson

1790

★ 3.7

Letter

Remember Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy Yet, that did not commit suicide.

John Adams

1814

★ 3.7

Personal journal

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.

Abraham Lincoln

1858

★ 3.7

The democratic aspiration is no mere recent phase in human history. It is human history. It permeated the ancient life of early peoples. It blazed anew in the Middle Ages. It was written in Magna Charta.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Third Inaugural Address of Franklin D. Roosevelt · 1941

★ 3.7

Film · Biography (film) · Biography

Elections of any kind are fucking bourgeois affectation.

Cleve Jones

Milk · 2008

★ 3.7

Letter

When the masses get involved in reasoning, everything is lost.

Voltaire

1766

★ 3.8

What other form of government, indeed, can so well deserve our esteem and love?

John Adams

Inaugural Address of John Adams · 1797

★ 3.8

Political literature · Philosophical literature

For if liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost.

Aristotle

Politics · 350 BC

★ 3.9

Political literature · Philosophical literature

In the strict sense of the term, a true democracy has never existed, and never will exist.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The Social Contract · 1762

★ 3.9

It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted.

Walt Whitman

Democratic Vistas · 1871

★ 3.9

A monarchy is a merchantman which sails well, but will sometimes strike on a rock, and go to the bottom; a republic is a raft which will never sink, but then your feet are always in the water.

Fisher Ames

1795

★ 5.1

Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.

Herbert Marcuse

One-Dimensional Man · 1964

★ 5.3

In a racially divided society majority rule is not a reliable instrument of democracy.

Lani Guinier

1992

★ 5.3

Democratic nations care but little for what has been, but they are haunted by visions of what will be; in this direction their unbounded imagination grows and dilates beyond all measure.... Democracy, which shuts the past against the poet, opens the future before him.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Democracy in America · 1840

★ 5.4

Philosophical dialogue · Dialogue · Philosophical literature

Democracy, which is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.

Socrates

Plato, Republic · 375 BC

★ 5.7

Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Democracy in America · 1840

★ 6.2

Well, the people have spoken-the bastards.

Dick Tuck

1966

★ 6.8

Poem · Satire

For who can be secure of private right, If sovereign sway may be dissolved by might? Nor is the people's judgement always true: The most may err as grossly as the few.

John Dryden

Absalom and Achitophel · 1681

★ 6.9

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of man's ideological evolution and the universalism of Western liberal democracy.

Francis Fukuyama

The End of History? · 1989

★ 6.9