A Bill of Rights that means what the majority wants it to mean is
worthless.
-Antonin Scalia
A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority.
-Henry
David Thoreau
All politics are based on the indifference of the majority.
-James
Reston
As my father once explained to me, our 'rights' are only as strong as
the democracy that protects them. Because we are a people's democracy
here in America, as great as the people of this country can be, but also
as fallible, we must stay ever vigilant in the face of any 'tyranny' of
the majority, no matter the stated objective.
-George Takei
Civilization has been a continuous struggle of the individual or of
groups of individuals against the State and even against 'society,' that
is, against the majority subdued and hypnotized by the State and State
worship.
-Emma Goldman
Democracy encourages the majority to decide things about which the
majority is ignorant.
-John Simon
Democracy is an experiment, and the right of the majority to rule is no
more inherent than the right of the minority to rule; and unless the
majority represents sane, righteous, unselfish public sentiment, it has
no inherent right.
-William Allen White
Every effort for progress, for enlightenment, for science, for
religious, political, and economic liberty, emanates from the minority,
and not from the mass.
-Emma Goldman
Henotheism is the view that there are other gods, but there is only one
God who is to be worshipped. The Ten Commandments express a henotheistic
view, as does the majority of the Hebrew Bible.
-Bart D. Ehrman
I believe that it should be perfectly lawful to print even things that
outrage the pruderies and prejudices of the general, so long as any
honest minority, however small, wants to read them. The remedy of the
majority is not prohibition, but avoidance.
-H.L. Mencken
I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of
the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power, than
by violent and sudden usurpations; but, on a candid examination of
history, we shall find that turbulence, violence, and abuse of power, by
the majority trampling on the rights of the minority, have produced
factions and commotions, which, in republics, have, more frequently than
any other cause, produced despotism. If we go over the whole history of
ancient and modern republics, we shall find their destruction to have
generally resulted from those causes.
-James Madison
I'm used to being in the minority. I'm a left-handed gay Jew. I've never
felt, automatically, a member of any majority.
-Barney Frank
If the society today allows wrongs to go unchallenged, the impression is
created that those wrongs have the approval of the majority.
-Barbara
Jordan
If you are cast in a different mould to the majority, it is no merit of
yours: Nature did it.
-Charlotte Brontë
In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of
opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but
woe to him if he goes beyond them.
-Alexis de Tocqueville
In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the
majority than to be right alone.
-John Kenneth Galbraith
In economics, the majority is always wrong.
-John Kenneth Galbraith
In making the great experiment of governing people by consent rather
than by coercion, it is not sufficient that the party in power should
have a majority. It is just as necessary that the party in power should
never outrage the minority.
-Walter Lippmann
In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of
ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved
from the necessity of forming opinions of their own.
-Alexis de
Tocqueville
It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed
by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses
which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist.
-John
Dalberg-Acton
It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By
definition, there are already enough people to do that.
-G.H. Hardy
It is safe to wager that every public idea and every accepted convention
is sheer foolishness, because it has suited the majority.
-Nicolas
Chamfort
It takes fifty years for the majority to be right. The majority is never
right until it does right.
-Henrik Ibsen
It taught me, at an early age, that being wrong can be dangerous, but
being right, when society regards the majority's falsehood as truth,
could be fatal.
-Thomas Szasz
Like the majority of men who are born to a given belief they demand the
most rigorous proof of any adverse belief but assume that their own
needs none.
-Herbert Spencer
Long ago I ceased to count heads. Truth is usually in the minority in
this evil world.
-Charles H. Spurgeon
Machines have no political opinions, but they have profound political
effects. They demand a strict regimentation of time, and, by abolishing
the need for manual skill, have transformed the majority of the
population from workers into laborers.
-W.H. Auden
Mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not
conforming to standards of thought, speech, and action derived by the
conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in
short, unusual. It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced mad by
officials destitute of evidence that they themselves are sane.
-Ambrose
Bierce
Never be afraid to stand with the minority when the minority is right,
for the minority which is right will one day be the majority.
-William
Jennings Bryan
Prohibition cannot be enforced for the simple reason that the majority
of American people do not want it enforced and are resisting its
enforcement.
-Fiorello LaGuardia
Schooling, which we engage in and which supposedly creates equal
opportunities, has become the unique, never-before-attempted way of
dividing the whole society into classes. Everybody knows at which level
of his twelve or sixteen years of schooling he has dropped out, and in
addition knows what price tag is attached to the higher schooling he has
gotten. It's a history of degrading the majority of people.
-Ivan
Illich
Shall we judge the country by the majority or by the minority?
Certainly, by the minority. The mass are animal, in state of pupilage,
and nearer the chimpanzee.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Success, recognition, and conformity are the bywords of the modern world
where everyone seems to crave the anesthetizing security of being
identified with the majority.
-Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The country was founded on the principle that the primary role of
government is to protect property from the majority, and so it remains.
-Noam
Chomsky
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever
that it is not utterly absurd; indeed, in view of the silliness of the
majority of mankind, a wide-spread belief is more likely to be foolish
than sensible.
-Bertrand Russell
The Jews are the living embodiment of the minority, the constant
reminder of what duties societies owe their minorities, whoever they
might be.
-Abba Eban
The majority is always wrong. The minority is rarely right.
-Henrik
Ibsen
The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the
violin.
-Honoré de Balzac
The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities,
and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or
much faith; and when the ordinary man calls himself a skeptic or an
unbeliever, that is ordinarily a simple pose, cloaking a disinclination
to think anything out to a conclusion.
-T.S. Eliot
The majority of the American people still believe that every single
individual in this country is entitled to just as much respect, just as
much dignity, as every other individual.
-Barbara Jordan
The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to be
insane in such a useful way that they can't commit you.
-Mark
Edwards
The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or
rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force
or fraud, in carrying elections.
-John Dalberg-Acton
The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority.
The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the
minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.
-A.A.
Milne
The truth is not always the same as the majority decision.
-Pope
John Paul II
The truth must essentially be regarded as in conflict with this world;
the world has never been so good, and will never become so good that the
majority will desire the truth.
-Søren Kierkegaard
The voice of the majority is no proof of justice.
-Johann von
Schiller
Was there ever a time when the majority was right?
-Robert A.
Heinlein
We are so concerned to flatter the majority that we lose sight of how
every so often it is necessary in order to preserve freedom for the
minority, let alone for the individual, to face that majority down.
-William
F. Buckley, Jr.
We in America do not have government by the majority. We have government
by the majority who participate.
-Thomas Jefferson
What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority
then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike.
-Alfred
North Whitehead
What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes
as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a
revolutionary minority.
-Walter Lippmann
When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved,
as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right.
-Eugene
V. Debs
When I refuse to obey an unjust law, I do not contest the right of the
majority to command, but I simply appeal from the sovereignty of the
people to the sovereignty of mankind.
-Alexis de Tocqueville
Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time
to reform.
-Mark Twain
Whoever has an opinion of his own, and honestly expresses it, will be
guilty of heresy. Heresy is what the minority believe; it is the name
given by the powerful to the doctrine of the weak.
-Robert G.
Ingersoll
Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.
-Leo
Tolstoy
Categories: Quotes of the day, Quotes on a topic, The majority and the minority
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