Bill Kristol Quotes

Demagogues are the mob's lackeys.

Machiavelli had some cold tricks for people who wanted to be demagogues and wanted to take over the world.

The heights of popularity and patriotism are still the beaten road to power and tyranny.

In every age the vilest specimens of human nature are to be found among demagogues.

Demagoguery is not unknown in American history.

There's never been an era absent of demagogues.

What George W. Bush learned in his pre-presidential years - and what he omits in his new memoirs - was not how to lead a nation, but how, with sufficient toughness, to cheat the democratic system to get elected.

Tyranny naturally arises out of democracy.

A demagogue is a person with whom we disagree as to which gang should mismanage the country.

…a low and dangerous demagogue.

I hate to say it but I was glad when they shot him. I don’t believe in terrorism or assassination but he could have become the American dictator.

You can't be a dictator any more; anyone who tries to play the part of God will stumble.

The shortest way to ruin a country is to give power to demogogues.

You have to be a demagogue on a lot of little things if you want to be around to have your way on the big things.

Since men must always assign a cause to all their misfortunes, the generally blame them on the evil intent of their rulers; … As always there are now many who fish in troubled waters, filling the minds of the commonality with the notion that things will go from bad to worse unless they appoint a head over them.

in countries where the ability to read and write has been recently acquired or where the people have had no long experience in governing themselves on the basis of their own thinking, it is easy for demagogues to arise and prostitute the mind of the common man to their own base ends

The people always have some champion who they set over them and nurse into greatness …. This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears, he is a protector.

No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument — the Incorporated National Will. ... When our dictator turns up, you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American

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

Politics without responsibility IS fascism.

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.

You never discount a demagogue.

There's nothing to fear. I'm not a dictator.

What links Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Andrej Babis, Jaroslaw Kaczynski and Marine Le Pen is one simple character trait: hypocrisy. These politicians aren't tribunes of the people, they are hucksters. They aren't bitter enemies of the Western system; they are con artists who seek to profit from it.

Trump manipulates the fearful by promising that he will use his fraudulent deal-making prowess to protect and take care of his supporters.