Gavin Newsom Quotes

Democracy is not the law of the majority but the protection of the minority.

If there is liberty, if there is democracy, in this country, it will stand or fall with the right of the minority to express to the full force of language its opposition in public to the policies of the government. And it will stand or fall with the courage of the minority so to express itself.

You can't put civil rights on the ballot.

The right of a minority is so important in a democracy.

And that is my definition of democracy, the right to be in a minority and not be suppressed.

If our fathers, in 1776, had acknowledged the principle that a majority had the right to rule the minority, we should never have become a nation; for they were in a small minority, as compared with those who claimed the right to rule over them.

All those who defend freedom are bound as their first duty to be the champions of minorities, and the danger of allowing the majority, which holds the power of the State, to interfere at its will is that the interests of the minority will be disregarded and crushed out under the omnipotent force of a popular vote

Of course, the aim of a constitutional democracy is to safeguard the rights of the minority and avoid the tyranny of the majority. (p. 102)

Minorities have a right to appeal to the Constitution as a shield against such oppression.

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.

The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

One great object of the Constitution was to restrain majorities from oppressing minorities or encroaching upon their just rights.

When you put a tiny and despised minority up for a popular vote, the minority usually loses.

The very purpose of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution is to protect minority rights against majority voters. Every court decision that strikes down discriminatory legislation, including past Supreme Court decisions, affirming the fundamental rights to marry the person you love, overrules a majority decision.

It’s very basic in the Bill of Rights, he says. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, whether the majority agrees with them or not. Rights are in some sense anti-democratic; to trumpet democracy as the all-important value is to denigrate them.”

Minority rights are just as important as majority decisions.

The USA was founded in the name of democracy, equality and individual freedom, but is failing to deliver the fundamental promise of protecting rights for all.

A radical ... and revolutionary ... attack upon the fundamental basic principle of representative democracy for free people.

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

The notion that a person's constitutional rights may be subject to a majority vote is itself anathema.

A man may be voted a bore or shunned as a pest, and yet he must be accorded the rights to which he is entitled by virtue of being a representative of the people.

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

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.

If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure.

Liberty resides in the rights of those people whose views we find most odious.