Quotes About Demagogues

#1. The church of Jesus Christ ought to be the last people to fall for hucksters and demagogues. After all, the church bears the Spirit of God, who gifts the Body with discernment and wisdom. But too often we do.

Russell D. Moore

#2. The tyranny of this dictatorship isn't primarily the fault of Big Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work. It's the fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups, who have let the demogogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest." 14

Sinclair Lewis

#3. In every age the vilest specimens of human nature are to be found among demagogues.

Thomas B. Macaulay

#4. 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

#5. It only takes a few politicians to stoke division, or a few demagogues encouraging hatred to set your kind upon one another. And then before you know it, you have a whole nation biting on its own tail, going round and round until there is nothing left but the snapping of teeth.

Paolo Bacigalupi

#6. Those who have not, and live in want, are a menace, Ridden with envy and fooled by demagogues.

Euripides

#7. Demagogues thrive in dim light.

Garrison Keillor

#8. There is a limit to the success of conservative populism and the exploitation of "little guy" or "silent majority" rhetoric, and it is very often reached because of the emaciated, corrupted personalities of the demagogues themselves.

Christopher Hitchens

#9. Demagogues like [Donald] Trump come along. He says I know what the cause is. Remember, later, the cause was that Mexicans who are coming to this country, well, they were criminals or rapists. Now it is Muslims.

Bernie Sanders

#10. The habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#11. You have delivered up our holy German Fatherland to one of the greatest demagogues of all time. I solemnly prophesy that this accursed man will cast our Reich into the abyss and bring our nation to inconceivable misery. Future generations will damn you in your grave for what you have done.

Erich Ludendorff

#12. Hamilton's besetting fear was that American democracy would be spoiled by demagogues who would mouth populist shibboleths to conceal their despotism.

Ron Chernow

#13. Athens' biggest worry was the sheer recklessness of its own democratic government. A simple majority of the citizenry, urged on and incensed by clever demagogues, might capriciously send out military forces in unnecessary and exhausting adventures.

Thucydides

#14. Demagogues and agitators are very unpleasant, they are incidental to a free and constitutional country, and you must put up with these inconveniences or do without many important advantages.

Benjamin Disraeli

#15. Better the rule of One, whom all obey, than to let clamorous demagogues betray our freedom with the kiss of anarchy.

Oscar Wilde

#16. Because of demagogues, rhetoric has a tainted reputation in our time. However, rhetoric is central to democratic governance. It can fuse passion and persuasion, moving free people to freely choose what is noble.

George F. Will

#17. What faith has not been used by demagogues as a club over somebody's head?

Francis Collins

#18. Where the laws are not authoritative demagogues arise. For the populace becomes a monarch when it turns from many into a single composite, since the many are in authority not as particular persons but all together.

Aristotle.

#19. From the right, you get demagogues shouting about brown-skinned anchor babies and clamoring to deport the undocumented. From the left, you get advocacy for the oppressed but otherwise, when it comes to national civic identity, mainly silence.

Eric Liu

#20. Where the laws are not supreme, there demagogues spring up.

Aristotle.

#21. We have learned to see racism in the spittle-laced epithets of the angry bigot. We must also learn to see racism in the coded racial entreaties promoted by calculating demagogues.

Ian F. Haney-Lopez

#22. Inequality provokes a generalized anger that finds targets where it can
immigrants, foreign countries, American elites, government in all forms
and it rewards demagogues while discrediting reformers.

George Packer

#23. We can't ignore right-wing demagogues who insist that the word of the doctor who proclaims a child's sex at birth somehow holds more sway over the reality of the body than the word of the person who inhabits it. - Gwendolyn Ann Smith

Kate Bornstein

#24. You [demagogues] are like the fishers for eels; in still waters they catch nothing, but if they thoroughly stir up the slime, their fishing is good; in the same way it's only in troublous times that you line your pockets.

Aristophanes

#25. Weltschmerz, basically, is the depression we feel when bamboozlers, fanatics, manipulators, trolls, bigots, demagogues, fear-mongers, liars and prigs threaten to take over the world, and there's nothing, we think, we can do about it.

Em L. Smith

#26. Aristotle warned that inequality brought instability, while Plato believed that demagogues exploited free speech to install themselves as tyrants.

Timothy Snyder

#27. America's two great specialties are demagogues and rock and roll, and we've all heard plenty of both in our time.

Stephen King

#28. Through knowledge and understanding we will drive from the temple of freedom all who seek to establish over us thought control - whether they be agents of a foreign power or demagogues thirsty for personal power and public notice.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#29. Demagogues always do well in economic downturns.

John Avlon

#30. Freedom of press and freedom of speech: What a blessing for a country while in the hands of honest, patriotic men; what a curse if in the hands of designing demagogues.

William J.H. Boetcker

#31. I think that person who actually proposes things, who will save Medicare, will be in a lot stronger position than someone who demagogues the issue.

Tom Latham

#32. Nor is the guilt entirely with the warmongers, plutocrats and demagogues. If people permit exploitation and regimentation in any name, they deserve their slavery. A tyrant does not make his tyranny possible. It is made by the people and not otherwise.

Jack Parsons

#33. Patriotism is not sentimental nonsense. Nor something dreamed up by demagogues. Patriotism is as necessary a part of man's evolutionary equipment as are his eyes, as useful to the race as eyes are to the individual.

Robert A. Heinlein

#34. Whiskey is carried into committee rooms in demijohns and carried out in demagogues.

Mark Twain

#35. The wealth that was created by my investments wasn't put into a giant swimming pool as so many elected demagogues seem to imagine. Instead it benefitted our employees, their families and our community at large.

Kenneth Langone

#36. Are there any monuments built to demagogues? I just don't think so.

Cory Booker

#37. A mass of ignorant, culturally degraded citizens easily becomes an immense drag on the system. They become easy prey to demagogues and applaud every attempt to undermine the foundations of that "natural liberty" which they have enjoyed in the first place.

Arthur Herman

#38. We cannot be wise while in the grip of a deep fear ... This is why demagogues, when seeking our support, will first cause us to fear and hate, knowing when we are in the grip of a great fear, we will abandon common sense and wisdom, we will forsake the hard-won lessons of time and experience.

Philip Gulley

#39. A democracy is no more than an aristocracy of orators. The people are so readily moved by demagogues that control must be exercised by the government over speech and press.

Thomas Hobbes

#40. If a single nutty or dangerous vision comes to be sufficiently widely shared, demagogues may be able to ride it to power.

Christopher H. Achen

#41. Just as demagogues lead their well-intentioned followers into tragedy, so the jungle inevitable reclaims it's own.

Jeff Gunn

#42. Machiavelli had some cold tricks for people who wanted to be demagogues and wanted to take over the world.

Mads Mikkelsen

#43. A short time ago the demagogues blamed capitalism for the poverty of the masses. Today they rather blame capitalism for the "affluence" that it bestows upon the common man.

Ludwig Von Mises

#44. It's political Daddyism and it's as old as demagogues and despotism.

Barry Goldwater

#45. Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other.

H.L. Mencken

#46. The people excited by ambitious demagogues, sooner or later return into the hands of the Aristocracy.

Napoleon Bonaparte

#47. 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.