Fisher Ames Quotes

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

Demagogues are the mob's lackeys.

A government by the passions of the multitude, or, no less correctly, according to the vices and ambitions of their leaders, is a democracy.

The primary social contract between the people of the United States and their government - quaint though it might seem to even mention it at this point - is that ours is to be a government 'of the people, by the people, for the people.'

We've got in the habit of not really understanding how freedom was in the 19th century, the idea of government of the people in the 19th century. America commits itself to that in theory.

Our supreme governors, the mob.

Where the laws are not supreme, there demagogues spring up .... The law ought to be supreme over all.

The government of the Union, then, ... is, emphatically, and truly, a government of the people. In form and in substance it emanates from them. Its powers are granted by them, and are to be exercised directly on them, and for their benefit.

A democratic society cannot tolerate mob rule.

Now we are going to have to be a government of men rather than a government of law.

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 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

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.

Ours is a fully democratic government, which in our language we call a people's government.

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

The framers hated the tyranny of King George, but they were also afraid of the mob. That's why they put so many checks and balances into our system, to guard against the excesses of a government that might be inflamed by public passion or perverted by a dictator's whim.

The greater the share the people have in government, the less liberty, civil or religious, does a nation enjoy.

Truth is suppressed, not to protect the country from enemy agents but to protect the Government of the day against the people.

What bitter anguish would not the people of Athens have often escaped if their government had contained so provident a safeguard against tyranny of their own passions? Popular liberty might then have escaped the indelible reproach of decreeing to the same citizens the hemlock on one day and statutes the next.

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. And nobody will ever say "Heil" to him, nor will they call him "Führer" or "Duce." But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of "O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!"

I have an intellectual inclination for democratic institutions, but I am instinctively an aristocrat, which means that I despise and fear the masses. I passionately love liberty, legality, the respect for rights, but not democracy....liberty is my foremost passion. That is the truth.

Lincoln's reference to government of the people, by the people, for the people is a generally satisfactory definition of democracy. I say generally because when it comes to fair and workable details, democracy fails to completely meet the criteria enunciated by Lincoln by a rather wide margin.

But there are some persons who wouldpersuade the people never to make use of their constitutional rights.

...any form of government that required the repression, imprisonment, and execution of those who disagreed with it was certainly not a government of the people.

Democracy cannot long survive when the people permit their lives to be dominated - economically or politically - by a powerful few.