Rush Limbaugh Quotes

The United States is dangerously close to becoming a democracy instead of a republic.

We have a constitutional republic, not a democracy.

A republic and a democracy are pretty much identical, pretty much on every level.

It's precisely because America is not a democracy that we have survived! It's precisely because majority rule does have checks and balances on it. It's precisely because this is a representative republic that we have survived.

America is not a democracy. I think if your kids understood that - and most people don't. We are a representative republic. We're not a direct democracy.

Australians find the American political system lovable but odd.

The people participate in votes in their states to choose electors to elect the president, but the people don't elect the president. We are not a democracy; we are a democratic republic. We have a representation system of government.

Some have argued that the United States was designed to block majority rule; to be a 'republic, not a democracy.' This is ahistorical nonsense.

Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.

America has never been a pure democracy and majoritarianism has always been as much feared as monarchism.

Democracy, republics: What do these words signify?

When the body of the people is possessed of the supreme power, it is called a democracy.

In America you elect the electoral college and they select the President. In Russia, the people select the President directly. This is more democratic.

The American political system was created by a bunch of geniuses so that it could be run by a bunch of idiots.

America is essentially and radically a democracy, not in name merely but in deed.

The founding fathers set up this country as a republic—not a democracy.

In an autocracy, one person has his way; in an aristocracy a few people have their way; in a democracy no one has his way.

No error is more common than to confound democracy as an element in national character with democracy as a form of government.… Now the two are not only not identical, but they are not even necessarily coexistent. By the former we understand that spirit in a people which leads them to demand equality among citizens and a substantial control over their own affairs; by the latter, a system in which the people pronounce directly on all the details of government.

In America you've got a one party state except that you've got two of them.

Democracy -- rule by the people -- sounds like a fine thing; we should try it sometime in America.

At no time, at no place in solemn convention assembled, through no chosen agents, had the American people officially proclaimed the United States to be a democracy. The Constitution did not contain the word or any word lending countenance to it.

[O]ur sages in the great [constitutional] convention... intended our government should be a republic which differs more widely from a democracy than a democracy from a despotism. The rigours of a despotism often... oppress only a few, but it is the very essence and nature of a democracy, for a faction claiming to oppress a minority, and that minority the chief owners of the property and truest lovers of their country.

There are elements of democracy in votes here and there in America. But in the actual structure of the government, we're a representative republic.

In America, we do not have a democracy. It's not what we have. We have a representative republic and therefore the rules and regulations that have been written to maintain it are not truly democratic - not purely democratic - in origin. They are about protecting and defending the establishment of this republic.

The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter,to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens and greater sphere of country over which the latter may be extended.