Tyranny Of The Majority Quotes

Democratic forms of government are vulnerable to mass prejudice, the so-called tyranny of the majority. ~ Maggie Gallagher

Yet in his own estimate, one theme in particular dominated all others: the growing tyranny of the majority, the ever-increasing and most formidable barriers raised by the majority around the free expression of opinion, and, as a result, the frightening oneness of American thinking, the absence of eccentricity and divergence from the norm.

A perfect liberty of the Mind exists in America, said Tocqueville, just as long as the sovereign majority has yet to decide its course. But once the majority has made up its mind, then all contrary thought must cease, and all controversy must be abandoned, not at the risk of death or physical punishment, but rather at the more subtle and more intolerable pain of ostracism, of being shunned by one's fellows, of being rejected by society.

Throughout history kings and princely rulers had sought without success to control human thought, that most elusive and invisible power of all. Yet where absolute monarchs had failed, democracy succeeds, for the strength of the majority is unlimited and all pervasive, and the doctrines of equality and majority rule have substituted for the tyranny of the few over the many the more absolute, imperious and widely accepted tyranny of the many over the few. ~ Richard D. Heffner

It is always a fashion to advise disputants to sit round a table and solve disputes by dialogue and discussion, and not to resort to violent confrontation and wars. Whether in national disputes or in international conflicts parties are being constantly advised to avoid wars and to negotiate, while governments continue to oppress, persecute, and even commit genocide.

No doubt, it is a very salutary advice and a noble ideal, quite often well-meaning, too. Nobody fights a war for the pleasure of it. But the trouble is, it has never been pragmatic ideal, and never will be so long as governments being what they are and the tyranny of the majority and armed might being the ruling principle of democracy…The weaker is left to its own devices to shake off tyranny and oppression.

If the weaker side listened to this idealistic advice and waited till the end of time for a solution to its problems there would have been no wars of independence. If the American colonies of George III's England listened to such advice and continued to be governed by England and to pay taxes to England without representation in the Parliament at Westminster, there would have been no American War of Independence, no American Declaration of Independence, and there would be no United States of America today…" (pp.279-280) ~ V. Navaratnam

The will of the people, moreover, practically means the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people; the majority, or those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority; type people, consequently, may desire to oppress a part of their number; and precautions are as much needed against this as against any other abuse of power. ~ John Stuart Mill

Of course, the aim of a constitutional democracy is to safeguard the rights of the minority and avoid the tyranny of the majority. (p. 102) ~ Cornel West

I do not believe in the unlimited power of the majority,because tyranny of the majority is tyranny like any other. ~ Alija Izetbegovic

We celebrate the beauty and reason of the individual, and resist the coercion of the state and the tyranny of the majority. We laugh and cry about the bullshit 'liberal' and 'conservative' pigeonholes that people throw themselves into. They think we favor violence, but I've been taught how to fight, and you'll probably never find anyone less likely to harm a living creature. ~ Robert Peate

Necessary connections are fabulous beasts. ~ Angela Carter

[The Bill of Rights is] designed to protect individuals and minorities against the tyranny of the majority, but it's also designed to protect the people against bureaucracy, against the government. ~ Laurence Tribe

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. ~ John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

Democracy was a terrifying concept for the old world of Europe, and even the new world of North America, where income inequality was rife. The finest minds of the nineteenth century warned against giving the vote to the workingman, for fear of mob rule or the tyranny of the majority. ~ George Megalogenis

Though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Democracy, which began by liberating man politically, has developed a dangerous tendency to enslave him through the tyranny of majorities and the deadly power of their opinion. ~ Ludwig Lewisohn

Of all tyrannies a country can suffer, the worst is the tyranny of the majority. ~ William Inge

Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. ~ John Paul Stevens

The institution known as "school" isn't just a facility for doing classwork. It's essentially a microcosm of society, all of humanity put together in a little diorama. Bully exists in schools because war and conflict exist in the world, and school castes reflect our stratified, hierarchical society. Living in a democracy, the tyranny of the majority naturally applies at school, too. The majority -- that is to say, the people with the most friends -- are superior. ~ Wataru Watari

In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature. ~ James Madison

The vast majority of the American people are hard-working taxpayers who take responsibility for their families, go to work every day, they pay their mortgage on time, they volunteer in their community. ~ Marco Rubio

Diverting resources into uneconomic uses takes them away from other, more productive areas and costs jobs. Some jobs are lost; others are never created. The uneconomic effects of protectionism benefit a few - usually well-to-do - at the expense of the great majority, including the poor. Protectionism cannot be justified on economic or moral grounds. As Frederic Bastiat wrote, tariffs are "legalized plunder." The law is used to steal. By ~ Ludwig Von Mises

The amount of knowledge which we can justify from evidence directly available to us can never be large. The overwhelming proportion of our factual beliefs continue therefore to be held at second hand through trusting others, and in the great majority of cases our trust is placed in the authority of comparatively few people of widely acknowledged standing. ~ Michael Polanyi

The factual reality is that the vast majority of immigrants - legal and illegal - contribute more to this country than they take out in social services. ~ Juan Williams

What is democracy? If it is the rule of the majority, ignoring the rest, then it is not good, it is very bad! But if it is the rule of the whole citizens, caring the wills of both the majority and the rest, then it is good, then it is real democracy! And the purpose of every real democracy is to be a modern country, to be a modern structure! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Law of Suspects. Suspects are those: who have in any way aided tyranny (royal tyranny, Brissotin tyranny ... ); who cannot show that they have performed their civic duties; who do not starve, and yet have no visible means of support; who have been refused certificates of citizenship by their Sections; who have been removed from public office by the Convention or its representatives; who belong to an aristocratic family, and have not given proof of constant and extraordinary revolutionary fervor; or who have emigrated. ~ Hilary Mantel

Knowledge is power. Information is power. The secreting or hoarding of knowledge or information may be an act of tyranny camouflaged as humility. ~ Robin Morgan

The vast majority is in an incredible state of mental sleep. People are not living, they are wasting their whole life. They don't even know where to put their attention, what to follow, which values to treasure... they have no ambitions, just crazy dreams that they block in themselves from working for... people are really in a mess. ~ Robin Sacredfire

A majority of women seem to consider themselves sent into the world for the sole purpose of displaying dry goods, and it is only when acting the part of an animated milliner's block that they feel they are performing their appropriate mission. ~ Abba Louisa Goold Woolson

Singapore's tragedy is not the absence of idealism, but that it systematically rewards the individualistic majority and discourages the socially-conscious minority. This is at odds with Singapore's self-image as a communitarian Asian society, an image conjured up largely to justify the protection of family values and paternalistic government. In truth, the overwhelming ethos is to mind your own business. Singapore's embrace of the market forces - based on the PAP's clear appreciation of the fact that people's desire to live in comfort is the most powerful force for civilisation's progress - has provided rich incentives for Singaporeans to work hard, and create wealth. But its exercise of illiberal controls to maintain ownership of the public sphere adds up to a heavy tax on thinking socially and acting politically. The public has been privatised. ~ Cherian George

The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. it is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists. ~ G.K. Chesterton

It so happens, in Malaysia, the people who are in a way not doing as well constitute the majority of the people - the Bumiputeras. ~ Najib Razak

We long ago ceased expecting that a President speak his own words. We no longer expect him actually to know the answers to questions put to him. We have, in effect, come to elect newscasters-and by a similar process: not for their probity or for their intelligence, but for their "believability."

"Hope" is a very different exhortation than, for example, save, work, cooperate, sacrifice, think. It means: "Hope for the best, in a process over which you have no control." For, if one had control, if one could endorse a candidate with actual, rational programs, such a candidate demonstrably possessed of character and ability sufficient to offer reasonable chance of carrying these programs out, we might require patience or understanding, but why would we need hope?

We have seen the triumph of advertising's bluntest and most ancient tool, the unquantifiable assertion: "New" in what way? "Improved" how? "Better" than what? "Change" what in particular? "Hope" for what?

These words, seemingly of broad but actually of no particular meaning, are comforting in a way similar to the self-crafted wedding ceremony.

Whether or not a spouse is "respecting the other's space," is a matter of debate; whether or not he is being unfaithful is a matter of discernible fact. The author of his own marriage vows is like the supporter of the subjective assertion. He is voting for codependence. He neither makes nor requires an actual commitment. He'd simply like t ~ David Mamet

The sad fact is that the vast majority of drunks stay drunks. There's a small minority of us who reach that fork in the road where one side says 'live' and the other says 'drink'. ~ John Larroquette

If your heart and your honest body can be controlled by the state, or controlled by community taboo, are you not then, and in that case, no more than a slave ruled by outside force? What tyranny could exceed a tyranny that dictates to the human heart, and that attempts to dictate the public career of an honest human body? ~ June Jordan

Down the pool they went until finally they were bunched and crowded against the end. And the feet and wildly plunging bodies followed them. A few frogs lost their heads and floundered among the feet and got through and these were saved. But the majority decided to leave this pool forever, to find a new home in a new country where this kind of thing didn't happen. A wave of frantic, frustrated frogs, big ones, little ones, brown ones, green ones, men frogs and women frogs, a wave of them broke over the bank, crawled, leaped, scrambled. They clambered up the grass, they dutched at each other, little ones rode on big ones, And then - horror on horror - the flashlights found them. Two men gathered them like berries. The line came out of the water and closed in on their rear and gathered them like potatoes. Tens and fifties of them were flung into the gunny sacks, and the sacks filled with tired, frightened, and disillusioned frogs, with dripping whimpering frogs. Some got away, of course, and some had been saved in the pool. But never in frog history had such an execution taken place. ~ John Steinbeck

The Allied governments, for example, with the British as executors, maintained in place the food blockade of Germany that had been in effect since 1917. A British authority would note that "in the last two years of the war, nearly 800,000 noncombatants died in Germany from starvation or diseases attributed to undernourishment. The biggest mortality was among children between the ages of 5 and 1 5, where the death rate increased by 55 percent. . . a whole generation [the one which had been born and lived during Hitler's rise to power] grew up in an epoch of undernourishment and misery such as we [British] have never in this country experienced."3 A distinguished American authority on United States foreign policy in the first half of the twentieth century, Stanford University professor Thomas A. Bailey, noted that "the Allied slow starvation of Germany's civilian population was quiet, unspectacular, and censored."4 The Englishman Gilbert Murray, writing in 1933, noted that future historians would probably regard the establishment and continuation of the blockade as one of those many acts of almost incredible inhumanity which made World War I conspicuous in history.
-- Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 122 ~ Russel H.S. Stolfi

Washington is dead! This great man fought against Tyranny; he established the liberty of his country. His memory will always be dear to the French people, as it will be to all free men of the two worlds; and especially to French soldiers, who, like him and the American soldiers, have combated for liberty and equality. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

The majority of our relationship took place over the phone, saving me tons of calories in unswallowed semen. ~ Jenny Mollen

Doubts raced through my mind as I considered the feasibility of enforcing a law which the majority of honest citizens didn't seem to want. ~ Eliot Ness

Dialectic concepts can permit the existence of UFOs and other life-forms... Even if these reports of flying saucers are fantasies, as is possible that the majority may be, many of them, their historical basis is correct… the scientific capacity of human beings is determined by their social organisation... The answers to these mysteries would lie in a study of Marxism." From Les Soucoupes Volantes (Flying Saucers) ~ Juan R. Posadas

Most people spend the majority of their lives in fear, focused on themselves, casting everyone around them as bad guys. They almost can't help it, because it happens subconsciously and they don't know any other way to be. When you understand that most human behavior is driven by fear, you will understand why people hurt or offend you. You will understand it isn't about you at all. Their bad behavior is caused by their fear of failure and loss. ~ Kimberly Giles

Things weren't always as good as they are now. In school we learned that in the old days, the dark days, people didn't realize how deadly a disease love was.
For a long time they even viewed it as a good thing, something to be celebrated and pursued. Of course that's one of the reasons it's so dangerous: It affects your mind so that you cannot think clearly, or make rational decisions about your own well-being. (That's symptom number twelve, listed in the amor deliria nervosa section of the twelfth edition of The Safety, Health, and Happiness Handbook, or The Book of Shhh, as we call it.) Instead people back then named other diseases - stress, heart disease, anxiety, depression, hypertension, insomnia, bipolar disorder - never realizing that these were, in fact, only symptoms that in the majority of cases could be traced back to the effects of amor deliria nervosa. ~ Lauren Oliver

(Why flowers are so important to the main character)
I need the reminder that God loves to make detailed and beautiful things, and that act of creation is itself a sufficient reason to make them. These flowers will live and die here, the majority of them never seen, even though a busy road is less than a mile away. ~ Dee Henderson

Mother India has 250 crore arms, majority of which are of the youth, who have the capacity to fulfil India's dreams! ~ Narendra Modi

In the lower classes the school master does not work for the parent, but against the parent. Modern education meanshanding down the customs of the minority, and rooting out the customs of the majority. ~ G.K. Chesterton

And what has come to prevail in democracies is the very reverse of beneficial, in those, that is, which are regarded as the most democratically run. The reason for this lies in the failure properly to define liberty. For there are two marks by which democracy is thought to be defined: "sovereignty of the majority" and "liberty." "Just" is equated with what is equal, and the decision of the majority as to what is equal is regarded as sovereign; and liberty is seen in terms of doing what one wants. ~ Aristotle.

The thing we have to fear in this country, to my way of thinking, is the influence of the organized minorities, because somehow or other the great majority does not seem to organize. They seem to feel that they are going to be effective because of their own strength, but they give no expression of it. ~ Al Smith

78. - The love of justice is simply in the majority of men the fear of suffering injustice. ~ Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Whoever compels you to go one mile, go with him two." Matthew 5:41 Our Lord's teaching can be summed up in this: the relationship that He demands for us is an impossible one unless He has done a supernatural work in us. Jesus Christ demands that His disciple does not allow even the slightest trace of resentment in his heart when faced with tyranny and injustice. ~ Oswald Chambers

I find it quite intriguing that the one observing me as different, immediately assumes that there's something wrong with me, but never, not even for one instant, questions the possibility of the opposite. It's truly amazing that the ones with more certainties, the most arrogant and the most selfish, are indeed the most stupid inside society. They are so dumb and ignorant that they can't see a writer in front of their nose. And the more the writer types, talks and thinks, the more they think that this separation, this difference, grants them some form of superiority. Indeed, the light pushes demons into hell. The brighter your light, the faster you differentiate others. The way of the light was never meant for the weak, which are a majority. And this majority will always ignore the light, as demons fearing and hating angels. And so, it's interesting that without artists God would not have a way to reach the world. And yet, without the ignorant, Satan wouldn't have a way to stop God. ~ Robin Sacredfire

I divide the world into three Classes - The few who make things happen, the many who watch things happen, the overwhelming majority who have no notion of what happens. ~ Nicholas Murray Butler

A new governing majority will depend on two breakthroughs. The first is that voters, not big money, once again determine election outcomes. We need to break out of the money-politics-media trap. The second is that government be able to translate increased revenues into effective public services and infrastructure. We need, in short, a return to civic virtue, in which Americans recommit to contributing to the common benefit and to cooperating for mutual gain. ~ Jeffrey D. Sachs

The days of using my name as a pejorative are now over. The right wing turned me into an accidental spokesperson for the liberal, majority agenda. ~ Michael Moore

In case it has slipped your notice, the vast majority of your education has emphasized survival and not getting caught."
"I'd say you talked more about the code than anything else," Tory pointed out.
"What did you think I meant by survival," Ivan countered. ~ Drew Hayes

The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion. ~ George Steiner

It is manifestly contrary to the law of nature, however defined, that a handful of people should gorge themselves with superfluities while the hungry majority goes in need of necessities. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

We are a constitutional monarchy. I don't order laws, I propose them. Article 35 of our constitution states that the king can only refuse a law of parliament once, then he has to sign it - if the same law is then supported by a two-thirds majority in both houses of parliament. ~ Hamad Bin Isa Al Khalifa

Man is so wretched that, while directing all his conduct towards satisfying his passions, he constantly moans about their tyranny: he cannot bear their violence, nor the violence he must use against himself in order to free himself from their yoke; he finds them disgusting, but so too their remedies, and he cannot come to terms with the pain of his illness, nor with the labour necessary for a cure. ~ Francois De La Rochefoucauld

What you need to do is protect the structures and dynamics that are helping the people choose. The only thing that we can do is to respect the will of the people when it comes to majority processes. It is not for us to impose a model, it is not for us to impose answers to some critical questions. ~ Tariq Ramadan

It's precisely on the Internet that the majority of the writing is terribly bad and uninteresting. ~ Peter Greenaway

The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle. ~ Eric Hoffer

According to the prevailing mythology, to be younger is to be better; therefore, we should expect to find young people in the majority of those who reflect high well-being ... In fact, the one finding that registered more consistently and emphatically than any other in the course of my research was this: Older is better. ~ Gail Sheehy