James Madison Quotes

All those who defend freedom are bound as their first duty to be the champions of minorities, and the danger of allowing the majority, which holds the power of the State, to interfere at its will is that the interests of the minority will be disregarded and crushed out under the omnipotent force of a popular vote

The minority yields to the majority!

To say that majorities, as such, have a right to rule minorities, is equivalent to saying that minorities have, and ought to have, no rights, except such as majorities please to allow them.

A dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority.

A government is free in proportion to the rights it guarantees to the minority.

The majority of people wherever found ought in all questions to govern the minority.

Sometimes great injustices may be inflicted on the minority when the majority is in the pursuit of a great and just cause.

When you're in the minority, it doesn't matter what you're agenda is, you're not going to have the degree of freedom that you have as a member of the majority.

'Democratic' in its original meaning refers to unlimited majority rule....a social system in which one's work, one's property, one's mind, and one's life are at the mercy of any gang that may muster the vote of a majority at any moment for any purpose

If a democracy is to remain real and stable, the majority must be humane and farsighted enough to take care of minorities who have serious objections to the majorities point of view and who, because of lack of numbers, do not have the political strength to impose their own policy solutions through their own political power.

Majority rule is not the norm for solving issues or problems.

A majority can do anything.

So long as a minority conforms to the majority, it is not even a minority.

When a respectable minority objects to any rule of conduct, it would be dignified for the majority ... to yield.... Numerical strength savors of violence when it acts in total disregard of any strongly felt opinion of the minority.

[Sometimes] the minorities are too respectable, not to be entitled to some sacrifice of opinion, in the majority.

51 percent of the people should not always get 100% of the power; 51 percent of the people should certainly not get all the power if they use that power to exclude the 49%. In that case, we do not have majority rule. We have majority tyranny.

The majority never has right on its side.

It is when it is contended that in a democracy right is what the majority makes it to be that democracy degenerates into demagoguery.

The majority is not society, is not everyone. Majority coercion over the minority is still coercion.

The voice of the majority is no proof of justice.

One great object of the Constitution was to restrain majorities from oppressing minorities or encroaching upon their just rights.

It is impossible that the whisper of a faction should prevail against the voice of a nation.

Abide by the voice of the majority, which we are told by our Master to be the voice of truth, never to be challenged, and always to be whole-heartedly enforced.

Democracy is nothing but the Tyranny of Majorities, the most abominable tyranny of all, for it is not based on the authority of a religion, not upon the nobility of a race, not on the merits of talents and of riches. It merely rests upon numbers and hides behind the name of the people.