Any CSGV demo-shills lurking on this thread, listen up:
QUOTES:
Dr. Will Durant, referencing a Republic: "Man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law."
May 31, 1787, while addressing members of the Constitutional Convention Edmund Randolph said, "We meet here today to provide a cure for the evils under which the United States labored; that in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and trials of democracy...."
1787, Elbridge Gerry, said: "The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want (that is, do not lack) virtue; but are the dupes of pretended patriots."
June 21, 1788, Alexander Hamilton: "It had been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience had proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity."
Alexander Hamilton: "We are a Republican Government. Real liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of Democracy."
Samuel Adams: "Remember, Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself! There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide."
James Madison: "... democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."
John Marshall (Chief Justice of the Supreme Court from 1801 to 1835): "Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos."
Herbert Spencer, English philosopher: "The Republican form of government is the highest form of government; but because of this it requires the highest type of human nature -- a type nowhere at present existing."
Thomas Babington Macaulay: "I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization, or both."
Dryden: "No government had ever been, or ever can be, wherein timeservers and blockheads will not be uppermost."
1795 Immanuel Kant: "Democracy is necessarily despotism."
1850, Benjamin Disraeli, (British House of Commons): "If you establish a democracy, you must in due time reap the fruits of a democracy. You will in due season have great impatience of public burdens, combined in due season with great increase of public expenditures You will in due season have wars entered into from passion and not from reason; and you will in due season submit to peace ignominiously sought and ignominiously obtained, which will diminish your authority and perhaps endanger your independence. You will in due season find your property is less valuable, and your freedom less complete."
Disraeli 1870: "The world is weary, of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians."
James Russell Lowell: "Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor."
W. H. Seward: "Democracies are prone to war, and war consumes them."
Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors."
188? Governor Seymour of New York: "The merit of our Constitution is not that it promotes democracy, but checks it".
Oscar Wilde: "Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people, by the people, for the people."
H. L. Mencken: "The most popular man under a democracy is not the most democratic man, but the most despotic man. The common folk delight in the exaction's of such a man. They like him to boss them. Their natural gait is the goosestep."
Ludwig Lewisohn: "Democracy, which began by liberating men politically, has developed a dangerous tendency to enslave him through the tyranny of majorities and the deadly power of their opinion."
Englishman, G. K. Chesterton: "You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution."
1931, The Duke of Northumberland: "The adoption of Democracy as a form of Government by all European nations is fatal to good Government, to liberty, to law and order, to respect for authority, and to religion, and must eventually produce a state of chaos from which a new world tyranny will arise."
Archibald E. Stevenson: "De Tocqueville once warned us," he wrote, "that: ‘If ever the free institutions of America are destroyed, that event will arise from the unlimited tyranny of the majority.’ But a majority will never be permitted to exercise such ‘unlimited tyranny’ so long as we cling to the American ideals of republican liberty and turn a deaf ear to the siren voices now calling us to democracy. This is not a question relating to the form of government. That can always be changed by constitutional amendment. It is one affecting the underlying philosophy of our system -- a philosophy which brought new dignity to the individual, more safety for minorities and greater justice in the administration of government. We are in grave danger of dissipating this splendid heritage through mistaking it for democracy."
28 Nov 1998, Steven Earl Newberry: "Democracy and Mobocracy are synonyms for a form of government in which the majority (mob) rules, and which by definition, guarantees the absence of minority rights."
15 Nov 2002, Steven Earl Newberry: "Democracy is a noose around Freedom's neck, gradually choking the dreams our founding fathers once had for this country. Democracy itself is not truly to blame, but when applied by people who have no conception or respect for the basic principles of individual's rights and freedoms and no understanding of the intentions our founding fathers had when they established our Constitution and our republican form of government, democracy becomes a great threat to our freedom and the overall health of our country. Excessive taxation is only one of the symptoms of what has become a cancerous disease caused by the rampant and uncontrolled application of democracy, which is now and has for some time, been slowly destroying the building blocks of every individual's freedom. Through excessive taxation, we have all become slaves to our government. Excessive taxation creates a cannibalistic economy that feeds upon itself . Woe be it to those who are still here, when the plate of taxation is barren and has created an economy that has nothing left to feed on."
I suspect the article that these quotes came from is well worth the time to read, if one has it.
And that is exactly why the Bill of Rights was put into the Constitution: to prevent government from using majority vote to suppress the minority. And in that, the RKBA was the foremost thought of the guys who founded the nation. For in an armed citizenry, mob rule is not possible, nor is any form of tyranny from within. The only problem is the lack of will on the part of the people to exercise their authority in the matter.
self bump for later reading