James Madison Quotes

How a minority, reaching majority, seizing authority, hates a minority.

In their hours of timidity the Congress becomes subservient to the importunities of organized minorities that the President comes more and more to stand as the champion of the rights of the whole country.

Neither current events nor history shows that the majority rules, or ever did rule.

Government is everywhere to a great extent controlled by powerful minorities, with an interest distinct from that of the mass of the people.

Shall we judge a country by the majority, or the minority? By the minority, surely.

If by the mere force of numbers a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might in a moral point of view, justify revolution—certainly would if such a right were a vital one.

If government is in the hands of the few, they will tyrannize the many; if in the hands of the many, they will tyrannize over the few. It ought to be in the hands of both, and they should be separated.... They will need a mutual check. This check is a monarch.

The majority of people wherever found ought in all questions to govern the minority.

Parliamentary government is simply a mild and disguised form of compulsion. We agree to try strength by counting heads instead of breaking heads, but the principle is exactly the same... The minority gives way not because it is convinced that it is wrong, but because it is convinced that it is a minority.

The minority of a country is never known to agree, except in its efforts to reduce and oppress the majority.

When a respectable minority objects to any rule of conduct, it would be dignified for the majority ... to yield.... Numerical strength savors of violence when it acts in total disregard of any strongly felt opinion of the minority.

The history of most countries has been that of majorities—mounted majorities, clad in iron, armed with death, treading down the tenfold more numerous minorities.

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.

It is quite plain that your government will never be able to restrain a distressed and discontented majority. For with you the majority is the government, and has the rich, who are always a minority, absolutely at its mercy.

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.

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.

A democracy is a state which recognizes the subjection of the minority to the majority, that is, an organization for the systematic use of violence by one class against the other, by one part of the population against another.

Filibuster is nothing less than a formula for tyranny by the minority

Ours is a constitutional freedom where the popular will is the law supreme and minorities are sacredly protected.

51 percent of the people should not always get 100% of the power; 51 percent of the people should certainly not get all the power if they use that power to exclude the 49%. In that case, we do not have majority rule. We have majority tyranny.

The dictatorship of the majority is a bugaboo which haunts the books of political theorists but has never been found in the flesh in modern history

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.

There would be but one article in the constitution of a State Socialistic country: “The right of the majority is absolute.”

What is government but an arrangement by which the many accept the authority of the few?

Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one.