Amy Chua Quotes

A community is democratic only when the humblest and weakest person can enjoy the highest civil, economic, and social rights that the biggest and most powerful possess.

A dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority.

Democracy in unequal agrarian societies tends not to last, as it alternates between populist demagogues attempting redistribution and the rich striking back with military coups.

Democracy is losing its followers. In our country everything is weakening. The money is weak. Democracy is weak and politicians are very weak. Everything that is weak dies one day.

Democratization is not necessarily the best way to fight Islamic extremism, because the transition to democracy has been found to be an especially vulnerable period for states across the board.

Democracy and elections can be a double-edged sword … democratic competition and elections increase the politicians’ appetite for gaining public support by pleasing the public, which is sometimes led by emotional motives and short-sighted considerations. Populist politics can sometimes be driven by a lack of knowledge and is not always conducive to the real interest …

Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide.

Oligarchy is to the advantage of the rich. Democracy to the advantage of the poor.

Our party’s always been the place you can come to wherever there’s injustice. That’s what the Democratic Party’s for. That’s why it was born. That’s why it survives. So the poor and the downtrodden and the bended can have a place to turn.

Successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies.

[Sometimes] the minorities are too respectable, not to be entitled to some sacrifice of opinion, in the majority.

Democracy has generally failed in Africa because to much power, too often, was concentrated in the hands of too few.

The Roman republic was indeed never finished. For the caprice of the multitude was left to operate at random. So that every popular demagogue had it in his power to spirit up the multitude to whatever pitch of madness might suit his ambitious, or interested views

… though the majority might be temporarily wrong, in the end, a majority that remained a majority over a period of years was usually right, and in our country, at least, we have been governed by the will of the majority. It has not meant, nor I surmise, does it mean in the present, the destruction of minorities …

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

In a capitalist democracy there are essentially two methods by which social choices can be made: voting, typically used to make ‘political’ decisions, and the market mechanism, typically used to make ‘economic’ decisions.

The Bush Administration went into the Middle East thinking it was spreading democracy. Instead they spread sectarianism.

This election is a critical juncture. We have to choose between being a Zionist and liberal nation, or turning into an ethnocentric, nationalist country. I am concerned about the direction in which this delicate democracy is heading.

You look at Egypt with American eyes. Democracy in your country has evolved over 200 years. Just give us a chance to develop. If we rush things, countries like ours will collapse.

In 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, there was a census of Jerusalem of which there is a cable copy in the British Foreign Office. There were 15,000 residents. Of those, 8,000, the majority were Jewish. After the Jews were ejected from the city when their Kingdom fell, the slowly began returning. And in 1863 they had become the majority, not in 1963 or any other time after the establishment of Israel.

Nobody in the American political establishment is happy about Mr. Trump’s wild-eyed accusations of voter fraud and media conspiracies because they understand that it undermines their own credibility as leaders in a democracy. This is exactly why my country’s leader, Vladimir V. Putin, is so delighted by Mr. Trump’s charges.as

Our democratic belief that anyone can be a political leader paradoxically feeds into the anti-democratic belief that we should look to one person to quickly and easily save us. No one, alone, can fix it, and in our system of government, this authoritarian approach is a prescription for catastrophe.

I would like to share with you my plan to destroy America…. I would invest in ethnic identity and victimology. I would get them to think that their lack of success was only the fault of the majority. I would start a grievance industry.

From populist demagogues, we will learn the indispensability of democracy. From isolationists, we will learn the need for global solidarity. And from tribalists, we will learn the beauty of cosmopolitanism.

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