Eleanor Roosevelt Quotes

A democratic government must always be left free to be operated upon by the will of the majority of the time being. All that the government of the day can do is to ascertain what now appears to be the best principle.

The majority prevails in a democracy, eventually.

We must reflect more on what democracy in the exercise of authority would mean. Is truth determined by a majority vote, only for a new 'truth' to be 'discovered' by a new majority tomorrow?

The theory of democratic government is not that the will of the people is always right, but rather that normal human beings of average intelligence will, if given a chance, learn the right and best course by bitter experience.

Notwithstanding the oppression and injustice experienced among us from democracy, the genius of the people is in favor of it, and the genius of the people must be consulted.

In the United States, where the numerical majority have long been in full possession of collective despotism, they would probably be as unwilling to part with it as a single despot or an aristocracy.

The majority of people wherever found ought in all questions to govern the minority.

Does history record any case in which the majority was right?

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.

The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity.

Democracy is nothing but the Tyranny of Majorities, the most abominable tyranny of all, for it is not based on the authority of a religion, not upon the nobility of a race, not on the merits of talents and of riches. It merely rests upon numbers and hides behind the name of the people.

'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

A democrat need not believe that the majority will always reach a wise decision. He should however believe in the necessity of accepting the decision of the majority, be it wise or unwise, until such a time that the majority reaches another decision.

Neither current events nor history shows that the majority rules, or ever did rule.

The evils of popular government appear greater than they are; there is compensation for them in the spirit and energy it awakens.

In our Governments, the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from the acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents.

Under universal suffrage the elected are those who know best how to take in the masses. The minority, which may happen to be the half minus one, is sacrificed.

What are the maxims of democracy?... A strict observance of justice and public faith, and a steady adherence to virtue.

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

This... [is] a country where the will of the majority is the law, and ought to be the law

In a democracy, you must follow the will of the majority, which may be right or wrong, moral or immoral, just or unjust. If that's the ruling of the majority that is what you should follow, respect, and obey — although you may continue to disagree with it.

Parliamentary government is simply a mild and disguised form of compulsion. We agree to try strength by counting heads instead of breaking heads, but the principle is exactly the same... The minority gives way not because it is convinced that it is wrong, but because it is convinced that it is a minority.

The ballot box is a license to govern, not a mandate to rule.

People mistake majoritarianism for democracy.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere.