“Democracy is the most vile form of government …
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, 1787, Federalist Paper #10

“A democracy is a volcano which conceals the fiery materials of
its own destruction. These will produce an eruption and carry
desolation in their way.”
-Fisher Ames, author of the words of the First Amendment

“Democracy … while it lasts is more bloody than either
[aristocracy or monarchy]. Remember, democracy never lasts long.
It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a
democracy that did not commit suicide.”
-John Adams, 1815

“Republics decline into democracies and
democracies degenerate into despotisms.”
-Aristotle

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But
it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates
is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly.
But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly
whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls
of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he
speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face
and their garments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in
the hearts of all men.
He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown
in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects
the body politic so that it can no longer resist.
A murderer is less to fear”
-Marcus Tullius Cicero 42 BC

“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will
within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.
I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often
but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights
of the individual.”
-Thomas Jefferson

“The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority
acting against a divided majority.”
-Will Durant

“The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.”
-Tacitus

“The more laws that are written, the more criminals are produced.”
-Lao-Tse, Tao Te Ching

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government.
It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote
themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on,
the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most
benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy
always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.
The average age of the world’s greatest civilization has been
two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this 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 dependence;
from dependence back again into bondage.”
-Scottish historian Alexander Tyler, in
The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Empire.
The bracketed portion on “selfishness” appears in only some citations, and
the term here means pathological acquisitiveness and a preference for short
term advantage to the detriment of long term advantage

“The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to
live at the expense of everyone else.”
-Frederic Bastiat

“Unconscionability has generally been recognized to include an absence
of meaningful choice on the part of one of the parties together with
contract terms which are unreasonably favorable to the other party.”
-Judge Wright (use of US paper money and private credit, checking, and
savings services, is a voluntary act (without which one is inconvenienced
to a degree most Americans cannot imagine), and constitutes agreement to
the contract that renders the user liable for income taxes)

“Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay.
That is the only American principle.”
-Franklin Delano Roosevelt

“From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”
-Karl Marx

“Democracy is the road to socialism.”
-Karl Marx

“The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under the
name of ‘liberalism’, they will adopt every fragment of the socialist
program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing
how it happened.”
-Norman Thomas, former U.S. Socialist Presidential candidate

“Socialism has a bad name in America, and no amount of wishful thinking
on the part of the left is going to change that…. the words Economic
Democracy are an adequate and effective replacement.”
-Derek Shearer, in Economic Democracy: The Challange of the 1980’s (1980)

“…I would like to be clearly understood…we, the Soviet people, are for
socialism…. We want more socialism and, therefore, more democracy.”
-Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika -
New Thinking for Our Country and the World, 1988

“Such 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 #10

“Democracy is indispensable to socialism.”
-V.I. Lenin

“The goal of socialism is communism.”
-V.I. Lenin