Some Great Anti-Democracy Quotes

Mr. Gray protests against censorship as undemocratic. (Censorship may be illiberal — against freedom — but not necessarily against the majority.)

Mr. Black is against Negro lynching, denouncing it as undemocratic. (As soon as the majority of a township wants to hang a Negro this action is un-Christian, illegal, but certainly very democratic.)

It must be remembered in that connection that liberty and democracy are not synonymous in spite of the fact that these two terms are frequently confounded in “democracies” with an aristocratic-liberal historical background. Numerical majorities are not necessarily keen to preserve civil liberties ;the demand for civil liberties {and privileges) always arose from select minorities. Genuinely “democratic” societies can be brutally cruel to those who dare to be “different” in an unconventional way.

Democratism and its allied herd movements, while remaining loyal to the principle of equality and identity, will never hesitate to sacrifice liberty.

It must be most inspiring for a true “democrat” to see “We, the people” taking the law in its own hands and thus dispensing with a judge who might disregard the most sacred declaration of mankind, the “voice of the people.” The victory of the numbers under these circumstances is complete; no pleading is possible because it is also superfluous. It would be very “undemocratic” if the reasoning or the appeals of a single human being (in this case the victim) could override the general will which in its inscrutable wisdom has already decided to roast a Negro slowly to death with blowtorches applied to the most intimate parts of his body.

–Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

The absolute ruler may be a Nero, but he is sometimes a Titus or Marc Aurelius; the people is often Nero, but never Marc Aurelius.

–Rivarol

Measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.

A pure democracy can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party. Hence it is, that democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.

–James Madison

Democracy means the opportunity to be everyone’s slave.

–Karl Kraus

Democracy is the counting of heads, not what’s in them!

–Padraig Deignan

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses. Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven. Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage. Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under. Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.

–H.L Mencken

That which now calls itself democracy differs from older forms of government solely in that it drives with new horses: the streets are still the same old streets, and the wheels are likewise the same old wheels.

–Friedrich Nietzsche

Majority rule supersedes whatever meaning any individual’s choice during an election (or other ballot or poll) might have, in that one person — the individual — gets overruled, by definition…the wants of other people are clearly still forced upon particular individuals as an intrinsic part of the democratic process. And in any democratic system the many is supposed to have the ultimate power to override and subdue individual resistance to achieve conformity with ‘the will of the people’, so-called. Despite any attempted checks to modify or limit this in the theory behind democratic republics, in serious matters (and matters taken as serious), majority rules and minority yields to its compulsion, even its aggression, in the avowed basic theory behind every society which is democratic in definition. “Serious matters” here means (at the very least): concerning any questions of individual sovereignty versus mass sovereignty. And therefore, individual sovereignty under a democracy is not sovereign at all. Force remains implicit against individual choice and its exercise, should the individual contradict sufficient number of others. Democratic theory condones aggression, at the very least for the compulsion of those who take exception.

Democratic people attend, regard, and even enshrine popularity, which in politics takes the form of majority (or plurality) consensus in elections, polls, referenda and plebiscites. Popular consensus does not deserve to be enshrined simply because of greater numbers. Sometimes popular consensus happens to be in favor of individual freedom and autonomy, and that is what deserves to be enshrined — freedom, perhaps even the desire for freedom — regardless of its unpopularity.

It seems instead that sometimes democracy does have a relationship with freedom — an antagonistic relationship.

Democracy however does not equate with this free self-rule at all. Democracy only amounts to “self-rule” if the phrase loses its personal meaning, if “self” becomes an imaginary collective individual conflated with a group of individuals, and “rule” means political machinations for mastery and management over others, instead of mastery or management of one’s own faculties and personal affairs.

“Democracy” concerns the demos (Athenian Greek), “the people” collectively, the common populace. Democracy considers the numbers and favors the “masses” and so it produces them. To recast a common political metaphor, democracy raises sheep. Sheep do not want to lead, nor think discriminately. Sheep feel most at home in the herd, led wherever they go. They want a shepherd, one will keep them feeling safe, safe and the same, leading them wherever they go, without droving them so hard that they ever must realize (and resent) that they might as well be dragged by the nose. Whether said shepherd (inevitably) fleeces or consumes them, they get a rude surprise — as they were on a dutiful lookout for a wolf in the fold.

-Colin Patrick Barth aka Phoenix aka Wisdom Dancer

“Democratic” decision making is a means for finding and implementing the will of the majority; it has no other function. It serves, not to encourage diversity, but to prevent it.

–David Friedman

Despite popular rhetoric, democracy is not synonymous with freedom. Taking something without permission is theft, but not when the majority goes along with it and calls it taxation. Matters that should be of no interest to any other person (e.g., what a person chooses to do with his or her body) become matters of public policy when the majority says so. The recipe is fairly straightforward. All you have to do is appoint someone else to initiate force on your behalf, get enough people to pick the same candidate, and then hide behind the waving banner of free and open elections. The syllogism goes something like: The initiation of force is wrong, so I cannot initiate force without punishment. Democratic elections are good. I help to elect someone to public office, then he or she initiates force on my behalf.

–Brian Drake

The proper response toward what we occasionally imagine to be democracy, methinks, is to retain one’s self-respect by not participating in it.

Voting in particular is an embarrassment, being a public display of weak character and low intelligence. Let us face the truth: Democracy, like spitting in public or the Roman games, is the proper activity of the lower intellectual and moral classes. It amounts to collusion in one’s own suckering.

Those who wash regularly should not stoop to democracy.

–Fred Reed

Parliamentary government is simply a mild and disguised form of compulsion. We agree to try strength by counting heads instead of breaking heads, but the principle is exactly the same… The minority gives way not because it is convinced that it is wrong, but because it is convinced that it is a minority.

–James Fitzjames Stephen

“I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”

–Thomas Carlyle

Democracy has nothing to do with freedom. Democracy is a soft variant of communism, and rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else.

–Hans-Herman Hoppe

Tyranny is usually tempered with assassination, and Democracy must be tempered with culture. In the absence of this, it turns into a representation of collective folly.

–John Stuart Mackenzie

Imagine if all of life were determined by majority rule. Every meal would be a pizza. Every pair of pants, even those in a Brooks Brothers suit, would be stone-washed denim. Celebrity diet and exercise books would be the only thing on the shelves at the library. And — since women are a majority of the population — we’d all be married to Mel Gibson.

–P.J. O’Rourke

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.

–Unknown

The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.

It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist.

–Lord Acton

The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, for the vast masses of the nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell a big one.

–Adolf Hitler

Democracy is no solution – it’s just 51% bossing the other 49% around. For God’s sake, Hitler was democratically elected! Democracy is just mob rule dressed up in a coat and tie.

–Doug Casey

It is a logical absurdity to equate democracy with freedom in the way that mainstream political philosophers and commentators typically do. A system where individuals and minorities are at the mercy of unconstrained majorities hardly constitutes freedom in any meaningful sense.

–Keith Preston

Liberty of the people is not my liberty!

–Max Stirner

Democracy (n.): Government of the sheep, by the shepherds, for the wolves.

–L.A. Rollins

Now, get seven million five hundred thousand votes to declare that two and two make five, that the straight line is the longest road, that the whole is less than its part; get it declared by eight millions, by ten millions, by a hundred millions of votes, you will not have advanced a step. Well, then, now you are going to be surprised. There are axioms in probity, in honesty, in justice, as there are axioms in geometry; and the truths of morality are no more at the mercy of a vote than are the truths of algebra. The notion of good and evil cannot be resolved by universal suffrage. It is not given to a ballot to make the false become the true and the unjust the just. The human conscience cannot be put to the vote.

–Victor Hugo

We talk about democracy as if it’s a safeguard for individual rights… Instead, it’s become our way of intruding on rights, allegedly in the name of that most collectivist of concepts: The Common Good.

–Jonathan David Morris

There is a difference between democracy and freedom. Freedom is not measured by the ability to vote. It is measured by the breadth of those things on which we do not vote. Freedom must be protected from democracy.

The unpopular answer, of course, is no. Freedom and democracy are different. In words attributed to Scottish historian Alexander Tytler: ‘A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury.’ Democracy evolves into kleptocracy. A majority bullying a minority is just as bad as a dictator, communist or otherwise, doing so

–John T. Wenders

The intellect of two thousand asses cannot bring forth a single man’s thought.

Democracy is a system where people are counted not weighed.

–Mohammad Iqbal

Democracy has nothing to do with the right choices. It has to do with the popular choices.

–Bchara Karam

The biggest argument against democracy is a five minute discussion with the average voter.

–Winston Churchill

Voting is sort of like being asked if you’d like a punch in the head or gut. Since I don’t want to be punched at all, I don’t see why I should participate in the farce.

–lupoleboucher

Democracy doesn’t favour the individual above all else, nor does it promise to. One of it’s greatest failings is that single voices of reason are too easily drowned out by the cacophony of the masses.

The concept of “The Will of the People” is dangerously arbitrary. Certainly not worthy of being the foundation of a rational and practical political system.

–Stephen Townshend

You want to know about voting. I’m here to tell you about voting. Imagine you’re locked in a huge underground nightclub filled with sinners, whores, freaks, and unnameable things that rape pit bulls for fun. And you ain’t allowed out until you all vote on what you’re going to do tonight. YOU like to put your feet up and watch television. THEY like to have sex with normal people using knives, guns, and brand-new sexual organs that you did not know existed. So you vote for television, and everyone else, as far as the eye can see, votes to fuck you with switchblades. That’s voting. You’re welcome.

–Spider Jerusalem

Good, law-abiding, value-oriented citizens are the ultimate in hypocrisy; “majority rules” and the law are exactly the same as being the biggest bully on the block with the biggest stick—it is only might that allows one group to force another to live by its code of conduct…

Democracy, or “majority rules,” is another trick of our society to force us to do things we don’t want to do. Even if we actually lived in a pure democracy (and the system we do live in is not even close), where everyone got a single vote on every subject, forcing the minority to obey the majority is no different to one man, if he had the power, forcing everyone else to do what he wanted them to—simply because he could.

Why is acquiescence to the numerous viewed as better servitude than bowing to might?

–William J. Murray

I think, you’re not blagging me on this ridiculous journey, with this bit of paper. I think if you want to change things, it’s not with an X on a piece of paper, it’s with an X on someone’s forehead.

-Russell Brand

Aaaand…a few of my own:

Democracy: People taking liberties with others’ freedoms via the ballot box.

If you want to see real Democracy in action, watch the Weakest Link.

Democracy, properly understood, is NOT synonymous with liberty. In fact, the two often clash.

A good analogy for voting is an inmate being offered a choice between sucking dick and taking it up the arse!

And my surefire democratard-baiting observation:

Gang rape is democracy in action.

~MRDA~