To: koan who wrote (779399 ) 4/10/2014 7:56:01 PM From: average joe 1 RecommendationRecommended By steve harris
Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 1571855 Democracy is a bad idea... the Greeks knew it and so did the founders of the USA. The US was founded on the Greek Model. The success of a democracy demands the entire nation be citizen soldiers. The American system is not a democracy. It is a constitutional republic. A democracy, if you attach meaning to terms, is a system of unlimited majority rule . . . a form of collectivism, which denies individual rights . . . . The American system is a constitutionally limited republic, restricted to the protection of individual rights. In such a system, majority rule is applicable only to lesser details, such as the selection of certain personnel. But the majority has no say over the basic principles governing the government. It has no power to ask for or gain the infringement of individual rights.from the AYN RAND Lexicon The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. Winston Churchill It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried. Winston Churchill Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization. Winston Churchill If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in government to the utmost. Aristotle Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers. Aristotle In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme. Aristotle Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal. Aristotle Our country's founders cherished liberty, not democracy. Ron Paul Democracy... is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder; and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike. Plato Democracy passes into despotism. Plato An ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination. Voltaire Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty. Plato Tyranny naturally arises out of democracy. Plato The ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination. Voltaire Democracy is the road to socialism. Karl Marx Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. John Adams Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around. Gilbert K. Chesterton You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution. Gilbert K. Chesterton Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated. Gilbert K. Chesterton There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship. Ralph Nader A pure democracy is a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person. James Madison It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning. George Orwell In a democracy, the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority. Edmund Burke The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. Ayn Rand I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences. Walt Whitman Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor. James Russell Lowell