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Posted on 11/14/2007 6:46:12 AM PST by Loud Mime
“It had been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience had proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.”
Alexander Hamilton June 21, 1788
“The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians.”
British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli -1850
“The adoption of Democracy as a form of Government by all European nations is fatal to good Government, to liberty, to law and order, to respect for authority, and to religion, and must eventually produce a state of chaos from which a new world tyranny will arise.”
Duke of Northumberland 1931
“I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization, or both.”
Thomas Babington Macaulay
“Democracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements.
Agnes Repplier
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
C.S. Lewis
A good politician under democracy is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
H.L. Mencken
Nothing...is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man.
Thomas Jefferson (letter to John Cartwright, 1824)
Be in general virtuous, and you will be happy.
Benjamin Franklin (letter to John Alleyne, 9 August 1768)
And this one I cannot verify:
A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
A writer claimed it was Thomas Jefferson, but it's not in his style.
The founders despised “true” democracy... they understood it to be a failed and flawed construct, which is why they gave us a Republic.
Sadly their posterity is largely so ill educated and ill informed that many worship at the alter of democracy and not liberty.
Hence, my tagline.
You’re right....they abhored democracies.
My favorite questions to a liberal:
(1) What form of government do we have in the US?
(2) What is the difference between a Democracy and a Republic?
Then the killer: If you don’t know these answers, what good is your opinion?
Aristotle wrote that a Democracy was a form of government where every man voted in his own self interest.
Darned if I could find it in time for today’s thread......
ping
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If our house be on fire, without inquiring whether it was fired from within or without, we must try to extinguish it.
Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826),
letter to James Lewis, Jr., May 9, 1798
I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.
If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.
The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.
Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826),
Letter to the Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin (1802)
There’s only one guarantee in the Constitution. I frequently ask the smartA libs what it is.
Invariably, they say the “pursuit of happiness.” Wrong Document. Wrong “guarantee”.
My point is that we have a Republic. But we’re treating it like an abusive parent treats their child. We can do great good or great bad.
As always, great information from you. Thank You.
The founders despised “true” democracy... they understood it to be a failed and flawed construct, which is why they gave us a Republic.
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Exactly. Even then they realized the difference.
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time.
E. B. White (1899 - 1985), New Yorker, July 3, 1944
A good politician under democracy is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
H.L. Mencken
Bull.
In a democracy 5 wolves and 2 sheep can vote on what to have for dinner.
In a Republic 5 wolves and 2 sheep can vote on what to have for dinner, except the sheep are allowed to carry firearms.- tom
Democracy: A government of the masses.
Authority derived through mass meeting or any other form of "direct" expression.
Results in mobocracy.
Attitude toward property is communistic — negating property rights.
Attitude toward law is that the will of the majority shall regulate, whether it be based upon deliberation or governed by passion, prejudice, and impulse, without restraint or regard to consequences.
Results in demagogism, license, agitation, discontent, anarchy.
“True democracy is two lambs and a wolf voting on what’s for dinner” —Ben Franklin
“Democracy is a terrible form of government...but all the others are so much worse!” —Churchill
“Truth is not determined by a majority vote” —Pope Benedict
The sequence in the rise and fall of a democracy, by Alex Fraser Tytler:
1. from bondage to spiritual faith;
2. from spiritual faith to great courage;
3. from great courage to liberty;
4. from liberty to abundance;
5. from abundance to selfishness;
6. from selfishness to complacency;
7. from complacency to apathy;
8. from apathy to dependence;
9. from dependency back again to bondage.
Wonder how this will go over in Pakistan, eh?
whoops, should be two wolves and a lamb
James Madison warned:
‘Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.’
Alexander F. Tyler stated:
‘A Democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largess out of the treasury with the result that democracies always collapse over a loose fiscal policy, always to be followed by a dictatorship.’
Fisher Ames stated:
‘Liberty has never lasted long in a democracy, nor has it ever ended in anything better than despotism.’
Samuel Adams stated:
‘Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes itself, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.’
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