Check on Obama’s missing birth certificate?
“We cannot thwart the will of the people.”
James Madison (essay #10 of the Federalist Papers):
“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.”
Thomas Jefferson:
“A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.”
Benjamin Franklin:
“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.”
Alexander Hamilton:
“We are a republican government. Real liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments.”
John Adams:
“Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself.”
This quote is suspect because it doesn't sound like Franklin. It's a bit too short and direct for the old master.
And the word "lunch" didn't come into common use until the 1920's. The word was always "luncheon" until then. Franklin, in his era, wold have used the word "supper".
All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him.
If it be aristocratic in organization, then it seeks to protect the man who is superior only in law against the man who is superior in fact; if it be democratic, then it seeks to protect the man who is inferior in every way against both.
One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible . . . to search out and combat originality among them.
All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives.The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.
Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it.
And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are. . . .The ideal government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone—one which barely escapes being no government at all.
This ideal, I believe, will be realized in the world twenty or thirty centuries after I have taken up my public duties in Hell.
- H.L. Mencken,