Rush Limbaugh Quotes

Democracy is something America has never really practiced. Because the Founding Fathers hated two things: monarchy and democracy. They wanted a republic, a replica of the Roman or Venetian republics. They didn't even like the etymology of the word "democracy."

There's a big difference in a representative republic and a democracy. We do not have a democracy in America.

America is not a democracy. I think if your kids understood that - and most people don't. We are a representative republic. We're not a direct democracy.

Democracy, which has flourished even in the polluted soil of Europe, would certainly thrive in the virgin soil of America. Here there is no real element of aristocracy, nothing but a sorry caricature. There are not then, my dear general, elements of monarchy in this land of God. Let a republic be formed here and dignity will grow in men... A monarchy established here would be of short duration, for an idea, once implanted in the people, is impossible to extinguish; and the idea of democracy has been firmly rooted here during twelve years of glorious struggle

There are elements of democracy in votes here and there in America. But in the actual structure of the government, we're a representative republic.

I think it's a great shame that America stopped being a republic and became an empire.

We're not a democracy.

Now one of two things is true: Either a republic is a desirable form of government, or else it is not.

The American political system was created by a bunch of geniuses so that it could be run by a bunch of idiots.

Why may not a Republic of Letters be realized in America as well as a Republican Government?

America is essentially and radically a democracy, not in name merely but in deed.

A republic is little better than a government of devils

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.

With all its faults, the American political system is probably the best political system in the world.

Australians find the American political system lovable but odd.

In America you've got a one party state except that you've got two of them.

In America, the people govern.

Israel is not an anarchy.

Democracy -- rule by the people -- sounds like a fine thing; we should try it sometime in America.

Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today. One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages.

America has never been a pure democracy and majoritarianism has always been as much feared as monarchism.

A nation can be one or the other, a democracy or an imperialist, but it can't be both. If it sticks to imperialism, it will, like the old Roman Republic, on which so much of our system was modeled, like the old Roman Republic, it will lose its democracy to a domestic dictatorship.

REPUBLIC, n. A nation in which, the thing governing and the thing governed being the same, there is only a permitted authority to enforce an optional obedience.

American democracy is supposed to be the paradigm for the rest of the world.

It's precisely because America is not a democracy that we have survived! It's precisely because majority rule does have checks and balances on it. It's precisely because this is a representative republic that we have survived.