This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
A statesman should follow public opinion as a coachman follows his horses; having firm hold on the reins, and guiding them.
To be loved for what one is, is the greatest exception. The great majority love in others only what they lend him, their own selves, their version of him.
The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.
I grew up with the idea that democracy is not something you believe in, or a place you hang your hat, but it’s something you do. You participate. If you stop doing it, democracy crumbles and falls apart.
The aging man of the middle twentieth century lives, not in the public world of atomic physics and conflicting ideologies, of welfare states and supersonic speed, but in his strictly private universe of physical weakness and mental decay.
People often say that, in a democracy, decisions are made by a majority of the people. Of course, that is not true. Decisions are made by a majority of those who make themselves heard and who vote - a very different thing.
The basis of effective government is public confidence.
Confidence | Government | Public | Wisdom | Government |
We are making the price of power much too high in this society. I worry that we are making the conditions of public life so tough that nobody except people really obsessed with power will be willing finally to pay that price. That would be tragic from the point of view of public well-being.
Life | Life | People | Power | Price | Public | Society | Will | Wisdom | Worry |
Even if for every hundred correct things we did we committed ten thousand mistakes, our revolution would still be - and it will be in the judgment of history - great and invincible; for this is the first time that not a minority, not the rich alone, not the educated alone, but the real masses, the overwhelming majority of the working people are themselves building a new life and are by their own experience solving the most difficult problems of socialist organization.
Experience | History | Judgment | Life | Life | Majority | Organization | People | Problems | Revolution | Time | Will | Wisdom |
Plainly, the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy. A majority, held in restraint by constitutional checks, and imitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does, of necessity, fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible; the rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy, or despotism in some form, is all that is left.
Anarchy | Majority | Necessity | People | Restraint | Rule | Wisdom |
Politicians tend to live "in character," and many a public figure has come to imitate the journalism which describes him.
Successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies. The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good but whether it is popular -- not whether it will work well and prove itself but whether the active talking constituents like it immediately. Politicians rationalize this servitude by saying that in a democracy public men are the servants of the people.
Consideration | Democracy | Good | Men | Public | Servitude | Talking | Will | Wisdom | Work |
The principle of democracy is corrupted not only when the spirit of equality is extinct, but likewise when they fall into a spirit of extreme equality, and when each citizen would fain to be upon a level with those whom he has chosen to command him. Then the people, incapable of bearing the very power they have delegated, want to manage everything themselves, to debate for the senate, to execute for the magistrate, and to decide for the judges.
Democracy | Equality | Extreme | People | Power | Spirit | Wisdom |