“Democracy can be an equilibrium: a system of "self-government" in which the distinction between the rulers and the ruled disappears.”
Adam Przeworski (1991) Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe, p. 26
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Adam Przeworski13
Polish-American academic 1940Related quotes
John Allen Fraser (1931) Canadian politician
Source: The House Of Commons At Work (1993), Chapter 1, The System of Government, p. 5
Alexander Hamilton book The Farmer Refuted
The Farmer Refuted (1775)
Context: The origin of all civil government, justly established, must be a voluntary compact, between the rulers and the ruled; and must be liable to such limitations, as are necessary for the security of the absolute rights of the latter; for what original title can any man or set of men have, to govern others, except their own consent? To usurp dominion over a people, in their own despite, or to grasp at a more extensive power than they are willing to entrust, is to violate that law of nature, which gives every man a right to his personal liberty; and can, therefore, confer no obligation to obedience.
“This distinction between invasion and resistance, between government and defence, is vital.”
Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (1854–1939) American journalist and anarchist
The Relation of the State to the Invididual (1890)
Context: This distinction between invasion and resistance, between government and defence, is vital. Without it there can be no valid philosophy of politics. Upon this distinction and the other considerations just outlined, the Anarchists frame the desired definitions. This, then, is the Anarchistic definition of government: the subjection of the non-invasive individual to an external will. And this is the Anarchistic definition of the State: the embodiment of the principle of invasion in an individual, or a band of individuals, assuming to act as representatives or masters of the entire people within a given area.
William Godwin (1756–1836) English journalist, political philosopher and novelist
Book V, Chapter 13, "General Features of Democracy"
Massacre is the too possible attendant upon revolution , and massacre is perhaps the most hateful scene, alllowing for its omentary duration, that any imagination can suggest, The fearful, hopeless, expectation of the defeated, and the blood-hound fury of their conquerors, is a complication of mischief that all which has been told of internal regions can scarcely surpass. The cold-blooded massacres that are perpetrated under the naem of criminal justice fall short of these in some of their most frightful aggravations. The ministers and instruments of law have by perform, and often bear their parts in the most shocking enormities without being sensible to the passions allied murders with the rudeness of an insulting triumph ; and, as the conduct themselves , in a certain sort, by known principles of injustice, the evil we have reason to apprehend has its limits. But the instruments of massacre are discharged from every restraint.
Book VIII, Ch.
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)
Walter Schellenberg (1910–1952) German general
To Leon Goldensohn (13 March 1946). Quoted in "The Nuremberg Interviews" - by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004
Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972) Pan Africanist and First Prime Minister and President of Ghana
The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah
Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Speech to the Anti-Socialist and Anti-Communist Union (17 February 1933), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 457
The 1930s
Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher
As cited in: Debora Hammond (2005). "Philosophical and Ethical Foundations of Systems Thinking", in: tripleC 3(2): pp. 20–27.
1950s, Problems of Life (1952, 1960)
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) Father of republic India, champion of human rights, father of India's Constitution, polymath, revolutionary…
Pakistan or The Partition of India (1946)