C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Democracy
Democracy means not “I am as good as you are,” but “You are as good as I am.”
Your little child is the only true democrat.
Democracy is a mischievous dream.
The love of democracy is that of equality.
In Europe democracy is a falsehood.
Democracies are prone to war, and war consumes them.
Democracy is the government of the people, by the people, for the people.
In every village there will arise a miscreant to establish the most grinding tyranny by calling himself the people.
Christ was the first true democrat that ever breathed, as the old dramatist Dekkar said he was the first true gentleman.
Democracy will itself accomplish the salutary universal change from delusive to real, and make a new blessed world of us by and by.
If there were a people consisting of gods, they would be governed democratically. So perfect a government is not suitable to men.
Democracy is always the work of kings. Ashes, which in themselves are sterile, fertilize the land they are cast upon.
The idea of bringing all men on an equality with each other has always been a pleasant dream; the law cannot equalize men in spite of nature.
I cannot help concurring with the opinion that an absolute democracy, no more than absolute monarchy, is to be reckoned among the legitimate forms of government.
He was a democrat in the best sense, earnestly desiring the elevation of the people to a higher plane of intellectual and moral life, as well as their political emancipation.
Democracy is the healthful life-blood which circulates through the veins and arteries, which supports the system, but which ought never to appear externally, and as the mere blood itself.
To govern according to the sense, and agreeably to the interests of the people is a great and glorious object of government. This object cannot be obtained but through the medium of popular election, and popular election is a mighty evil.
Lycurgus being asked why he, who in other respects appeared to be so zealous for the equal rights of men, did not make his government democratical rather than oligarchical, “Go you,” replied the legislator, “and try a democracy in your own house.”
It is the most beautiful truth in morals that we have no such thing as a distinct or divided interest from our race. In their welfare is ours, and by choosing the broadest paths to effect their happiness we choose the surest and the shortest to our own.
A father of the church said that property was theft, many centuries before Proudhon was born. Bourdaloue reaffirmed it. Montesquieu was the inventor of national workshops and of the theory that the state owed every man a living. Nay, was not the church herself the first organized democracy?
There is still another inconveniency in conquests made by democracies; their government is ever odious to the conquered states. It is apparently monarchical, but in reality it is more oppressive than monarchy, as the experience of all ages and countries evinces. Montesquieu.