Penn Jillette Quotes

Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority.

Majority rule only works if you're also considering individual rights. Because you can't have five wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for supper.

Democracy is necessarily despotism, as it establishes an executive power contrary to the general will; all being able to decide against one whose opinion may differ, the will of all is therefore not that of all: which is contradictory and opposite to liberty.

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.”

The experience of the past one hundred and fifty years has revealed the danger that, through judicial interpretation, the constitutional device for the protection of minorities from oppressive majority action, may be made the means by which the majority is subject to the tyranny of the minority.

The rights to life, liberty and property were not meant to be subject to the vagaries of majority rule.

… by a free country I mean a country where people are allowed, so long as they do not hurt their neighbors, to do as they like. I do not mean a country where six men may make five men do exactly as they like. That is not my notion of freedom.

If I am part of a group of 100 people, do 99 people have the right to sentence me to death, just because they are majority?

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)

Democracy without respect for individual rights sucks. It's just ganging up against the weird kid, and I'm always the weird kid.

To say that majorities, as such, have a right to rule minorities, is equivalent to saying that minorities have, and ought to have, no rights, except such as majorities please to allow them.

Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.

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

'Democratic' in its original meaning refers to unlimited majority rule....a social system in which one's work, one's property, one's mind, and one's life are at the mercy of any gang that may muster the vote of a majority at any moment for any purpose

Minority rights are just as important as majority decisions.

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

The majority are not morally free to become a tyranny and destroy the rights of minorities.

If people by a plebiscite elect a man despot over them, do they remain free because the despotism was of their own making? Are the coercive edicts issued by him to be regarded as legitimate because they are the ultimate outcome of their own votes?

True republicanism is the sovereignty of the people. There are natural and imprescriptible rights which an entire nation has no right to violate

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

The majority is not society, is not everyone. Majority coercion over the minority is still coercion.

Democracy doesn't automatically safeguard women and minorities.

A Bill of Rights that means what the majority wants it to mean is worthless.

Nobody needs to justify why they "need" a right: the burden of justification falls on the one seeking to infringe upon the right. But even if they did, you can't give away the rights of others because they're not useful to you. More simply, the majority cannot vote away the natural rights of the minority. Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.