Tyranny of the Majority Quotes

I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.

I warn against the tyranny of the majority of the people with good table manners.

Democracy... while it lasts is more bloody than either aristocracy or monarchy. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide.

Better a hundred years of tyranny than one day of anarchy.

'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

Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism.

The greatest threat to our freedom is an all powerful federal government.

It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.

Which is better, to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away, or by three thousand tyrants not a mile away?

The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.

Why independence, if the slaves of today will be the tyrants of tomorrow?

If a free society is ever destroyed in America, it will be done in the name of one particular vision of liberty and freedom.

Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.

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.

I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty, or civilization, or both….

The majority of the stupid is invincible and guaranteed for all time. The terror of their tyranny, however, is alleviated by their lack of consistency.

A democracy, when put to the strain, grows weak; and it is supplanted by oligarchy [rule by the few].

The public must be put in its place...so that each of us can live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.

Witness the tragic condition of Russia. The methods of State centralization have paralyzed individual initiative and effort; the tyranny of the dictatorship has cowed the people into slavish submission and all but extinguished the fires of liberty; organized terrorism has depraved and brutalized the masses and stifled every idealistic aspiration; institutionalized murder has cheapened human life, and all sense of the dignity of man and the value of life has been eliminated; coercion at every step has made effort bitter, labor a punishment, has turned the whole of existence into a scheme of mutual deceit, and has revived the lowest and most brutal instincts of man.

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

51 percent of the people should not always get 100% of the power; 51 percent of the people should certainly not get all the power if they use that power to exclude the 49%. In that case, we do not have majority rule. We have majority tyranny.

The Government of the absolute majority instead of the Government of the people is but the Government of the strongest interests; and when not efficiently checked, it is the most tyrannical and oppressive that can be devised

The right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible..

Let the filibuster be no more. Let the people decide.

The Founding Fathers worried that 'some common impulse of passion' might lead many to subvert the rights of the few. It's a rational fear, one that is played out endlessly.