Republic vs. Democracy

 

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. — Winston Churchill

 

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. — Henry L. Mencken

 

It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny. — James Fenimore Cooper

 

When once a republic is corrupted, there is no possibility of remedying any of the growing evils, but by removing the corruption and restoring its lost principles; every other correction is either useless or a new evil. — Barron Charles de Montesquieu

 

Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. — Oscar Wilde

 

The greatest danger the Republic faces is its growing number of under-informed electorate, which is merely a confederacy of fools, making one of its own the prince. — Bernie G. Ruchin

 

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge. — Isaac Asimov

 

Republicanism is not the phantom of a deluded imagination. On the contrary, laws, under no form of government, are better supported, liberty and property better secured, or happiness more effectually dispensed to mankind. — George Washington

 

Democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine percent. — Thomas Jefferson

 

The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not. — Thomas Jefferson

 

The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind. — Thomas Jefferson

 

It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution. — Thomas Jefferson

 

Democracy… while it lasts is more bloody than either aristocracy or monarchy. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide. — John Adams

 

Democracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy; such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man's life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit, and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable [abominable] cruelty of one or a very few. — John Adams

 

There is no good government but what is republican. That the only valuable part of the British constitution is so; for the true idea of a republic is 'an empire of laws, and not of men.' That, as a republic is the best of governments, so that particular arrangement of the powers of society, or in other words, that form of government which is best contrived to secure an impartial and exact execution of the law, is the best of republics. — John Adams

 

The experience of all former ages had shown that of all human governments, democracy was the most unstable, fluctuating and short-lived. — John Quincy Adams

 

It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity. — Alexander Hamilton

 

We are a Republic. Real Liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of Democracy. — Alexander Hamilton

 

Democracy is the most vile form of government. … Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; 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

 

A simple democracy is the devil's own government. — Benjamin Rush

 

A democracy is a volcano, which conceals the fiery materials of its own destruction. These will produce an eruption, and carry desolation in their way. — Fisher Ames

 

All such men are, or ought to be, agreed, that simple governments are despotisms; and of all despotisms, a democracy, though the least durable, is the most violent. — Fisher Ames

 

In democracy … there are commonly tumults and disorders … Therefore a pure democracy is generally a very bad government. It is often the most tyrannical government on earth. — Noah Webster

 

It is easy to see that when republican virtue fails, slavery ensues. — Thomas Paine