Democratic Decay Quotes

Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle.

All democracies turn into dictatorships - but not by coup. The people give their democracy to a dictator, whether it's Julius Caesar or Napoleon or Adolf Hitler. Ultimately, the general population goes along with the idea.

There's no checklist of how democracies fail because they fail in different ways. Some of them fail because they break up and civil war breaks out... Often they fail because someone is elected to power who doesn't respect the rules of the democracy.

America is on her deathbed.

When free discussion is denied, hardening of the arteries of democracy has set in, free institutions are but a lifeless form, and the death of the republic is at hand.

When leaders are no longer beholden to the people who elected them, corruption results and the recruitment of extremists becomes easier.

Trump wants to be the first American tsar. With his hero worship of Putin, his admiration for the apparent omnipotence of the Kremlin, schoolboyish crush on Putin's gangster swagger and his contempt for democracy, Trump wants to rule with his family, taking decisions purely because he's right about everything like a tsar.

Democracy no longer means what it was meant to. It has been taken back into the workshop. Each of its institutions has been hollowed out, and it has been returned to us as a vehicle for the free market, of the corporations. For the corporations, by the corporations.

Liberty has never lasted long in a democracy, nor has it ever ended in anything better than despotism.

Basically, we are witnessing the twilight of democracy.

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.

A fatal defect in majority rule is that by its very nature it abolishes itself. Majority rule must inevitably become minority rule: the majority is too big to handle itself; it organizes itself into committees ... which in their turn resolve themselves into a committee of one.

The representatives of people become uncrowned kings and queens once they get into Parliament.

Our nation has in 300 years grown apart from even the democratic ideals of other peoples. In some of them class government still lingers; in others, democracy is little better than oligarchy.

People are increasingly beginning to feel that democracy itself is being destroyed by this latest phase of globalization and that politics doesn't matter because it changes nothing.

Political corruption is eating our democracy out from the inside. Most Americans know that. But democratic and economic health can't be easily disentangled.

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

When the public loses faith in democracy's ability to solve the problems it has created for itself, the game's almost over. And I think we are this close to losing democracy to the mercenary class.

When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself.

The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.

If democracy is ever to be threatened, it will not be by revolutionary groups burning government offices and occupying the broadcasting and newspaper offices of the world. It will come from disenchantment, cynicism and despair caused by the realisation that the New World Order means we are all to be managed and not represented.

There's no doubt that in the last two to three decades, American democracy has been hacked. It was based on the regular harvesting of the wisdom of crowds, but now big sources of special interest money are able to prevent the passage of almost any meaningful reform that's aimed at the public interest.

Democracy is corrupted not only when the spirit of equality is corrupted, but likewise when they fall into a spirit of extreme equality.

As John Adams said, all democracies will eventually self-destruct. We seem to be doing it very quickly.

India’s democracy has dissolved into … a system totally dominated by electoral victories and defeats. The moment you enter office, you begin to think of the next election.