Horace Mann Quotes

The difference between being out of step with a dictator and being out of step with the democratic majority is practically negligible. The important thing is to be in step.

When the people have no other tyrant, their own public opinion becomes one.

When majority is insane, sane must go to asylum.

But remember that the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority

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 worst enemy of truth and freedom in our society is the compact majority.

For me every ruler is alien that defies public opinion.

It is remarkable how easily children and grown-ups adapt to living in a dictatorship organised by lunatics.

Government, in which the majority rules in all things, cannot be based on justice.

What the multitude says is so, or soon will be.

Public opinion, a vulgar, impertinent, anonymous tyrant who deliberately makes life unpleasant for anyone who is not content to be the average man.

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 era of individualism, liberalism and democracy, of humanitarianism and freedom, is nearing its end. The masses will accept with resignation the victory of the Caesars, the strong men, and will obey them. Life will descend to a level of general uniformity, a new kind of primitivism, and the world will be better for it.....

If government is in the hands of the few, they will tyrannize the many; if in the hands of the many, they will tyrannize over the few. It ought to be in the hands of both, and they should be separated.... They will need a mutual check. This check is a monarch.

The dictatorship of the majority is a bugaboo which haunts the books of political theorists but has never been found in the flesh in modern history

A government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it.

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

Although every man in democracy thinks himself individually the equal of every other man, this makes it difficult to resist the collectivity of equal men. If all opinions are equal, then the majority of opinions, on the psychological analogy of politics, should hold sway.

The subjection of individuals will increase amongst democratic nations, not only in the same proportion as their equality, but in the same proportion as their ignorance.

[…] the underlying problem is the soft progressive totalitarianism that seeks to compel submission to its creed. A powerful cultural establishment, now reinforced by political dominion in Washington, won’t tolerate deviance. Instead of learning to live at peace with the reality of pluralism, the essence of a successful democracy, it demands concordance with all of its ever-changing strictures. It ascribes dissent not to honest disagreement, differing experiences, diverse intellectual traditions or the basic human instinct for autonomy, but to malice and ignorance.

The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity, since the tastes, knowledge, and principles of the majority form the tribunal of appeal.

It's characteristic of democracy that majority rule is understood as being effective not only in politics but also in thinking. In thinking, of course, the majority is always wrong.

most Americans are in deep awe of things-as-they-are. Even with everything this obviously out of control, they still tell themselves that those in authority must know what they are doing, and must be describing our condition to us as it really is; they still take it for granted that somehow what is, what is done, must make sense, can't really be insane. These assumptions exercise a tyranny over their minds.

The only distinction that democracies reward is a high degree of conformity.

We are against the majority tyrannizing the minority. But we are definitely against the minority tyrannizing the majority.