Demagogy Quotes

“When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine's Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwah, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship—though I like to think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn't known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offense of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment to the Constitution, could be imagined. President George H.W. Bush, when asked to comment, could only say grudgingly that, as far as he could see, no American interests were involved…”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Don't you know yet, he said, that an idle and selfish class loves to see mischief being made, even if it is made at its own expense? Its own life being all a matter of pose and gesture, it is unable to realize the power and the danger of a real movement and of words that have no sham meaning. It is all fun and sentiment. It is sufficient, for instance, to point out the attitude of the old French aristocracy towards the philosophers whose words were preparing the Great Revolution. Even in England, where you have some common-sense, a demagogue has only to shout loud enough and long enough to find some backing in the very class he is shouting at. You, too, like to see mischief being made.
The demagogue carries the amateurs of emotion with him. Amateurism in this, that, and the other thing is a delightfully easy way of killing time, and feeding one's own vanity--the silly vanity of being abreast with the ideas of the day after to-morrow. Just as good and otherwise harmless people will join you in ecstasies over your collection without having the slightest notion in what its marvellousness really consists. [The informer]”
― Joseph Conrad, A Set of Six

“[O]nce demagogy and falsehoods become routine, there isn’t much for the political journalist to do except handicap the race and report on the candidate’s mood.”
― George Packer

“En amour, on appelle ça un étalon; en politique, un démagogue. Le secret de la réussite, c'est de ne penser qu'à la jouissance de l'autre.”
― Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt

“There can be no right to truth except recognition and knowledge of truth. Once we try to establish the right to truth and God, we leave the territory of truth and enter the domain of demagogy and deceit. The truth is an almost absolute category, and the same applies to God. What is indisputable or nearly absolute can only be partially known. Still, major monotheistic religions not only steal God, but they steal him (It) absolutely, not somewhat.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“Demagogy must be heavily punished — it resembles psychological Genocide.”
― Sino Melo