Anarchy Democracy Quotes & Sayings

Anarchism is democracy taken seriously. — Edward Abbey

In liberal democracy and anxious anarchy, the traditional classic dance, compact of aristocratic authority and absolute freedom in a necessity of order, has never been so promising as an independent expression as it is today. — Lincoln Kirstein

Self-governance does not mean no one is responsible. It means everyone is. — Heather Marsh

The government of man should be the monarchy of reason: it is too often the democracy of passions or the anarchy of humors. — Benjamin Whichcote

Democracy is morose, and runs to anarchy, but in the state, and in the schools, it is indispensable to resist the consolidation ofall men into a few men. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides adduces a change in language as a major factor in Athens's descent from dysfunctional democracy through demagoguery into tyranny and anarchy: people began to define things in any way they pleased, he says, and the "normally accepted meaning of words" broke down. In his account of the Catiline crisis in republican Rome, Sallust has Cato the Younger identify the misuse of language - specifically the scission of word and meaning - as the underlying cause of the threat to the state. Society, Cato says, has lost the "vera vocabula rerum," literally, the "true names of things."18 In seventeenth-century England, Thomas Hobbes lived through a civil war he believed had been caused in significant measure by a war of words about religion - spread through the pervasive pamphleteering that printing had made possible - that had fatally weakened the linguistic common ground on which an ordered state depends. — Mark John Thompson

Democracy is an imperfect way of steering between the violence of anarchy and the violence of tyranny, with the least violence you can get away with. — Steven Pinker

Functional societies need algorithms which reward us for being of service to those who need it most. Instead we have algorithms which reward us for being of service to those who need it least — Heather Marsh

Democracy leads to anarchy, which is mob rule. — Plato

Albeit nurtured in democracy,
And liking best that state republican
Where every man is Kinglike and no man
Is crowned above his fellows, yet I see,
Spite of this modern fret for Liberty,
Better the rule of One, whom all obey,
Than to let clamorous demagogues betray
Our freedom with the kiss of anarchy.
Wherefore I love them not whose hands profane
Plant the red flag upon the piled-up street
For no right cause, beneath whose ignorant reign
Arts, Culture, Reverence, Honor, all things fade,
Save Treason and the dagger of her trade,
Or Murder with his silent bloody fee. — Oscar Wilde

For me democracy is the only way of life. The opposite is dictatorship or anarchy. — Elie Wiesel

They that are discontented under monarchy, call it tyranny; and they that are displeased with aristocracy, call it oligarchy: so also, they which find themselves grieved under a democracy, call it anarchy, which signifies the want of government; and yet I think no man believes, that want of government, is any new kind of government. — Thomas Hobbes

We must make the intellectual world safe for democracy. But in the conditions of modern mental anarchy, neither that nor any other ideal is safe. just as Protestants appealed from priests to the Bible, and did not realize that the Bible also could be questioned, so republicans appealed from kings to the people, and did not realize that the people also could be defied. There is no end to the dissolution of ideas, the destruction of all tests of truth, that has become possible since men abandoned the attempt to keep a central and civilized Truth, to contain all truths and trace out and refute all errors. Since then, each group has taken one truth at a time and spent the time in turning it into a falsehood. We have had nothing but movements; or in other words, monomanias. But the Church is not a movement but a meeting-place; the trysting-place of all the truths in the world. — G.K. Chesterton

Democracy is a see-saw between complete chaos and tolerable confusion — Rohinton Mistry

We do not understand democracy in its bourgeois meaning
of babbling, lack of discipline, anarchy. We understand democracy as the active participation of the citizens in formulating and implementing the Party's policy. — Nicolae Ceausescu

But democrats are seldom welcome on planets run by totalitarian governments, and scarcely more welcome on planets where anarchy prevails--this is due to the very nature of democracy, the only practical compromise between totalitarianism and anarchy. — Christopher Stasheff

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. — H.L. Mencken

The science of war leads one to dictatorship, pure and simple. The science of non-violence alone can lead one to pure democracy. Power based on love is thousand times more effective and permanent than power derived from fear of punishment. It is a blasphemy to say non-violence can be practiced only by individuals and never by nations which are composed of individuals. The nearest approach to purest anarchy would be a democracy based on non-violence. A society organized and run on the basis of complete non-violence would be the purest anarchy. — Mahatma Gandhi

All of society's problems which could be solved by money, were caused by money. — Heather Marsh

All ponzi schemes are upheld by a centripetal force caused by those orbiting the circles of power, celebrity and wealth and trying to get in. When the ponzi scheme reaches its point of maximum growth, the force disperses and the ponzi scheme collapses. — Heather Marsh

A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one. Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally shortsighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations, though one would think that the world had seen more than enough of what a well-disciplined mob can do in the hands of a single madman. Unfortunately, this realization does not seem to have penetrated very far - and our blindness is extremely dangerous. — C. G. Jung

Democracy without respect for individual rights sucks. It's just ganging up against the weird kid, and I'm always the weird kid. — Penn Jillette

If elections could change anything, they would have already made them forbidden. — Unknown

The proposal to quit voting is basically revolutionary; it amounts to a shifting of power from one group to another, which is the essence of revolution. As soon as the nonvoting movement got up steam, the politicians would most assuredly start a counterrevolution. Measures to enforce voting would be instituted; fines would be imposed for violations, and prison sentences would be meted out to repeaters. — Frank Chodorov

Direct democracy is lazy anarchy, for people who don't want to be governed but are too lazy to govern themselves. They want participation served to them. — Heather Marsh

The laws of democracy remain a dead letter, its freedom is anarchy, its equality the equality of unequals — Plato

As I have shown, I will defend democracy with arms when it is threatened by violence; with firmness when it is weakened by division; with law and order when it is subverted by anarchy; and always, I will try to sustain it by wise policies of economic progress so that a democracy means not just an empty liberty, but a full life for all. — Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo

For a Monarchy readily becomes a Tyranny, an Aristocracy an Oligarchy, while a Democracy tends to degenerate into Anarchy. So that if the founder of a State should establish any one of these three forms of Government, he establishes it for a short time only, since no precaution he may take can prevent it from sliding into its contrary, by reason of the close resemblance which, in this case, the virtue bears to the vice. — Niccolo Machiavelli

Democracy is a suggestion box for slaves. — Stefan Molyneux

Isocrates: Democracy destroys itself because it abuses its right to freedom and equality. Because it teaches its citizens to consider audacity as a right, lawlessness as a freedom, abrasive speech as equality, and anarchy as progress. — Michael Lewis