“Democracy! Bah! When I hear that word I reach for my feather Boa!”
“Democracy: In which you say what you like and do what you're told.”
“Democracy is not so much a form of government as a set of principles.”
“That a peasant may become king does not render the kingdom democratic.”
“In a democracy everybody has a right to be represented, including the jerks.”
“I believe in democracy, because it releases the energies of every human being.”
“Freedom without obligation is anarchy. Freedom without obligation is democracy.”
“Democracy is also a form of religion. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses.”
“The freeman, casting with unpurchased hand the vote that shakes the turrets of the land.”
“Two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.”
“Democracy is a process by which the people are free to choose the man who will get the blame.”
“America is the place where you cannot kill your government by killing the men who conduct it.”
“Chinks in America's egalitarian armor are not hard to find. Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.”
“I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.”
“The ship of Democracy, which has weathered all storms, may sink through the mutiny of those aboard.”
“Democracy encourages the majority to decide things about which the majority is blissfully ignorant.”
“Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.”
“The best way of learning to be an independent sovereign state is to be an independent sovereign state.”
“Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.”
“Everybody's for democracy in principle. It's only in practice that the thing gives rise to stiff objections.”
“Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.”
“Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.”
“The worst thing I can say about democracy is that it has tolerated the Right Honorable Gentleman for four and a half years.”
“Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin.”
“Everything that is right or natural pleads for separation. The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, 'Tis time to part.”
“Democracy is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequal alike.”
“Democracy don't rule the world, you better get that in your head; this world is ruled by violence, but I guess that's better left unsaid.”
“We once worried that democracy could not survive if an undereducated populace knew too little. Now we worry if it can survive us knowing too much.”
“I am a democrat only on principle, not by instinct -- nobody is that. Doubtless some people say they are, but this world is grievously given to lying.”
“It is not enough to merely defend democracy. To defend it may be to lose it; to extend it is to strengthen it. Democracy is not property; it is an idea.”