Demagogue Quotes

#1. The sure foundations of the state are laid in knowledge, not in ignorance; and every sneer at education, at culture, at book learning, which is the recorded wisdom of the experience of mankind, is the demagogue's sneer at intelligent liberty, inviting national degeneracy and ruin.

George William Curtis

#2. Demagogue
a vessel containing beer and other liquids.

Mark Twain

#3. He was as absurd as an Athenian demagogue, about whom Dr Faure had that morning been characteristically rude, since they were foreign, given to unnatural vices, and favoured democracy. Being thirteen, it was the unnatural vices that interested us.

Jonathan Grimwood

#4. Howard Dean is a cruel and extremist demagogue. And Howard Dean is as ignorant on John Ashcroft as he is on national security. If this cruel, loudmouth extremist is the cream of the Democrat crop, next November's going to make the 1984 election look like a squeaker.

Tom DeLay

#5. It was the mob that swept him into office. However, it's unlikely that when more sober elements prevail they'll want to support a cripple and demagogue who depends on inflaming the mass with his lies and spellbinding.

Philip K. Dick

#6. The American doctrinaire is the converse of the American demagogue, and, in this way, is scarcely less injurious to the public. The first deals in poetry, the last in cant. He is as much a visionary on one side, as the extreme theoretical democrat is a visionary on the other.

James F. Cooper

#7. The mass of mankind, Burke implies, reason hardly at all, in the higher sense, nor ever can: deprived of folk-wisdom and folk-law, which are prejudice and prescription, they can do no more than cheer the demagogue, enrich the charlatan, and submit to the despot.

Russell Kirk

#8. The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

H.L. Mencken

#9. Better a loving single-parent family than a 'conventional' family where the parents hate each other and the father is a demagogue.

Moby

#10. There were still too many people who were afraid of a technology that eluded them, still more who would never have access and resented and feared it in equal measures. Mobilize those groups just once, find a demagogue-and there always were demagogues-and the nets would find themselves destroyed.

Melissa Scott

#11. Donald Trump removed all doubt. He is running for president as a fascist demagogue.

Rachel Maddow

#12. The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so they believe they are clever as he.

Karl Kraus

#13. A demagogue is a person with whom we disagree as to which gang should mismanage the country.

Don Marquis

#14. Nothing is more calculated to make a demagogue popular than a constantly reiterated demand for heavy taxes on the rich. Capital levies and high income taxes on the larger incomes are extraordinarily popular with the masses, who do not have to pay them.

Ludwig Von Mises

#15. Everyone wants to demagogue everyone else. That may be good politics, but it's awful policy.

Chris Christie

#16. We have passed the age of the demagogue, the man who has little to say and says it loud. We have come to the age of the mystagogue or don, the man who has nothing to say, but says it softly and impressively in an indistinct whisper.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#17. To understand Hitler's power as a speaker, we must consider that he was not just the bellowing tavern demagogue we always picture, but in fact constructed his speeches very deliberately.

Volker Ullrich

#18. Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds expression in the anonymity of the Corporate State. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism, and the Constitution while manipulating internal levers.

Chris Hedges

#19. To play the demagogue for purposes of self-interest is a cardinal sin against the people in a democracy, exactly as to play the courtier for such purposes is a cardinal sin against the people under other forms of government.

Theodore Roosevelt

#20. The hack is like a politician who consults the polls before he takes a position. He's a demagogue. He panders.

Steven Pressfield

#21. I am hopelessly divided between the dark and the good, the rebel and the saint, the sex maniac and the monk, the poet and the priest, the demagogue and the populist. Pen to paper, I've put it all down, every bit from the heart.
I'm going out on a limb here, so watch my back.

Billy Idol

#22. A demagogue must be neither an educated nor an honest man; he has to be an ignoramus and a rogue.

Aristophanes

#23. The demagogue does not manipulate the people; instead, the "ruler who behaves like a subject"57 slavishly follows the will of the people and fails to chart a course for the city beyond the narrows of popularity and passion. The demagogue runs democracy into the ground. But

Michael Signer

#24. So next time you hear a raving demagogue counseling hatred for other, slightly different groups of humans, for a moment at least see if you can understand his problem: He is heeding an ancient call that - however dangerous, obsolete, and maladaptive it may be today - once benefitted our species.

Carl Sagan

#25. As for [Amiri] Baraka, he and I have disagreements. I mean, he becomes a demagogue when there's an audience. He's a nice guy in private. I mean I like the guy; he's a terrific writer. I've published two of his books. Baraka is one of these fundamentalists who is prone to idol worship.

Ishmael Reed

#26. The secret of the demagogue is to appear as dumb as his audience so that these people can believe themselves as smart as he is.

Rebecca Goldstein

#27. [Y]ou possess all the attributes of a demagogue; a screeching, horrible voice, a perverse, crossgrained nature and the language of the market-place. In you all is united which is needful for governing.

Aristophanes

#28. The conservatives nearly always tolerate the demagogue while he is destroying liberals.

Harry Golden

#29. But they were as different as fire and ice. Robert Kennedy thought Eugene McCarthy was pompous, petty, and venal. McCarthy thought Kennedy was a spoiled, unintelligent demagogue.

Jack Newfield

#30. We've got a great percentage of our population that, to our great shame, either cannot or, equally unfortunate, will not read. And that portion of our public is growing. Those people are suckers for the demagogue.

Walter Cronkite

#31. Of old, the demagogue was also a general, and then democracies changed into tyrannies. Most of the ancient tyrants were originally demagogues. They are not so now, but they were then; and the reason is that they were generals and not orators, for oratory had not yet come into fashion.

Aristotle.

#32. I do not write for a select minority, which means nothing to me, nor for that adulated platonic entity known as 'The Masses'. Both abstractions, so dear to the demagogue, I disbelieve in. I write for myself and for my friends, and I write to ease the passing of time.

Jorge Luis Borges

#33. This is revolution in reaction, as well as in radicalism, and Toryism speaking a jargon of law and order may often be a graver menace to liberty than radicalism bellowing the empty phrases of the soapbox demagogue.

Frank I. Cobb

#34. Behind each breakaway movement is a breakaway demagogue who will set up his breakaway demagogue government.

Frank Zappa