Martin Amis Quotes
It's an ancient idea that the leader of a democracy should not be the cleverest but the most average. That's an arguable point, but the world has decided otherwise - except in America, where it still divides the country right down the middle.
Amis, Martin. The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump. Essays and Reportage, 1986-2016. Jonathan Cape, 2017.
Faction was the word Madison used for Political Party.
As a member of the electoral college, he refused to vote for Richard M. Nixon who had won the North Carolina vote. Extremist fundamentalists often oppose democracy in favor of republicanism. A major distinction for them is in the republic, there is not direct
Although it had conservative and progressive support, there was opposition in the middle and the vote failed in the House 188 to 209. See Hamilton Fish for the amendment text.
This was much more the case in 1840 when this quotation was written. Since then, a much higher proportion of American society has become educated, and the cultures that American immigrants have come from had multiplied. Publications abounded and after radio and television there were more attacks on American majority positions. The major change came with radio call in talk shows, similar TV shows and then the Internet provided a painless way to publicly go against majority opinion. By the first decade of the 21st century, movements of majority rejectionists such as the Tea Party and the Occupy Movement were thriving and “futile contests” received much public attention and showed that there were others with the non-majority views who made it socially acceptable to be outside the norms of the majority.
See 358821 for another expression of this idea.
Martin Louis Amis is a British novelist, essayist, memoirist, and screenwriter. He is best known for his novels Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). He received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience and has been listed for the Booker Prize twice (shortlisted in 1991 for Time's Arrow and longlisted in 2003 for Yellow Dog). Amis served as the Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester until 2011. In 2008, The Times named him one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
