Norman Mailer Quotes

The consent of the governed" is more than a safeguard against ignorant tyrants: it is an insurance against benevolent despots as well.

Democracy is much too important to be left to public opinion.

No democracy pretends to be a tyranny. Most tyrannies pretend they are democracies. Democracy remains the definition of political legitimacy.

It is an essential tenet of our whole representative form of government, the idea that there should not be some tyranny which makes it so nobody can even have a chance to vote.

There is a danger in democracy itself.

It is not good to have a rule of many.

I am the government.

All government, of course, is against liberty.

Democracy is constructed like an edifice, freedom by freedom, right by right, until it reaches its snapping point.

Liberty may be endangered by the abuse of liberty, but also by the abuse of power.

Let the people think they govern and they will be governed.

The known propensity of a democracy is to licentiousness which the ambitious call, and the ignorant believe to be liberty.

Democracy literally means the power of people. Democracy is not about politics, it is about the people.

The freedom to persuade and suggest is the essence of the democratic process.

In a democracy, as a matter of course, every effort is made to seize upon and create publick opinion, which is, substantially, securing power.

A democracy delegates leadership. It cannot surrender to it.... The genuinely democratic community rightfully views the hero with suspicion and is notoriously ungrateful.

The people who own the country ought to govern it.

Wherever the real power in a government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Government the real power lies in the majority of the community.

Democracy needs leaders, not masters.

In the United States, where the numerical majority have long been in full possession of collective despotism, they would probably be as unwilling to part with it as a single despot or an aristocracy.

The love of power and the love of liberty are in eternal antagonism.

In democracies the people seem to act as they please.

Democracy is the best revenge.

The experience of the past one hundred and fifty years has revealed the danger that, through judicial interpretation, the constitutional device for the protection of minorities from oppressive majority action, may be made the means by which the majority is subject to the tyranny of the minority.

The principle that the majority have a right to rule the minority, practically resolves all government into a mere contest between two bodies of men, as to which of them shall be masters, and which of them slaves; a contest, that—however bloody—can, in the nature of things, never be finally closed, so long as man refuses to be a slave.