Democracy, R.I.P.

[marmar]

"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists".

- Abbie Hoffman

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"If the concepts 'enemy' and 'fear' constitute the 'energetic principles' of politics, a democratic political system is impossible, whether the fear is produced from within or without... If freedom is absence of restraints, the restraints to be removed are many, but the psychological restraint of fear ranks first."

- Franz Neumann

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"If democracy is such a good thing, let's have more of it."

- Dick Gregory

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"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."

- Louis D. Brandeis

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"Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are, in principle, under autocratic control. Thus, a corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist, that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level... Just as I'm opposed to political fascism, I am opposed to economic fascism. I think that until the major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it's pointless to talk about democracy".

- Noam Chomsky

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"When people refuse to obey, then democracy comes alive."

- Howard Zinn

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"And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing...a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods."

- Aldous Huxley

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"The real difference between democracy and oligarchy is poverty and wealth. Wherever men rule by reason of their wealth, whether they be few of many, that is an oligarchy, and where the poor rule, that is democracy".

- Aristotle

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"Democracy restores to man a consciousness of his value, teaches him by the removal of authority and oppression to listen to the dictates of reason, gives him confidence to treat all other men as his fellow human beings, and induces him to regard them no longer as enemies against whom to be upon his guard, but as brethren whom it becomes him to assist".

- William Godwin

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"There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide".

- Samuel Adams

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"The inevitable outcome of Democracy is the control by the people themselves, not only of their own political organization, but through that, also of the main instruments of wealth production; the gradual substitution of organized cooperation for the anarchy of the competitive struggle… The economic side of the democratic ideal is, in fact, socialism itself".

- Sidney Webb

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"The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment".

- Robert Maynard Hutchins