Democracy check up

Brought to you by some of the greatest thinkers in History
Here is a list of 20 quotes.
When you read these quotes how do you feel about the state of America today?


1. When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.
Plato

2. Democracy feeds on argument, on the discussion as to the right way forward. This is the reason why respecting the opinion of others belongs to democracy.
Richard von Weizsacker

3. The more corrupt the state, the numerous the laws.
Tacitus

4. The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.
Thomas Jefferson

5. When a nation's government becomes more fearful of its citizens' rights than protective of them, that nation's future is only despotism and extinction.
Unknown

6. Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom: it is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
William Pitt

7. A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular.
Adlai Ewing Stevenson

8. Those who suppress freedom always do so in the name of law and order.
John V. Lindsay


9. Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is thee
Ayn Rand


10. They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty or safety.
Benjamin Franklin

11. The more developed a nation is, the more complete is the independence of the individual, and the safer the individual from encroachments by another.
Dmitry Pisarev

12. Fifty-one percent of a nation can establish a totalitarian regime, suppress minorities and still remain democratic.
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

13. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.
Frederick Douglass

14. Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule--and both commonly succeed, and are right...
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)

15. A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.
Henry de Jouvenel

16. In a democracy, dissent is an act of faith.
J. William Fulbright

17. It is the besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which the masses of men exhibit their tyranny.
James Fenimore Cooper

18. Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death.
James Madison

19. 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

20. Any doctrine that weakens personal responsibility for judgment and for action helps create the attitudes that welcome and support the totalitarian state.
John Dewey


15.