Universal Suffrage Quotes

“The word suffrage has nothing to do with suffering. It's from the Latin 'suffragium' and it's about having a vote, a voice, the right to participate in the making of decisions.
And isn't that the same struggle (which does have to do with suffering) that we are facing in this country? That all adults should have a vote, a voice, the right to participate in the making of decisions?
Universal Suffrage. What Extreme Conditions will it take for us to forge the path to it?”
― Shellen Lubin

“Imagine if one should drag an innocent passer-by from the street to the operating room of a nearby hospital and force him at gunpoint to perform a delicate operation. The man would burst into tears. However, if one were to ask him to sound off on problems such as nuclear experiments, Vietnam, the borders of Israel, support for Indonesia, aid to Latin America, or recognition of Red China, in most cases he would start spouting opinions.”
― Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism Revisited: from de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot

“If she is one of the most valuable of the nation’s citizens she should have a voice in its affairs”
― Constance Smedley

“About the principle of representation and the concept of a parliament, today we have grown accustomed to associating them exclusively with the system of absolute democracy, based on universal suffrage and the principle of one man, one vote. This basis is absurd and indicates more than anything else the individualism that, combined with the pure criterion of quantity and of number, defines modern democracy. We say individualism in the bad sense, because here we are dealing with the individual as an abstract, atomistic and statistical unity, not as a ‘person’, because the quality of a person — that is, a being that has a specific dignity, a unique quality and differentiated traits—is obviously negated and offended in a system in which one vote is the equal of any other, in which the vote of a great thinker, a prince of the Church, an eminent jurist or sociologist, the commander of an army, and so on has the same weight, measured by counting votes, as the vote of an illiterate butcher’s boy, a halfwit, or the ordinary man in the street who allows himself to be influenced in public meetings, or who votes for whoever pays him. The fact that we can talk about ‘progress’ in reference to a society where we have reached the level of considering all this as normal is one of the many absurdities that, perhaps, in better times will be the cause of amazement or amusement.”
― Julius Evola, Fascism Viewed from the Right

“[I]t was not until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that black citizens had proper recourse for violations of their voting rights through the Department of Justice. . . . .The Voting Rights Act itself was weakened by a 2013 ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court, which overturned the act's most effective enforcement tool, Section 5, requiring jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimmination to seek federal approval before making any changes to voting rules. Voter suppression, not only in the nothern states, but in districts with minority populations within many other states all around the country, remains a pressing problem. Access to tje vote is still manipulated for partisan political advantage, amd true universal suffrage remains an elusive goal.”
― Elaine F. Weiss

“Unlike conservatives and cautious liberals, fascists never wanted to keep the masses out of politics. They wanted to enlist, discipline, and energize them. In any event, by the end of World War I, there was no possible turning back to a narrow suffrage. Young men almost everywhere had been summoned to die for their countries, and one could hardly deny the full rights of citizenship to any of them. Women, too, whose economic and social roles the war had expanded enormously, received the vote in many northern European countries (though not yet in France, Italy, Spain, or Switzerland). While fascists sought to restore patriarchy in the family and the workplace, they preferred to mobilize sympathetic women rather than disfranchise them, at least until they could abolish voting altogether.”
― Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism

“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

“By holding out to the people a new right—the right to vote—it becomes possible set on them a radically new duty, a duty that no peasant population would have so readily accepted: the duty to wage war. This was always the justification of the nobility's privilege: they ruled because they fought, and they fought because they ruled.”
― Daniel Schwindt

“Universal suffrage enfranchised everyone and, in doing so, reduced everyone's power to the smallest share possible. While this was acceptable when it was conceived as impotence over others, it becomes intolerable when we realize that our power over ourselves is included in the bargain. The individual in a regime of universal suffrage has an absolute minimum of influence.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“Whether we are speaking of the philosophical history of the concept (universal suffrage) or the contemporary reality of its application, everyone stops somewhere. They all set a limit, even if that limit is the requirement of adulthood (a completely arbitrary classification if there ever was one). This unwillingness to apply the principle completely tells us something: First, it tells us that almost everyone knows that there ought to be some sort of qualification for electoral participation; and second, it tells us that no one knows exactly what this qualification ought to be. Because everyone agrees, even if unconsciously, on the first point—that qualifications there must be—then we can consider this an implicit acknowledgment that universal suffrage, even where it is preached, must be considered a purely sentimental notion which no one is actually willing to implement. We may then set about examining the second point, concerning the necessity and nature of the qualifications that ought to be set before the voting citizen.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“Well, we are showing them that government does not rest upon force at all: it rests upon consent”
― Emmeline Pankhurst