Anthony Beilenson Quotes

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

A majority can do anything.

We [Congress] are proving inadequate not only to our most difficult problems but also to routine duties. Our national political campaigns never stop. We seem convinced that majorities exist to impose their will with few concessions and that minorities exist to prevent the party in power from doing anything important. […] That’s not how we were meant to govern. Our entire system of government — with its checks and balances, its bicameral Congress, its protections of the rights of the minority — was designed for compromise.

The minority yields to the majority!

If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure.

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.

Eliminating the filibuster would eliminate the people’s voices in the Senate.

That’s one difficulty about a democracy. Nothing ever gets decided—even after its been decided.

Majoritarian is when a majority takes a decision. It is not dictatorship. It is about which issue is major.

The minority must bow to the majority.

The argument most commonly made in the filibuster's favor is crudely partisan: 'Our side may be in the majority now, but someday it will be in the minority, and when that happens we'll want to block the other side's extremist agenda.'

The debates of that great assembly are frequently vague and perplexed, seeming to be dragged rather than to march, to the intended goal. Something of this sort must, I think, always happen in public democratic assemblies.

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.

If the minority is able to successfully undo the Affordable Care Act by blackmail, it will be the undoing of the democratic nature of our government.

We shouldn't deny the right of the minority to filibuster, but we need to do a much better job of making them own it. That way, the American people could figure out who is being obstructionist and who is willing to compromise.

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.

A pure democracy can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party

Logically, in a society ostensibly grounded on representative government, it would seem reasonable that a majority of the people in a State would elect a majority of that State’s legislators.

Democracy—the essential thing as distinguished from this or that democratic government—was primarily an attitude of mind, a spiritual testament, and not an economic structure or a political machine. The testament involved certain basic beliefs—that the personality was sacrosanct, which was the meaning of liberty; that policy should be settled by free discussion; that normally a minority should be ready to yield to a majority, which in turn should respect a minority’s sacred things.

'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.

Majority rule is not the norm for solving issues or problems.

At times those who won, 51 percent of the population claim the right to ride roughshod over the other 49 percent.

The majority are not morally free to become a tyranny and destroy the rights of minorities.

[Describing how Congress functions:] ... the way the Founding Fathers intended—not very well. They understood that if you move too quickly, our democracy will be less responsible to the majority.