majority quotes

The Government of the absolute majority, instead of the Government of the people, isbut the Government of the strongest interests; and when not efficiently checked, it is the most tyrannical and oppressive that can be devised.

-John Caldwell Calhoun
  Speech, US Senate,15 Feb.

A majority is always the best repartee.

- Benjamin, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield Disraeli
  Tancred, bk.2, ch.14.

Putting a majority together is like a one-armed man wrapping cranberries.

- Bob (RobertJoseph) Dole
Quoted in Hedrick Smith The Power Game (1988).

Today I see more clearly than yesterday that back of the problem of race and color, lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it: and that isthefact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance and disease of the majority of their fellowmen; that to maintain this privilege men have waged war until today war tends to become universal and continuous, and the excuse for this war continues largely to be color and race.

-W(illiam) E(dward) B(urghardt) Du Bois
Preface to reprint of  The Souls of Black Folk (1969).

Flertallet har aldrig retten pafi   sin side. Aldrig, siger jeg! Det er en af disse samfundslÖgnere, som en fri, t½nkende mand mafi   gÖre oprÖr imod. Hvem er det, som udgÖr flertallet af beboerne i et land? Er det de kloge folk, eller er det de'   dumme? Jeg t½nker, vi fafi  r vaere enige om, at dumme mennesker er tilstede i en ganske forskr½kkelig overv½ldende majoritet rundt omkring pafi   den hele vide jord. The majority never has right on its side.Never,I say! That is one of the social lies that a free, thinking man is bound to rebel against.Who makes up the majority in any given country? Is it the wise men or the fools? I think we must agree that the fools are in a terrible overwhelming majority, all the wide world over.

- HenrikJohan Ibsen
  En folkefiende (An Enemy of  the People), act 4.

Un homme avec Dieu est toujours dans la majorite  . One man with God is always a majority.

-John Knox
Inscription on the Reformation Monument, Geneva, attributed to Knox.

We consider ourselves to be free because no one in our society is allowed unlimited powerno leader, faction, party or 'class', no majority, no government, church, corporation, trade, or professional association or trade union. The secret of its freedom is that it is composed of a multitude of organisations in the constitution of the best of which is reproduced that diffusion of power which is characteristic of the whole.

- Michael Joseph Oakeshott
  Rationalism in Politics.

Let me say it again, I don't believe in black majority rule ever in Rhodesia. Not in a thousand years.

- Ian Douglas Smith
  Radio broadcast, 20 Mar.

   Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain't that a big enough majority in any town?

- Mark pseudonym of  Samuel Langhorne Clemens Twain
  TheAdventures of Huckleberry Finn, ch.26.

There was a heated division of opinion in the lobbies during the interval but a small conservative majority took the view that it might be as well to remain in the theatre.

- Kenneth Tynan
  Reviewing the play The Glorious Days.

What ismorality inany given time or place? It iswhat the majority thenand therehappento like, and immorality is what they dislike.

- Alfred North Whitehead
  Conversation, 30 Aug. Collected in Dialogues (1954).