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

Democracy... is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder; and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.
Plato

Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.
Plato

Democracy passes into despotism.
Plato

Tyranny naturally arises out of democracy.
Plato

I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.
Walt Whitman

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

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.
John Adams

Democracy is the road to socialism.
Karl Marx

An ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.
Voltaire

The ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.
Voltaire

Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a President and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

I think it is absolutely essential in a democracy to have competition in the media, a lot of competition, and we seem to be moving away from that.
Walter Cronkite

I swear to the Lord, I still can't see, why Democracy means, everybody but me.
Langston Hughes

It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.
George Orwell

Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.
P. J. O'Rourke

A free America... means just this: individual freedom for all, rich or poor, or else this system of government we call democracy is only an expedient to enslave man to the machine and make him like it.
Frank Lloyd Wright

A pure democracy is a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person.
James Madison

In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued - they may be essential to survival.
Noam Chomsky