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Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
-- E.B. White
We are called a democracy, for the administration in the hands of many and not of the few.
– Thucydides
When the people rule, they must be rendered happy, or they will overturn the state.
– Alexis De Tocqueville
Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
Democracy... is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequal alike.
-- Plato
The blind lead the blind. It’s the democratic way.
– Henry Miller
Under democracy, one party always devoted its chief efforts to trying to prove that the other is unfit to rule – and both commonly succeed and are right.
-- H.L. Mencken
Democracy is a kingless regime infested by many kings who are sometimes more exclusive, tyrannical, and destructive than one, if he be a tyrant.
-- Benito Mussolini
Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
-- George Bernard Shaw
Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
-- Abraham Lincoln, 1863
No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
-- Winston Churchill
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
"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship."
-- Misattributed to Alexander Fraser Tytler
(See: Wikipedia ; Loren Collins )
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