"The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy."
- Carroll Quigley, Author of Tragedy & Hope, Clinton’s mentor
"A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar."
- H. L. Mencken
"Monarchy degenerates into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into savage violence and chaos."
- Polybius 200-118 BCE
"The Roman Republic fell, not because of the ambition of Caesar or Augustus, but because it had already long ceased to be in any real sense a republic at all. When the sturdy Roman plebeian, who lived by his own labor, who voted without reward according to his own convictions, and who with his fellows formed in war the terrible Roman legion, had been changed into an idle creature who craved nothing in life save the gratification of a thirst vapid excitement, who was fed by the state, and who directly or indirectly sold his vote to the highest bidder, then the end of the republic was at hand, and nothing could save it. The laws were the same as they had been, but the people behind the laws had changed, and so the laws counted nothing."
- Theodore Roosevelt
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage."
- Alexander Tytler on the fall of the Athenian republic
"Fifty men have run America, and that's a high figure."
Joseph Kennedy, father of JFK, in the July 26th, 1936 issue of The New York Times
"Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods."
- H. L. Mencken
"
Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood."
Mahatma Gandhi
"Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule – and both commonly succeed, and are right."
H.L. Mencken
"The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants."
Albert Camus
"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."
- Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State under Richard Nixon, about Chile prior to the CIA overthrow of the democratically elected government of President Salvadore Allende in 1973
"Sooner will a camel pass through a needle's eye than a great man be "discovered" by an election."
- (Constitutionally Elected) Adolf Hitler
"The true equation is 'democracy' = government by world financiers...The main mark of modern governments is that we do not know who governs, de facto any more than de jure. We see the politician and not his backer; still less the backer of the backer; or, what is most important of all, the banker of the backer."
- Candour Magazine, 13 July 1956, p. 12
"It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything."
- Joseph Stalin
"If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal."
- Emma Goldman
Our Democracy is a rigged game. It is comparable to a boxing match where one promoter owns both fighters. All the suckers pay and cheer and think they’re influencing the outcome. It’s a false dichotomy where each side is part of a whole monstrous giant: a step to the left, then a step to the right towards world domination. With each step agents and dupes cheer that the giant has finally made a ninety degree turn, one way or the other.