• "We are now forming a Republican form of government. Real Liberty is not found in the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments. If we incline too much to democracy, we shall soon shoot into a monarchy, or some other form of dictatorship."
  --Alexander Hamilton

  
  

• "...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."
  --James Madison, Federalist No. 10 (arguing in favor of a constitutional republic)

  
  

• "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."
  -- John Adams, 1814

  
  

• "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."
  -- Duke of Northumberland, 1931

  
  

• "Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos."
  -- John Marshall, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court

  
  

• "I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization, or both."
  -- Thomas Babington Macaulay

  
  

• "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury."
  -- Alexander Tytler

  
  

• "Democracy is a form of worship. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses."
  -- H.L. Mencken

  
  

• "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

  
  

• "Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage."
  -- H.L. Mencken

  
  

• "Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people."
  -- Oscar Wilde

  
  

• "Any political party that includes the word 'democratic' in its name, isn't."
  -- Patrick Murray

  
  

• "Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance."
  -- H.L. Mencken

  
  

• "If we advert to the nature of republican government, we shall find that the censorial power is in the people over the government, and not in the government over the people."
  -- James Madison

  
  

• "The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections."
  -- Lord Acton

  
  

• "Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few."
  -- George Bernard Shaw

  
  

• "All the civilizations we know have been created and directed by small intellectual aristocracies, never by people in the mass. The power of crowds is only to destroy."
  -- Jean de la Fontaine, Fables (1668)

  
  

• "If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
  -- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)

  
  

• "It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority...from the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason."
  -- Lord Acton

  
  

• "The people as a body cannot deliberate. Nevertheless, they will feel an irresistible impulse to act, and their resolutions will be dictated to them by their demagogues... and the violent men, who are the most forward to gratify those passions, will be their favorites. What is called the government of the people is in fact too often the arbitrary power of such men. Here, then, we have the faithful portrait of democracy."
  -- Fisher Ames, The Dangers of American Liberty (1805)

  
  

• "The tendencies of democracies are, in all things, to mediocrity, since the tastes, knowledge, and principles of the majority form the tribunal of appeal."
  -- James Fenimore Cooper, The American Democrat (1838)