Democracy
arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are
equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be
absolutely equal.
Men
are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition
to put moral chains upon their own appetites...
Society
cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed
somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.
I
know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people
themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their
control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them,
but to inform their discretion by education.
An
association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which
has never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town
meeting or a vestry.
A
democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only
exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the
public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the
candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result
that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a
dictatorship.
The
average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred
years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence:
from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from
courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness,
from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to
dependency, from dependency back to bondage.
Many
forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of
sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or
all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of
government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to
time.
Under
democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove
that the other party is unfit to rule — and both commonly succeed, and are
right.
Every
state begins in compulsion; but the habits of obedience become the
content of conscience, and soon every citizen thrills with loyalty to the
flag.
The
citizen is right; for however the state begins, it soon becomes an
indispensable prop to order.
I
was guilty of judging capitalism by its operations and socialism by its
hopes and aspirations; capitalism by its works and socialism by its
literature.
Most
socialist doctrines and movements are literally saturated with the mood
of death, catastrophe and destruction... One could regard the death of
mankind as the final result to which the development of socialism leads.
At
the heart of the socialist vision is the notion that a compassionate
society can create more humane living conditions for all through government
"planning" and control of the economy...
Idealist
socialists create systems in which idealists are almost certain to lose and be
superseded by those whose drive for power, and ruthlessness in achieving it,
make them the "fittest" to survive under a system where government power is
the ultimate prize...
The
issue is not what anyone intends but what consequences are in fact likely to
follow.