Interesting Quotes
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be - Thomas Jefferson
How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don't think - Adolf Hitler
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
Landholders ought to have a share in the government to support these invaluable interests and check the other many. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority - James Madison
The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling power. Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing - Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power – Giovanni Gentile Encyclopedia Italiana (Mussolini later claimed credit for the quote)
We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth in a few hands, but we can't have both. - Louis D. Brandeis
Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of unspoken, but constant and uniform association, not to raise the wages of labor above their actual rate...[but] Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular associations to lower the wages of labor even below this rate - Adam Smith
Naturally, the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship ...Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. - Hermann Goering, Nazi Air Force commander (Nuremberg Trials)
Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception - Mark Twain (from The Mysterious Stranger)
There is no subjugation so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom, for in that way one captures volition itself - Jean Jacques Rousseau
Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise - Adolf Hitler
I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America - Alexis de Tocqueville
If children are raised in common in the midst of equality...let us not doubt that...they will learn to cherish one another as brothers, never to want anything but what the society wants - Jean-Jacques Rousseau