The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. - Winston Churchill

Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. - Oscar Wilde

Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve. - George Bernard Shaw

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. - H. L. Mencken

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge. - Isaac Asimov

In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country, capitalism triumphed over democracy. - Fran Lebowitz

The spirit of democracy is not a mechanical thing to be adjusted by abolition of forms. It requires change of heart. - Mahatma Gandhi

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy? - Mahatma Gandhi

Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education. - Franklin D. Roosevelt

Democracy... while it lasts is more bloody than either aristocracy or monarchy. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide. - John Adams

Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few. - George Bernard Shaw

Democracy is the process by which people choose the man who'll get the blame. - Bertrand Russell

An ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination. - Voltaire

The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy. - Woodrow Wilson

A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy. - Aldous Huxley

We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both. - Louis D. Brandeis

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. - H. L. Mencken

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage. - H. L. Mencken

Democracy as a system has evolved into something that Thomas Jefferson didn't anticipate. - Hunter S. Thompson

All the blood is drained out of democracy - it dies - when only half the population votes. - Hunter S. Thompson

The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness. - Niels Bohr

In a democracy, the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority. - Edmund Burke

On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does. - Will Rogers

Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated. - Gilbert K. Chesterton

Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses. - H. L. Mencken

Sometimes I think that a parody of democracy could be more dangerous than a blatant dictatorship, because that gives people an opportunity to avoid doing anything about it. - Aung San Suu Kyi

Adultery is the application of democracy to love. - H. L. Mencken

The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy. - Charles de Montesquieu

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state. - Noam Chomsky

The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment. - Robert M. Hutchins

To make democracy work, we must be a notion of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain. - Louis L'Amour

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary. - Reinhold Niebuhr

In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. - Orson Welles

Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor. - James Russell Lowell

Advertising is the very essence of democracy. - Anton Chekhov

The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians. - Benjamin Disraeli

Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy. - Benito Mussolini

You measure a democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists. - Abbie Hoffman

What is most important for democracy is not that great fortunes should not exist, but that great fortunes should not remain in the same hands. In that way there are rich men, but they do not form a class. - Alexis de Tocqueville

Democracy is being allowed to vote for the candidate you dislike least. - Robert Byrne

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. - E. B. White

In our so-called democracy we are accustomed to give the majority what they want rather than educate them to understand what is best for them. - Carter G. Woodson

We can't equate democracy with Christianity because the largest democracy on earth is India, which is primarily Hindu. The third largest democracy is Indonesia, which is Islamic. Democracy and freedom are not dependent on Christian beliefs. - Jimmy Carter

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois. - Gustave Flaubert

A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won't cross the street to vote in a national election. - Bill Vaughan