John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States
XVIII, p. 483. Usually misquoted as "Democracy…while it lasts is more bloody than either aristocracy or monarchy".
1810s, Letters to John Taylor (1814)
Part 1.3 Rights of Man
1790s, Rights of Man, Part I (1791)
John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States
XVIII, p. 483. Usually misquoted as "Democracy…while it lasts is more bloody than either aristocracy or monarchy".
1810s, Letters to John Taylor (1814)
Leo Strauss (1899–1973) Classical philosophy specialist and father of neoconservativism
“What is liberal education,” pp. 4-5
Liberalism Ancient and Modern (1968)
Context: It was once said that democracy is the regime that stands or falls by virtue: a democracy is a regime in which all or most adults are men of virtue, and since virtue seems to require wisdom, a regime in which all or most adults are virtuous and wise, or the society in which all or most adults have developed their reason to a high degree, or the rational society. Democracy, in a word, is meant to be an aristocracy which has broadened into a universal aristocracy. … There exists a whole science—the science which I among thousands of others profess to teach, political science—which so to speak has no other theme than the contrast between the original conception of democracy, or what one may call the ideal of democracy, and democracy as it is. … Liberal education is the ladder by which we try to ascend from mass democracy to democracy as originally meant.
Celia Green (1935) British philosopher
The Decline and Fall of Science (1976)
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer
The Great Infidels (1881)
Context: The greatest men the world has produced have known but little. They had a few facts, mingled with mistakes without number. In some departments they towered above their fellows, while in others they fell below the common level of mankind.
Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician
Interview by Laura Knoy on NHPR, June 5, 2007 http://info.nhpr.org/node/13016 <br class="br">2000s, 2006-2009
Joseph Hayne Rainey (1832–1887) politician
1871, Speech on the the Ku Klux Klan Bill of 1871 (1 April 1871)
Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) American journalist and radio broadcaster
Source: "Let the Record Speak" 1939, p. 353 (newspaper column: “As Litvinov Goes,” May 5, 1939)
Norman Thomas (1884–1968) American Presbyterian minister and socialist
Debate with Barry Goldwater, University of Arizona campus, Tucson, Arizona, November 1961
“Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed
the floor.”
Ogden Nash (1902–1971) American poet
"You and Me and P. B. Shelley" http://books.google.com/books?id=zixbAAAAMAAJ&q=%22Life+is+not+having+been+told+that+the+man+has+just+waxed+the+floor%22&pg=PA5#v=onepage <br class="br">Good Intentions (1942)