Mahatma Gandhi Quotes

The majority is not society, is not everyone. Majority coercion over the minority is still coercion.

Shall we judge a country by the majority, or the minority? By the minority, surely.

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

The majority never has right on its side.

[We] must come to understand what it means to be a member of the minority or other small partner people, and to be ready to give that minority assurances which are necessary for a majority..

So long as a minority conforms to the majority, it is not even a minority.

Bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.

A democracy is a state which recognizes the subjection of the minority to the majority, that is, an organization for the systematic use of violence by one class against the other, by one part of the population against another.

Sometimes great injustices may be inflicted on the minority when the majority is in the pursuit of a great and just cause.

While Zinoviev is in the majority he is for iron discipline.... When he is in the minority... he is against it.

… the most powerful party must happily accept and hear the opinions of the weakest

All those who defend freedom are bound as their first duty to be the champions of minorities, and the danger of allowing the majority, which holds the power of the State, to interfere at its will is that the interests of the minority will be disregarded and crushed out under the omnipotent force of a popular vote

The voice of the majority is no proof of justice.

The minority yields to the majority!

Our Constitution does not profess to have been established simply by the majority, but by 'the people' - the minority as much as the majority.

To say that majorities, as such, have a right to rule minorities, is equivalent to saying that minorities have, and ought to have, no rights, except such as majorities please to allow them.

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.

It is the safeguard of the strongest that he lives under a government which is obliged to respect the voice of the weakest.

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

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.

Better be wrong with the many than right with the few.

Minorities…are almost always in the right.

If a democracy is to remain real and stable, the majority must be humane and farsighted enough to take care of minorities who have serious objections to the majorities point of view and who, because of lack of numbers, do not have the political strength to impose their own policy solutions through their own political power.

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

The Supreme Court is the living voice of the Constitution—that is, of the will of the people expressed in the fundamental law they have enacted. It is ... the conscience of the people.... It is the guarantee of the minority who, when threatened by the impatient vehemence of the majority, can appeal to this permanent law, finding the interpreter and enforcer thereof in a Court set high above the assaults of faction.