“The founding fathers were not interested in democracy, in fact, in a country with 3 1/4 million people, which is about what we were at the time of the separation from England, only 700,000 people could vote — white males of property. So it's never been terribly democratic. …and they put together a constitution which would protect property for all time. No nonsense about democracy!”

— Gore Vidal

2010s, "Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia" (2013)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 14, 2021. History

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Gore Vidal 163

American writer 1925–2012

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Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

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“It is impossible to restore what is gone, obviously. I was born in the Soviet Union at about the same time as you (although we lived under different systems, we still listened to the same music, as we found out) but the world has changed since then, and the Soviet Union no longer exists. We have the Russian Federation, which is based on a Constitution adopted by our people. This Constitution proclaims the same set of values that is accepted by the absolute majority of humankind, notably, the supremacy of human rights, democracy, the protection of private property, market-based development and so on and so forth. I won't list all of them because these are universal values. So nobody wants to go back. There is no returning to the past.”

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cnbc.com http://www.cnbc.com/id/102088768

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Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

(1847)

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