Thomas Sowell Quotes

I had preconceived notions going in and it was even stranger than I thought it would be …. It is a total cult of personality.

Demagoguery is not unknown in American history.

Demagogues are the mob's lackeys.

Trump manipulates the fearful by promising that he will use his fraudulent deal-making prowess to protect and take care of his supporters.

There's never been an era absent of demagogues.

Demagoguery enters at the moment when, for want of a common denominator, the principle of equality degenerates into the principle of identity.

I think it's fair to say there is a demagogic path that Europeans, South Americans, Asians have pursued, and we know where that leads. It uses xenophobia, it uses paranoia, it uses prejudice, it uses nationalism to really stir people up and to, you know, begin an us-versus-them contrast, which is dangerous and is not something we've had in our politics at a presidential level in America.

I think my main concern is because I worry about demagoguery. It's real. You see the people standing up there and applauding.

Nostalgia for dead tyrants and the longing for heroes are unhealthy, and they can result in the deification of a Saddam as easily as a Havel or Mandela.

A demagogue is a person with whom we disagree as to which gang should mismanage the country.

…a low and dangerous demagogue.

The demagogue ... is a good showman, whether at Nuremberg at a youth conference, or in Georgia at a political barbecue. He knows the tricks of the ham actor, the gestures, the tones of voice that can arouse passions. Always he dresses himself up as the little man come to life, grown to Brobdingnagian stature and become the "Duce" or the "Leader" or, maybe, "Ploughboy Pete.

The people always have some champion who they set over them and nurse into greatness …. This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears, he is a protector.

The nation which can only be saved by one man and wants to be saved that way deserves a whipping!

To a certain extent, all dictatorships are alike. From Stalin's Soviet Union to Mao's China, from Ceauşescu's Romania to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, all these regimes had the same trappings ... But Kim Il-sung took the cult of personality to a new level. What distinguished him in the rogues' gallery of twentieth-century dictators was his ability to harness the power of faith. Kim Il-sung understood the power of religion.

Our democratic belief that anyone can be a political leader paradoxically feeds into the anti-democratic belief that we should look to one person to quickly and easily save us. No one, alone, can fix it, and in our system of government, this authoritarian approach is a prescription for catastrophe.

The idea that democracies could be vulnerable to demagogues is not a new notion.

Down with politics and the art of the possible; up with pronouncements and the allure of the prophetic: It's the way of demagogues everywhere.

Where you don't have people who have strong intellectual capacity, you get demagoguery.

Populism, literally, means speaking for 'the people.' In practice it means demagoguery.

What happened in the US is a regression to the domination side of the social scale. Trump claimed that he, as a "strongman," would solve all our problems, and was elected by fanning fear, hate, scapegoating, the debasement of women.

My fear is that the Tea Party gets a charismatic leader. Because all they're selling is fear and anger. And that's all Hitler sold. 'I'm angry and I'm frightened, and you should hate that guy over there.' And that's what they're doing.

Fascism is not just a word. It's not just a way to insult someone with whom you disagree. It is a specific thing. It is a specific form of far right politics that involves a sort of narcissistic cult of superman action around the leader of the party.

One thing that all the totalitarian states did was make the great leader's face everywhere.

Donald Trump is using an age-old trick of right wing populism, much like George Wallace, much like Joe McCarthy, Pitchfork Ben Tillman who in the 1880s and '90s was a rabid hateful racists who whipped up hate and hysteria for his own political benefit.