Randal Marlin Quotes

The House Rules Committee is perhaps the free world's outstanding bureaucratic abomination - a tiny, airless closet deep in the labyrinth of the Capitol where some of the very meanest people on earth spend their days cleaning democracy like a fish.

The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.

We, unlike Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy, have never stopped being a nation of laws, not of men. But witness how men with motives and a majority can manipulate law to cruel and unjust ends.

dangerous demagogue corrupt pervert, prostitute, debauch cursed.

But a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their oppressors in Church and State

There can hardly be a more grave act imaginable than to dupe a democracy into going to war, but this is what Bush has done.

Demagogues are the mob's lackeys.

I consider it a great homage to public opinion to find every scoundrel nowadays professing himself a liberal.

What does democracy come down to? The persuasive power of slogans invented by wily self-seeking politicians.

We have a Sunday code and a weekday code. We preach good and practice evil. We clothe the wolf of our actions in the sheep's clothing of our beautiful phrases.

The designing Party-Man always appears in the Mask of publick Spirit, and conceals the most selfish and riotous Disposition, under the venerable Pretext of asserting Liberty, and defending his Country

Every stupid policeman, fanatical judge, or moralist for revenue, can successfully abridge freedom of speech by the lawless use of power, and the hysterical mob of pretending lovers of liberty and democracy will stand by an applaud, --so low have we fallen since our American Constitutions were written. We see how the very essence of tyranny thrives under the forms of democracy

in countries where the ability to read and write has been recently acquired or where the people have had no long experience in governing themselves on the basis of their own thinking, it is easy for demagogues to arise and prostitute the mind of the common man to their own base ends

A government by the passions of the multitude, or, no less correctly, according to the vices and ambitions of their leaders, is a democracy.

It is when it is contended that in a democracy right is what the majority makes it to be that democracy degenerates into demagoguery.

Party politics in modern democratic society means pandering to a wide variety of different groups and sympathizing with their often quite base motives, such as revenge, power, booty, and spoils, to maintain the necessary level of support.

Democracy does not seem to render the world more peaceful. The masses are emotional by nature, skilled propaganda will always succeed in arousing their feelings.

The populist left loves power more than democracy, and it will fight to keep it at great cost.

A man compounded of law and gospel is able to cheat a whole country with his religion and then destroy them under color of law.

The idea that democracies could be vulnerable to demagogues is not a new notion.

What links Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Andrej Babis, Jaroslaw Kaczynski and Marine Le Pen is one simple character trait: hypocrisy. These politicians aren't tribunes of the people, they are hucksters. They aren't bitter enemies of the Western system; they are con artists who seek to profit from it.

The people as a body cannot deliberate. Nevertheless, they will feel an irresistible impulse to act, and their resolutions will be dictated to them by their demagogues... and the violent men, who are the most forward to gratify those passions, will be their favorites. What is called the government of the people is in fact too often the arbitrary power of such men. Here, then, we have the faithful portrait of democracy.

It's when people begin using their religion as just a way of getting power over other people that scares me. I'm afraid that's what's going on in a lot of cases right now. When people deliberately tell lies, Creationism for instance, and pretend, "Oh, it's not really religion." I mean they know they're lying, and yet they're the religious people. There's something wrong there.

By playing down to the idea of the common man, dogmatic political authority exploits him... So the ideal of innate aristocracy of which hour forefathers dreamed is betrayed for votes in the name of democracy.

...the West has its share of liars and poseurs, the ablest of whom congregate in government.