suffrage quotes

The English are used to suffrage; it istheir panacea for all that goes wrong with them.

-Thomas Carlyle
  Chartism, ch.9.

All governments use force and all assert that they are founded on reason. In fact, whether universal suffrage prevails or not, it is always an oligarchy that governs, finding ways to give to'the will of the people'the expression which the few desire.

-Vilfredo Pareto
Quoted in Arthur Livingstone (ed) The Mind and Society (1935).

Universal suffrage is counter-revolution.

- PierreJoseph Proudhon
On Europe after the1848 revolution. Quoted in A J P Taylor From Napoleon to the Second International (1993).