Majorities Quotes

#1. Thought that is silenced is always rebellious. Majorities, of course, are often mistaken. This is why the silencing of minorities is necessarily dangerous. Criticism and dissent are the indispensable antidote to major delusions.

Alan Barth

#2. Mankind will in time discover that unbridled majorities are as tyrannical and cruel as unlimited despots.

John Adams

#3. I don't actually subscribe to the view that all power corrupts. But absolute power - when secured on the back of massive parliamentary majorities, which don't reflect the balance of political opinion in the country - can corrupt absolutely.

Charles Kennedy

#4. The fact disclosed by a survey of the past that majorities have been wrong must not blind us to the complementary fact that majorities have usually not been entirely wrong.

Herbert Spencer

#5. Majorities and minorities cannot rightfully be taken at all into account in deciding questions of justice.

Lysander Spooner

#6. Individual rights are not subject to a public vote. A majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority. The political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities, and the smallest minority on earth is the individual.

Ayn Rand

#7. Decision by majorities is as much an expedient as lighting by gas.

William E. Gladstone

#8. By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes is his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.

John Acton

#9. Tradition with all its happy assumptions and necessary evils, all of its content majorities and stout killers, is not always a reliable guide.

Matthew Scully

#10. The United States Congress, acting with large bipartisan majorities, at the urging of the President, enacted as the law of the land that all children are to be above average.

Charles A. Murray

#11. Majorities, of course, start with minorities.

Robert Moses

#12. Democracy is nothing but the Tyranny of Majorities, the most abominable tyranny of all, for it is not based on the authority of a religion, not upon the nobility of a race, not on the merits of talents and of riches. It merely rests upon numbers and hides behind the name of the people.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

#13. By nature, every individual has the right to govern himself; and governments, whether founded on majorities or minorities, must derive their right from the assent, expressed or implied, of the governed,, and be subject to such limitations as they may impose.

John C. Calhoun

#14. The minorities are sometimes right. The majorities never.

George Bernard Shaw

#15. Despots and democratic majorities are drunk with power.

Ludwig Von Mises

#16. It does not do to rely too much on silent majorities, Evey, for silence is a fragile thing...
One loud noise, and it's gone.

Alan Moore

#17. History has never been dominated by majorities, but only by dedicated minorities who stand unconditionally on their faith.

Rousas John Rushdoony

#18. Her [Jurdge Sandra Day O'Connor] judgment has also been critical in protecting our environmental rights. She joined in 5-4 majorities affirming reproductive freedom and religious freedom and the Voting Rights Act.

Patrick Leahy

#19. To say that majorities, as such, have a right to rule minorities, is equivalent to saying that minorities have, and ought to have, no rights, except such as majorities please to allow them.

Lysander Spooner

#20. Demand the ballot as the undeniable right of every man who is called to the poll, and take special care that the old constitutional rule and principle, by which majorities alone shall decide in Parliamentary elections, shall not be violated.

John Bright

#21. In Britain, polls show large majorities in favour of mansion taxes and higher taxes on the finance sector.

Geoff Mulgan

#22. There is a powerful desire by majorities to assert a religious identity for the country.

Jack Balkin

#23. When the American people elected Barack Obama and large Democrat majorities, the die was cast. ObamaCare was coming. Popular or not, constitutional or not, affordable or not, it didn't matter.

Bob Beauprez

#24. F.D.R. had an economic crisis of unprecedented proportions in 1933 when he drove 15 major bills through the Congress, and super majorities in the House and the Senate in 1935 when he won passage of Social Security.

Robert Dallek

#25. Beautiful women must think about their beauty as capitalists think about their investments or politicians about their majorities; it is all they have to insure their places in the world.

Cyril Connolly

#26. You know, a lot of the people that are running. We want to go in; we want to have majorities. It's very important.

Donald Trump

#27. There is a qualitative difference between being a minority and being a majority. Majorities are stronger under psychological pressure because numbers count. But only if they are aware of it.

Peter Abrahams

#28. One great object of the Constitution was to restrain majorities from oppressing minorities or encroaching upon their just rights.

James K. Polk

#29. Majorities are generally wrong, if only in their reasons for being right.

George Saintsbury

#30. It is the soldier and the army, not parliamentary majorities and decisions, that have welded the German Empire together. I put my trust in the army.

Wilhelm II

#31. The parliamentary principle of decision by majorities only appears during quite short periods of history, and those are always periods of decadence in nations and States.

Adolf Hitler

#32. I don't like music docs, usually. There's nothing to really say. What can you say about music? Normally, you can't say too much. There are a few really good ones, but the majorities are boring, I think.

Malik Bendjelloul

#33. Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities.

Thomas Jefferson

#34. Realism in foreign policy is made up of a clear set of values, since difficult foreign policy decisions are often decided with the narrowest of majorities. Without any sense of what is right and wrong, one would drown in a flood of difficult and pragmatic decisions.

Henry A. Kissinger

#35. The tyranny of majorities may be as bad as the tyranny of kings.

Arthur Balfour

#36. It is a logical absurdity to equate democracy with freedom in the way that mainstream political philosophers and commentators typically do. A system where individuals and minorities are at the mercy of unconstrained majorities hardly constitutes freedom in any meaningful sense.

Keith Preston

#37. Elect us, hold us accountable, and make a judgment and then go from there. But I do tell you that if the Democrats win, and have substantial majorities, the Congress of the United States will be more bipartisan.

Nancy Pelosi

#38. The very purpose of a bill of rights is to withdraw certain subjects from ... political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities.

Robert H. Jackson

#39. Being 'at the mercy of legislative majorities' is merely another way of describing the basic American plan: representative democracy.

Robert Bork

#40. Incumbents are safe, but party majorities are not. This fosters symbolic votes, message politics and little serious legislating in Congress.

Thomas E. Mann

#41. Democracy is for infidels. A real Muslim is not a democrat because he doesn't care about the opinions of majorities and minorities don't interest him. He is only interested in what Islam says.

Abdul Sattar Abu Risha

#42. This is the age in which thin and theoretic minorities can cover and conquer unconscious and untheoretic majorities.

G.K. Chesterton

#43. Jews, blacks and homosexuals are despised by the Christian and Communist majorities of East and West. Also, as a result of the invention of Israel, Jews can now count on the hatred of the Islamic world.

Gore Vidal

#44. The essence of constitutionalism in a democracy is not merely to shape and condition the nature of majorities, but also to stipulate that certain things are impermissible, no matter how large and fervent a majority might want them.

George Will

#45. They're still a subject beholden to special interests, but at least they have a national constituency. At least they have to think about national majorities.

Mark Shields

#46. The Bill of Rights does not come from the people and is not subject to change by majorities. It comes from the nature of things. It declares the inalienable rights of man not only against all government but also against the people collectively.

Walter Lippmann

#47. Democracy, which began by liberating man politically, has developed a dangerous tendency to enslave him through the tyranny of majorities and the deadly power of their opinion.

Ludwig Lewisohn

#48. Acting alone, minorities can never achieve the majorities necessary for political change.

Hillary Clinton

#49. From the fact that most Americans want others to fund or subsidize their healthcare, it does not follow that they have such a right. A need is not a right. A man's life, liberty and the products of his labor were not intended to be up for grabs by grubby, greedy majorities.

Ilana Mercer