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What men value in the world is not rights but privileges.

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Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.

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Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed and...more

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Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.

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When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact t...more

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The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their in...more

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Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

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Government today is growing too strong to be safe. There are no longer any citizens in the world there are only subjects. They work day in and day out...more

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The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.

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Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

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The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

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Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.

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I do not believe in democracy, but I am perfectly willing to admit that it provides the only really amusing form of government ever endured by mankind...more

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The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and ta...more

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No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the record for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating...more