“Those who, in the nineteenth century, argued the dangers of a mass democracy in which a majority of the voters would have no stake in the country at all, had reason to be fearful. But the remedy is not to restrict the franchise to those who own property: it is to extend the ownership of property to the largest possible majority of those who have the vote. The widespread ownership of private property is crucial to the survival of freedom and democracy. It gives the citizen a vital sense of identification with the society of which he is a part. It gives him a stake in the future—and indeed, equally important, in the present. It creates a society with an inbuilt resistance to revolutionary change.”

— Nigel Lawson

Maurice Macmillan Memorial Lecture (June 1985), quoted in The View from No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical (London: Bantam, 1992), p. 206.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Those who, in the nineteenth century, argued the dangers of a mass democracy in which a majority of the voters would ha…" by Nigel Lawson?

Nigel Lawson 22

British Conservative politician and journalist 1932

Related quotes

“Both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany did indeed allow—or, more accurately, tolerate—private property. However, it was ‘property’ in a peculiar and very restricted sense—not the virtually untrammeled private ownership of Roman law and nineteenth–century Europe, but rather conditional possession, under which the state, the owner of last resort, reserved to itself the right to interfere with and even confiscate assets which in its judgment were unsatisfactorily used.”

Richard Pipes (1923–2018) American historian

Source: Property and Freedom (1999), p. 218

“The real revolution (in property rights) has already largely taken place; the great majority of stockholders have been deprived of control of their property through the diffusion of ownership and the growth in the power of management.”

Robert Aaron Gordon (1908–1978) American economist

Source: Business Leadership in the Large Corporation (1945), p. 350

“Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

Source: (1776), Book V, Chapter I, Part II, 775.

“We have to harmonize the two facts, that wealth is good and necessary, and that wealth is a danger to its possessor and to society. On the one hand property is indispensable to personal freedom, to all higher individuality, and to self-realization; the right to property is a corollary of the right to life; without property men are at the mercy of nature and in bondage to those who have property. On the other hand property is used as a means of collecting tribute and private taxes, as a club with which to extort unearned gain from laborers and consumers, and as the fundamental tool of oppression.”

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) United States Baptist theologian

Source: The Social Principles of Jesus (1918), p. 127

“The united vote of those who toil and have not will vanquish those who have and toil not, and solve forever the problems of democracy.”

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) American labor and political leader

The Socialist Party and the Working Class (1904)

“Freedom of speech is not the property of those who happen to belong to the elites of a country. It is an inalienable right, the birthright of our people. For centuries battles have been fought for it, and now it is being sacrificed to please a totalitarian ideology.”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

Speech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pfEJaI2iS4 (7 February 2011)
2010s

“… it is precisely because it is not a democracy that China will likely be so successful…What is of vital importance for economic success is economic freedom, meaning the protection of private property, the rule of law, and minimal regulation and taxation, not the right to vote.”

Peter D. Schiff (1963) American entrepreneur, economist and author

Quotes from Crash Proof (2006)

“Marriage is not ownership and wives are not property.”

Robert A. Heinlein book The Puppet Masters

Source: The Puppet Masters (1951), Chapter 21 (p. 116)

“I believe in evil. It is the property of all those who are certain of truth.”

Edward Teller (1908–2003) Hungarian-American nuclear physicist

As quoted in The Martians of Science : Five Physicists Who Changed the Twentieth Century (2006) by István Hargittai, p. 251
Context: I believe in evil. It is the property of all those who are certain of truth. Despair and fanaticism are only differing manifestations of evil.

“All freedoms provided by democracy are for those who believe in it. Can the rights and freedoms of millions of virtuous people who believe in democracy be safeguarded if those who seek to destroy it abuse rights and freedoms to achieve their goals?”

Kenan Evren (1917–2015) Turkish general

An Uneasy Honeymoon, Time. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,952783-2,00.html (Sep. 29, 1980)
Said Evren in defense of the decision to take power after the 1980 military coup.

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Nigel Lawson 22

Related quotes

Related topics