“I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.”
Listen the to actual quoted words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nf_bu-kBr4
1963 statement, as quoted in The Quote Verifier : Who Said What, Where, and When (2006) by Ralph Keyes, p. 82
Meet the Press (1965), as quoted in The Quote Verifier : Who Said What, Where, and When (2006) by Ralph Keyes, p. 82
The numbers cited in paraphrases of this quote often vary from 100 to 2000.
Unsourced variant: I would rather be governed by the first 2000 names in the Boston phone book than by the 2000 members of the faculty of Harvard University.
Variant: I would rather be governed by the first two thousand people in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand people on the faculty of Harvard University.
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
William F. Buckley Jr. 43
American conservative author and commentator 1925–2008Related quotes
Source: Present Status of the Philosophy of Law and of Rights (1926), Ch. VII, Natural Right, § 30, p. 68.
Letter to Colonel Edward Carrington, Paris, (16 January 1787)
1780s
“Two great poets are stronger than two thousand mediocrities”
31
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)
Je confesse aujourd'hui de bonne foi que je m'en veux d'avoir autrefois vu en noir, et le gouvernement révolutionnaire et Robespierre et Saint-Just. Je crois que ces hommes valaient mieux à eux seuls que tous les révolutionnaires ensemble.
[in Gracchus Babeuf avec les Egaux, Jean-Marc Shiappa, Les éditions ouvrières, 1991, 69, 27082 2892-7]
On Maximilien de Robespierre
Jacob G. Hornberger, editor, The Tyranny of Gun Control, “Introduction,” Fairfax, VA, Future of Freedom Foundation (FFF), (1997) p. xii
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)