Democracy: In which you say what you like and do what you're told.

We once worried that democracy could not survive if an undereducated populace knew too little. Now we worry if it can survive us knowing too much.

The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry.

When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong.

Nor is the people's judgment always true: the most may err as grossly as the few.

Everybody's for democracy in principle. It's only in practice that the thing gives rise to stiff objections.

The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population -- the intelligent ones or the fools? I think we can agree it's the fools, no matter where you go in this world, it's the fools that form the overwhelming majority.

Democracy without morality is impossible.

Chinks in America's egalitarian armor are not hard to find. Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.

Democracy means the opportunity to be everyone's slave.

Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions -- it only guarantees equality of opportunity.

This is one of the paradoxes of the democratic movement -- that it loves a crowd and fears the individuals who compose it -- that the religion of humanity should have no faith in human beings.

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.

The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.

There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship.

In a democracy everybody has a right to be represented, including the jerks.

Democracy is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequal alike.

Freedom without obligation is anarchy. Freedom without obligation is democracy.

Democracy is a political method, that is to say, a certain type of institutional arrangement for arriving at political -- legislative and administrative -- decisions and hence incapable of being an end in itself.

Democracy encourages the majority to decide things about which the majority is blissfully ignorant.

Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.

America is the place where you cannot kill your government by killing the men who conduct it.