Demagogue Quotes

... immoral, evil and a demagogue.

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

… becoming a very dangerous proposition…. an out and out demagogue

If there had been a charismatic figure in the United States who could mobilize fears, anger, racism, a sense of loss of the future that belongs to us, this country could be in real danger. We're lucky that there never has been an honest, charismatic figure. McCarthy was too much of a thug, you know? Nixon was too crooked. Trump, I think, is too much of a clown. So, we've been lucky.

Of one man in especial, beyond anyone else, the citizens of a republic should beware, and that is of the man who appeals to them to support him on the ground that he is hostile to other citizens of the republic, that he will secure for those who elect him, in one shape or another, profit at the expense of other citizens of the republic. It makes no difference whether he appeals to class hatred or class interest, to religious or anti-religious prejudice. The man who makes such an appeal should always be presumed to make it for the sake of furthering his own interest.

The reign of terror to which France submitted has been more justly termed "the reign of cowardice." One knows not which most to execrate,--the nation that could submit to suffer such atrocities, or that low and bloodthirsty demagogue that could inflict them. France, in succumbing to such a wretch as Robespierre, exhibited, not her patience, but her pusillanimity.

Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds expression in the anonymity of the Corporate State. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism, and the Constitution while manipulating internal levers.

[Spiro] Agnew was a small-time pol who became the most blatant crook to sit one heartbeat away from the presidency. He was a demagogue ranting ghost-written bile that split Americans amid the war and fires of the '60s. But political peers, sensing in Agnew's tumble their own fragility, always treated Spiro as gently as a museum vase.

The qualities necessary for a demagogue are these: to be foul-mouthed, base-born, and a low and mean fellow.

The Democrats have twice now enabled a World-Historic Demagogue to be elected President of the United States. One wonders if Trump’s reelection will stand with Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon. The Gaza-like rubble of the Biden Administration is just beginning to come into focus. It probably dates to the days before Biden became President, when he made a deal with the socialist minions of Bernie Sanders to create his new Administration. This was Project 2021, the precursor of Project 2025. It resulted in left-nuttiness below the radar throughout the government. Every so often, the nuttiness would surface—as with the chaos at the Southern border—and Biden would do nothing about it. But usually it was a subdural hematoma, bleeding beneath the surface, like the death-grip the teachers unions held over the Department of Education. And the utter lapse in keeping the Pentagon up to date and funded appropriately. And the espousal, in too many Democratic cities, of releasing shoplifters without bail. (It wasn’t Defund the Police; it was Empower The Thieves.)

The conservatives nearly always tolerate the demagogue while he is destroying liberals.

Who voted for Trump? Who are these people who, as he famously said, would let him shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and still support him? It's people who want too strong a leader, who would do what that leader tells them. Similar to the Europeans following Mussolini and Hitler. There's a streak in humanity that likes that kind of leader. That's Trump's core. Authoritarianism.

The demagogue is usually sly, a detractor of others, a professor of humility and disinterestedness, a great stickler for equality as respects all above him, a man who acts in corners, and avoids open and manly expositions of his course, calls blackguards gentlemen, and gentlemen folks, appeals to passions and prejudices rather than to reason, and is in all respects, a man of intrigue and deception, of sly cunning and management.

The sure foundations of the state are laid in knowledge, not in ignorance; and every sneer at education, at culture, at book learning, which is the recorded wisdom of the experience of mankind, is the demagogue's sneer at intelligent liberty, inviting national degeneracy and ruin.

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

This Senate, is a sanctuary; a citadel of law, of order, and of liberty; and it is here — it is here, in this exalted refuge; here, if anywhere, will resistance be made to the storms of political frenzy and the silent arts of corruption; and if the Constitution be destined ever to perish by the sacrilegious hands of the demagogue or the usurper, which God avert, its expiring agonies will be witnessed on this floor.

If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definition, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society's own equivalent of oblivion.

The American doctrinaire is the converse of the American demagogue, and, in this way, is scarcely less injurious to the public. The first deals in poetry, the last in cant. He is as much a visionary on one side, as the extreme theoretical democrat is a visionary on the other.

…a low and dangerous demagogue.

The Southern demagogue can no more leave the educational system alone than can his European equivalent. It is the nature of the demagogue. Reading and writing are the two enemies he fears most ... Wherever he lives he fears schools and colleges and teachers and students. He feels that they are engaged in a gigantic conspiracy against his rule.

Unfortunately in this country we now have a demagogue ... one that is reckless with the truth.

Roosevelt, if he had lived, would probably have been unbeatable, despite the inevitable reaction against the war. He was so expert a demagogue that it would have been easy for him to divert the popular discontent to some other object. He could have been beaten only by a demagogue even worse than he was himself.

You never discount a demagogue.

Demagogue--a vessel containing beer and other liquids.

When leaders use words to bludgeon and not to persuade, when opinion supersedes fact and people stop listening to one another, we have, the perfect conditions for the true demagogue. [Donald] Trump is running hard for that role.