Quotes & Sayings About Demagogues

If a single nutty or dangerous vision comes to be sufficiently widely shared, demagogues may be able to ride it to power. — Christopher H. Achen

We can't ignore right-wing demagogues who insist that the word of the doctor who proclaims a child's sex at birth somehow holds more sway over the reality of the body than the word of the person who inhabits it. - Gwendolyn Ann Smith — Kate Bornstein

Fascism's success almost always depends on the cooperation of the "losers" during a time of economic and technological change. The lower-middle classes - the people who have just enough to fear losing it - are the electoral shock troops of fascism (Richard Hofstadter identified this "status anxiety" as the source of Progressivism's quasi-fascist nature). Populist appeals to resentment against "fat cats," "international bankers," "economic royalists," and so on are the stock-in-trade of fascist demagogues. — Jonah Goldberg

Demagogues are so easy to identify. They gesture a lot and speak with pulpit rhythms, using words that ring of religious fervour and god-fearing sincerity. Sincerity with nothing behind it takes so much practice. The practice can always be detected. Repetition. Great attempts to keep your attention on words. — Frank Herbert

The habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Where the laws are not supreme, there demagogues spring up. — Aristotle.

A mass of ignorant, culturally degraded citizens easily becomes an immense drag on the system. They become easy prey to demagogues and applaud every attempt to undermine the foundations of that "natural liberty" which they have enjoyed in the first place. — Arthur Herman

Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other. — H.L. Mencken

The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press. These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others. Dangerous as these people may be, they are not so significant as thousands of other people who have never been mentioned.
The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information.
With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power. — Henry A. Wallace

Demagogues always do well in economic downturns. — John Avlon

A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough ... People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself. — Doris Lessing

Whiskey is carried into committee rooms in demijohns and carried out in demagogues. — Mark Twain

A democracy is no more than an aristocracy of orators. The people are so readily moved by demagogues that control must be exercised by the government over speech and press. — Thomas Hobbes

Nor is the guilt entirely with the warmongers, plutocrats and demagogues. If people permit exploitation and regimentation in any name, they deserve their slavery. A tyrant does not make his tyranny possible. It is made by the people and not otherwise. — Jack Parsons

It is when the rich and well-educated and highly-privileged classes neglect their duties, when they neglect to study the interests, and conciliate the affections, and instruct the opinions, and champion the rights of the people, that the latter become discontented and turbulent, and fall into the hands of demagogues: the demagogue always steps in, where the patriot is wanting. — Washington Irving

Through knowledge and understanding we will drive from the temple of freedom all who seek to establish over us thought control - whether they be agents of a foreign power or demagogues thirsty for personal power and public notice. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

Better the rule of One, whom all obey, than to let clamorous demagogues betray our freedom with the kiss of anarchy. — Oscar Wilde

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

With more than 80 percent of Americans living in metropolitan areas, there are still demagogues who want to run down the idea of multiculturalism, of urbanity, being the only future we have. We either live or die based on how we live in cities, and our society is either going to be great or not based on how we perform as creatures of the city. — David Simon

Machiavelli had some cold tricks for people who wanted to be demagogues and wanted to take over the world. — Mads Mikkelsen

Because of demagogues, rhetoric has a tainted reputation in our time. However, rhetoric is central to democratic governance. It can fuse passion and persuasion, moving free people to freely choose what is noble. — George F. Will

Demagogues and agitators are very unpleasant, they are incidental to a free and constitutional country, and you must put up with these inconveniences or do without many important advantages. — Benjamin Disraeli

Wall Street's shenanigans have convinced a large portion of America that the economic game is rigged. Yet capitalism depends on trust. Without trust, people avoid even sensible economic risks. They also begin trading in gray markets and black markets. They think that if the big guys cheat in big ways, they may as well begin cheating in small ways. And when they think the game is rigged, they're easy prey for political demagogues with fast tongues and dumb ideas. Wall — Robert B. Reich

I'm not impressed should someone tell me that a certain man I consider crazy or stupid surpasses a common man in many achievements and particulars of life. Epileptics have amazing strength when they go into seizure; paranoiacs have an ability to reason that few normal men can match; religious maniacs bring multitudes of believers together as few (if any) demagogues can, and with a force of conviction that the latter can't inspire in their followers. And all that this proves is that craziness is craziness. I prefer a defeat that knows the beauty of flowers to a victory in the desert, full of blindness in the soul, alone with its isolated nothingness. — Fernando Pessoa

The people as a body cannot deliberate. Nevertheless, they will feel an irresistible impulse to act, and their resolutions will be dictated to them by their demagogues ... and the violent men, who are the most forward to gratify those passions, will be their favorites. What is called the government of the people is in fact too often the arbitrary power of such men. Here, then, we have the faithful portrait of democracy. — Fisher Ames

Our society is driven today by so much ethnic discord. We have Black Lives Matter, which I praise and celebrate. We have the demagogues stereotyping Muslims and resurrecting racist stereotypes they used to visit on us. The larger goal is to show that we are all the same, we all come from Africa, and we all have the same larger family tree. It's about the fundamental unity of the human community. — Henry Louis Gates

America's two great specialties are demagogues and rock and roll, and we've all heard plenty of both in our time. — Stephen King

Madison's experience at both the state and the federal level had convinced him that "the people" was not some benevolent, harmonious collective but rather a smoldering and ever-shifting gathering of factions or interest groups committed to provincial perspectives and vulnerable to demagogues with partisan agendas. — Joseph J. Ellis

Hemans gallows ought to be the fate of all such ambitious men who would involve their country in civil wars, and all the evils in its train that they might reign & ride on its whirlwinds & direct the Storm The free people of these United States have spoken, and consigned these wicked demagogues to their proper doom. — Andrew Jackson

Intellectual freedom is essential
freedom to obtain and distribute information, freedom for open-minded and unfearing debate and freedom from pressure by officialdom and prejudices. Such freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorship. — Andrei Sakharov

The wars around the globe into which religion is woven
violence that over the past two decades has sent many tens of thousands of men, women, and children to terrible deaths in the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, Indonesia, India, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and the United States
deeply threaten what we have of a human society. Denouncing religion itself is futile. And such simple reactions badly miss the point. It is among the religious believers that the work must be done, within that overwhelming majority who would find common ground in being human and not wanting destruction, if only because their traditions are about so much more. Those traditions contain life-giving possibilities, even if the worst demagogues would try to twist dogma so hard as to wring poison from it. — Gustav Niebuhr

There is a limit to the success of conservative populism and the exploitation of "little guy" or "silent majority" rhetoric, and it is very often reached because of the emaciated, corrupted personalities of the demagogues themselves. — Christopher Hitchens

The owners of factories are more concerned than other classes and interests in the intelligence of their laborers. When the latter are well-educated and the former are disposed to deal justly, controversies and strikes can never occur, nor can the minds of the masses be prejudiced by demagogues and controlled by temporary and factious considerations. — Howard Zinn

Of old, the demagogue was also a general, and then democracies changed into tyrannies. Most of the ancient tyrants were originally demagogues. They are not so now, but they were then; and the reason is that they were generals and not orators, for oratory had not yet come into fashion. — Aristotle.

It's political Daddyism and it's as old as demagogues and despotism. — Barry Goldwater

We cannot be wise while in the grip of a deep fear ... This is why demagogues, when seeking our support, will first cause us to fear and hate, knowing when we are in the grip of a great fear, we will abandon common sense and wisdom, we will forsake the hard-won lessons of time and experience. — Philip Gulley

Aristotle warned that inequality brought instability, while Plato believed that demagogues exploited free speech to install themselves as tyrants. — Timothy Snyder

There were still too many people who were afraid of a technology that eluded them, still more who would never have access and resented and feared it in equal measures. Mobilize those groups just once, find a demagogue-and there always were demagogues-and the nets would find themselves destroyed. — Melissa Scott

You have delivered up our holy German Fatherland to one of the greatest demagogues of all time. I solemnly prophesy that this accursed man will cast our Reich into the abyss and bring our nation to inconceivable misery. Future generations will damn you in your grave for what you have done. — Erich Ludendorff

Just as demagogues lead their well-intentioned followers into tragedy, so the jungle inevitable reclaims it's own. — Jeff Gunn

A dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants. — Alexander Hamilton

Where the laws are not authoritative demagogues arise. For the populace becomes a monarch when it turns from many into a single composite, since the many are in authority not as particular persons but all together. — Aristotle.

Are there any monuments built to demagogues? I just don't think so. — Cory Booker

It is more fun to listen to the radio speeches of a dictator than to study economic treatises. The entrepreneurs and technologists who pave the way for economic improvement work in seclusion; their work is not suitable to be visualized on the screen. But the dictators, intent upon spreading death and destruction, are spectacularly in sight of the public. Dressed in military garb they eclipse in the eyes of the movie-goers the colourless bourgeois in plain clothes. The problems of society's economic organization are not suitable for light talk at fashionable cocktail parties. Neither can they be dealt with adequately by demagogues haranguing mass assemblies. They are serious things. They require painstaking study. They must not be taken lightly. — Ludwig Von Mises

Hitler the thinker was wrong that politics and science are the same thing. Hitler the politician was right that conflating them creates a rapturous sense of catastrophic time and thus the potential for radical action. When an apocalypse is on the horizon, waiting for scientific solutions seems senseless, struggle seems natural, an demagogues of blood and soil come to the fore. A sound policy for our world, then, would be one that keeps the fear of planetary catastrophe as far away as possible. This means accepting the autonomy of science from politics, and making the political choice to support the pertinent kinds of science that will allow conventional politics to proceed. — Timothy Snyder

When states are democratically governed according to law, there are no demagogues, and the best citizens are securely in the saddle; but where the laws are not sovereign, there you find demagogues. The people become a monarch ... such people, in its role as a monarch, not being controlled by law, aims at sole power and becomes like a master. — Aristotle.

Several centuries ago the greatest writer in history described the two most menacing clouds that hang over human government and human society as "malice domestic and fierce foreign war." We are not rid of these dangers but we can summon our intelligence to meet them.

Never was there more genuine reason for Americans to face down these two causes of fear. "Malice domestic" from time to time will come to you in the shape of those who would raise false issues, pervert facts, preach the gospel of hate, and minimize the importance of public action to secure human rights or spiritual ideals. There are those today who would sow these seeds, but your answer to them is in the possession of the plain facts of our present condition. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

In every age the vilest specimens of human nature are to be found among demagogues. — Thomas B. Macaulay

The rage bubbling up from our impoverished and disenfranchised working class presages a looming and dangerous right-wing backlash. I spent two years traveling the country to write a book on the Christian Right called American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. I visited former manufacturing towns where for many the end of the world is no longer an abstraction. They have lost hope. Fear and instability have plunged the working classes into profound personal and economic despair, and, not surprisingly, into the arms of the demagogues and charlatans of the radical Christian Right who offer a belief in magic, miracles, and the fiction of a utopian Christian nation. And unless we rapidly re-enfranchise our dispossessed workers into the economy, unless we give them hope, our democracy is doomed. — Chris Hedges

We have learned to see racism in the spittle-laced epithets of the angry bigot. We must also learn to see racism in the coded racial entreaties promoted by calculating demagogues. — Ian F. Haney-Lopez

By contrast with this extensive Republican use of the press, the Federalists did little. Presuming that they had a natural right to rule, they had no need to stir up public opinion, which was what demagogues did in exploiting the people's ignorance and innocence.37 Federalist editors and printers of newspapers like John Fenno and his Gazette of the United States did exist, but most of these supporters of the national government were conservative in temperament; they tended to agree with the Federalist gentry that artisan-printers had no business organizing political parties or engaging in electioneering. — Gordon S. Wood

There is an error common to both oligarchies and to democracies: in the latter the demagogues, when the multitude are above the law, are always cutting the city in two by quarrels with the rich, whereas they should always profess to be maintaining their cause; just as in oligarchies the oligarchs should profess to maintain the cause of the people, . — Aristotle.

Throughout history the community of readers has been prey to sinister forces - to pedants and priests, legislators and lunatics, deities and demagogues. You have paid for your passion in humiliation, mutilation, and sometimes even - as when Henry VIII burned Bible translator William Tyndale as a heretic - immolation. I salute you all, as do my fellow books. — James K. Morrow

The wealth that was created by my investments wasn't put into a giant swimming pool as so many elected demagogues seem to imagine. Instead it benefitted our employees, their families and our community at large. — Kenneth Langone

Don't talk to me about appealing to the public. I am done with the public, for the present anyway. The public reads the headlines and that is all. The story itself is fair and shows the facts. That would be all right if the public read the facts. But it does not. It reads the headlines and listens to the demagogues and that's the stuff public opinion is made of. — J. P. Morgan

War is no longer made by simply analyzed economic forces if it ever was. War is made or planned now by individual men, demagogues and dictators who play on the patriotism of their people to mislead them into a belief in the great fallacy of war when all their vaunted reforms have failed to satisfy the people they misrule. — Ernest Hemingway,

Demagogues thrive in dim light. — Garrison Keillor

Democracy turns upon and devours itself. Universal suffrage, in theory the palladium of our liberties, becomes the assurance of our slavery. And that slavery will grow more and more abject and ignoble as the differential birth rate, the deliberate encouragement of mendicancy and the failure of popular education produce a larger and larger mass of prehensile half-wits, and so make the demagogues more and more secure. — H.L. Mencken

The best thing about Las Vegas is that no one pretends to be responsible for your behavior like they do in the rest of the country. There's no meddling self-righteous liberals or right-wing Christian demagogues telling you that you can't do something fun with your own time and money. If you can afford it, it's yours. — Drew Carey

Wal-Mart has become the whipping boy for political demagogues, unions and anti-traders. I suggest that they have the wrong target ... Wal-Mart exists and prospers because tens of millions of Americans find Wal-Mart to be a suitable source of goods and services ... unions and anti-traders should direct their outrage and condemnation at the tens of millions of Americans who shop at Wal-Mart and keep it in business. — Walter E. Williams

Crowds can be frightening. They have a way of impressing the low, base taste upon their members. Watching the way thousands of people in his audience could not think for themselves, could not find the courage to allow their ordinary feelings of decency and taste to prevail, I understood better how demagogues are possible. — Roger Ebert

I think that person who actually proposes things, who will save Medicare, will be in a lot stronger position than someone who demagogues the issue. — Tom Latham

Those who have not, and live in want, are a menace, Ridden with envy and fooled by demagogues. — Euripides

It only takes a few politicians to stoke division, or a few demagogues encouraging hatred to set your kind upon one another. And then before you know it, you have a whole nation biting on its own tail, going round and round until there is nothing left but the snapping of teeth. — Paolo Bacigalupi

The nature of war itself is changing to reflect this new reality. History has shown that two democracies almost never wage war against each other. Almost all wars of the past have been waged between nondemocracies, or between a democracy and a nondemocracy. In general, war fever can be easily whipped up by demagogues who demonize the enemy. But in a democracy, with a vibrant press, oppositional parties, and a comfortable middle class that has everything to lose in a war, war fever is much more difficult to cultivate. — Anonymous

Hamilton's besetting fear was that American democracy would be spoiled by demagogues who would mouth populist shibboleths to conceal their despotism. — Ron Chernow

Someone recently pointed out how much Barack Obama's style and strategies resemble those of Latin American charismatic despots - the takeover of industries by demagogues who never ran a business, the rousing rhetoric of resentment addressed to the masses and the personal cult of the leader promoted by the media. But do we want to become the world's largest banana republic? — Thomas Sowell

You [demagogues] are like the fishers for eels; in still waters they catch nothing, but if they thoroughly stir up the slime, their fishing is good; in the same way it's only in troublous times that you line your pockets. — Aristophanes

What faith has not been used by demagogues as a club over somebody's head? — Francis Collins

The spirit of Lincoln still lives; that spirit born of the teachings of the Nazarene, who promised mercy to the merciful, who lifted the lowly, strengthened the weak, ate with publicans, and made the captives free. In the light of this divine example, the doctrines of demagogues shiver in their chaff. — Martin Luther King Jr.

If elementary training in neighbor love focuses on family and friends, in secondary neighbor-love studies, we learn to see the outlier, the outsider, the outcast, the stranger, the alien, and even the enemy as neighbors too. Such an education can be deeply subversive, some might even say unpatriotic. After all, political figures, military leaders, and rising demagogues consistently consolidate power by scapegoating and dehumanizing an outsider, an outcast, or an enemy. But — Brian McLaren

A short time ago the demagogues blamed capitalism for the poverty of the masses. Today they rather blame capitalism for the "affluence" that it bestows upon the common man. — Ludwig Von Mises

Freedom of press and freedom of speech: What a blessing for a country while in the hands of honest, patriotic men; what a curse if in the hands of designing demagogues. — William J.H. Boetcker

The Arab rulers are basically unpopular. They are supported by the United States against the wishes of their people. In all of this rather heady mixture of violence and policies that are remarkably unpopular right down to the last iota, it's not hard for demagogues, especially people who claim to speak in the name of religion, in this case Islam, to raise a crusade against the United States and say that we must somehow bring America down. — Edward Said

Yes, authority, coercion, and dependence rest on the mass, but never freedom or the free unfoldment of the individual, never the birth of a free society. The Socialist demagogues know that as well as I, but they maintain the myth of the virtues of the majority, because their very scheme of life means the perpetuation of power. — Emma Goldman

On its own, being a decent person is no guarantee that you will act well, which brings us back to the one protection we have against demagogues, tricksters, and the madness of crowds, and our surest guide through the uncertain shoals of life: clear and reasoned thinking. Logic will never fail you, unless you're unaware of - or deliberately ignore - the consequences of your deeds. — Christopher Paolini

After the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia offered its new structure of government to the states for ratification, members of the Dismal Swamp Company differed in their opinions of it. Visitors to Mount Vernon heard George Washington say that he was "very anxious" to see all states ratify the Constitution. Alexander Donald wrote: "I never saw him so keen for any thing in my life, as he is for the adoption of the new Form of Government." Conversations at Mount Vernon touched on demagogues winning state elections to pursue "their own schemes," on the "impotence" of the Continental Congress, and on the danger of "Anarchy and civil war." Washington concluded: "it is more than probable we shall exhibit the last melancholy proof, that Mankind are not competent to their own government without the means of coercion in the Sovereign." By "sovereign" he meant not the people but the national government. Without a new, stronger government, he said, America faced "impending ruin. — Charles Royster

Demagogues like [Donald] Trump come along. He says I know what the cause is. Remember, later, the cause was that Mexicans who are coming to this country, well, they were criminals or rapists. Now it is Muslims. — Bernie Sanders

Although he trusted the good sense of the people in the long run, he believed that they could easily be misled by demagogues. He was a realist who had no illusions about human nature. "The motives which predominate most human affairs," he said, "are self-love and self-interest." The common people, like the common soldiers in his army, could not be expected to be "influenced by any other principles than those of interest. — Gordon S. Wood

The tyranny of this dictatorship isn't primarily the fault of Big Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work. It's the fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups, who have let the demogogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest." 14 — Sinclair Lewis

Weltschmerz, basically, is the depression we feel when bamboozlers, fanatics, manipulators, trolls, bigots, demagogues, fear-mongers, liars and prigs threaten to take over the world, and there's nothing, we think, we can do about it. — Em L. Smith

Patriotism is not sentimental nonsense. Nor something dreamed up by demagogues. Patriotism is as necessary a part of man's evolutionary equipment as are his eyes, as useful to the race as eyes are to the individual. — Robert A. Heinlein

Athens' biggest worry was the sheer recklessness of its own democratic government. A simple majority of the citizenry, urged on and incensed by clever demagogues, might capriciously send out military forces in unnecessary and exhausting adventures. — Thucydides

Inequality provokes a generalized anger that finds targets where it can
immigrants, foreign countries, American elites, government in all forms
and it rewards demagogues while discrediting reformers. — George Packer

From the right, you get demagogues shouting about brown-skinned anchor babies and clamoring to deport the undocumented. From the left, you get advocacy for the oppressed but otherwise, when it comes to national civic identity, mainly silence. — Eric Liu

The church of Jesus Christ ought to be the last people to fall for hucksters and demagogues. After all, the church bears the Spirit of God, who gifts the Body with discernment and wisdom. But too often we do. — Russell D. Moore

dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants. In — Alexander Hamilton

The people excited by ambitious demagogues, sooner or later return into the hands of the Aristocracy. — Napoleon Bonaparte

Trusting as we did to the virtue of the people, the real people, not the politicians and demagogues, we passed through the most responsible and trying scenes, sustained by the bone and sinew of the nation, the laborers of the land, where alone, in these days of Bank rule, and ragocrat corruption, real virtue and love of liberty is to be found. — Andrew Jackson