Plurality Quotes

A unity of the Executive would be necessary in order to promote dispatch; -that a plurality of Persons would never do. When I was in Holland the States general were obliged to give up their power to a French Man to direct their military operations…. However power is always increasing on the part of the Executive

Everything, everywhere, shall be decided by majority vote.

One must not mistake majority for truth.

You're not trying to win 100 percent of the vote. You're after 50 percent plus one. It doesn't matter if you tick off the other 49 percent.

Like Leibniz's possible worlds, most men are only equally entitled pretenders to existence. There are few existences.

A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.

Today we are aware as never before of the plurality of human life-styles and possibilities, while at the same time being tied, like in an old silent movie, to a runaway locomotive rushing headlong toward a very singular catastrophe

It is easy to see why a diversity of cultures should confront power with a problem. If culture is about plurality, power is about unity. How can it sell itself simultaneously to a whole range of life forms without being fatally diluted?

There should be many judges, for few will always do the will of few.

Multiple descriptions are better than one.

There are hundreds of thousands of Scots who acknowledge English, Irish or Welsh parts of their very being. Lives and destinies are similarly intertwined in Catalonia and Spain, in Ukraine and Russia.

There are men of eighteen different languages; they are scattered here and there upon the [Hudson] river.

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

... whatever men do or know or experience can make sense only to the extent that it can be spoken about. There may be truths beyond speech, and they may be of great relevance to man in the singular, that is, to man in so far as he is not a political being, whatever else he may be. Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves.

What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions; life is plurality, death is uniformity.

I don't campaign for the end of the aristocracy or the upper classes; I don't really want to destroy anything at all. I just want more plurality.

Treating 'water' as a name of a single scattered object is not intended to enable us to dispense with general terms and plurality of reference. Scatter is in fact an inconsequential detail.

I believe the world to be a muffin pan, and there certainly are a lot of muffins here.

This is the reason why the doctrine of plurality of wives was revealed, that the noble spirits who are waiting for tabernacles might be brought forth

There's no reason why there needs to be one search engine or one social network or one store that we buy all of our crap from. It's possible to imagine a world in which there's actually competition.

The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.

Every president to hold office has espoused some version of Americanism - the truths that we hold self-evident, even when those truths are not always in evidence. But for all their grand rhetoric and mostly good deeds, none was able to seal the deal on the trifecta of equality, plurality and socioeconomic ascendancy. Obama has.

I have a different idea of a universal. It is of a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all.

To speak of the Muslim world is not to endorse a totalitarian project, nor to bolster an Islamist narrative, nor to suggest that variety, plurality, and diversity are lacking in what Muslims think, believe, speak, and do as Muslims.

God is found in the collection of Many. . . rather than in the One.