Benjamin Spock Quotes

The voice of the majority is no proof of justice.

It is not good to have a rule of many.

The majority is not society, is not everyone. Majority coercion over the minority is still coercion.

The real power in America is held by a fast-emerging new Oligarchy of pimps and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness or even trees, except maybe the ones in their own yards, and they don't mind admitting it.

It is conflict combined with consent, not consent alone, which preserves democracy from eroding into oligarchy.

For the first time in the life of the great republic, there was a political organization which grappled directly and fundamentally with the growing injustice which marked the dealings between Exploiters and the Exploited

Of course I wrote most of the Constitution myself. I remember hesitating for a long time over the US presidential system. But it wouldn't have done — we were too trained in English democracy to sit down under a dictatorship which is what the American system really is.

In the history of mankind many republics have risen, have flourished for a less or greater time, and then have fallen because their citizens lost the power of governing themselves and thereby of governing their state; and in no way has this loss of power been so often and so clearly shown as in the tendency to turn the government into a government primarily for the benefit of one class instead of a government for the benefit of the people as a whole.

The Government of the absolute majority instead of the Government of the people is but the Government of the strongest interests; and when not efficiently checked, it is the most tyrannical and oppressive that can be devised

Representative democracy betrays the electorate when laws have no roots in the people but in oligarchies.

People mistake majoritarianism for democracy.

The majority never has right on its side.

Wherever democracy has prevailed, the power of the State has been used in some form or other to plunder the well-to-do classes for the benefit of the poor.

Does history record any case in which the majority was right?

We can conceive of various kinds of democracy.

Trump wants to be the first American tsar. With his hero worship of Putin, his admiration for the apparent omnipotence of the Kremlin, schoolboyish crush on Putin's gangster swagger and his contempt for democracy, Trump wants to rule with his family, taking decisions purely because he's right about everything like a tsar.

In a democracy, the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority.

I'm the most democratic fascist you'll ever meet. I listen to everybody, and then I make a decision.

It's not up to one individual to decide, 'I'm going to dictate the outcome of what's going to happen legislatively.' That is not a democracy; it's an atrocity.

Because the rich are generally few in number, while the poor are many, they appear to be antagonistic, and as the one or the other prevails they form the government. Hence arises the common opinion that there are two kinds of government - democracy and oligarchy.

The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.

If dictatorship is the concentration of power, freedom consists in its diffusion.

We need to change the power structure in America, we need to end the political oligarchy.

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

The only minority in America that's asking for integration is the so-called Negro, primarily because he is inferior, not inherently inferior, but he's economically, socially, politically inferior.