Democracy Fails Quotes

“The moment you hand over YOUR responsibility to manage your own rights, morality, and freedoms - to the government, that is the moment democracy fails.”
― Christina Engela, Black Sunrise

“It was not, however, to these Fascist groups, numerically unimportant as they were, that the Third Republic owed its collapse. On the contrary, the plain, if paradoxical, truth is that their influence was never so slight as at the moment when the collapse actually took place. What made France fall was the fact that she had no more true Dreyfusards, no one who believed that democracy and freedom, equality and justice could any longer be defended or realized under the republic.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“The City, Netherton had heard Lowbeer say, explaining the "klept" to Flynne, had long been, and well prior to the jackpot, a unique species of semi-autonomous crypto-state, the single least democratic element of elected British government. It was this singular status, according to Lowbeer, that had allowed it to ride out the eventual collapse of democracy. That, and its core expertise in laundering money, had brought it into a mutually beneficial synergy with the émigré oligarch community, dominated by Russians, who had themselves first been attracted to London by the City’s meta-criminal financial arcana, plus the lavish culture of personal amenities for those requiring same.”
― William Gibson, Agency

“Democracy is like spider web. If any negligible right decision falls into them they entrap it. But big wrong decision break through & escape it.”
― Atef Ashab Uddin Sahil

“ust discrimination,” in other words, “preference based on merit” is conspicuously absent in a process which, in our society, has a deep and wide influence as a sanctified example—political elections. Whether it is a genuinely democratic election in the West or a plebiscitarian comedy in the East, the one-man-one-vote principle is now taken for granted. The knowledge, the experience, the merits, the standing in the community, the sex, the wealth, the taxes, the military record of the voter do not count, only the vegetable principle of age—he must be 18, 21, 24 years old and still “on the hoof.” The 21-year-old semiliterate prostitute and the 65-year-old professor of political science who has lost an arm in the war, has a large family, carries a considerable tax burden, and has a real understanding of the political problems on which he is expected to cast his ballot—they are politically equal as citizens. Compared with a 20-year-old student of political science our friendly little prostitute actually rates higher as a voter.”
― Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism Revisited: from de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot

“Could America lose faith with democracy? “People are strongly committed to the concept of democracy and yet China has had massive growth and way better infrastructure under totalitarianism,” Gundlach mused. “What are we doing when our outcomes are inferior? Is it possible we could change in that regard? Yes, it is possible. I think we are going to see substantial changes in the next six years.” That might even include the U.S. breaking into more than one country, he said.”
― Jeffrey Gundlach, DoubleLine Capital CEO

“Democracy was never inherited. Every generation will have to decide whether to choose or lose it.”
― Syllabus Onajobi, The Last Year of Democracy: How Democracy Fails, Betrays the People, and the Constitution Crumbles—and How Citizens Can Resist Authoritarianism, ... Political Polarization