“Democracy is a system in which heads are counted but not weighed.”

Dotty, Act I
Source: Jumpers (1972)

Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln Douglas Debates http://archive.li/CFqbg (1959), p. xi
1950s

Cleopatra (1889)

Williams last words to his friend Lamoral of Egmont after he said to him; „Farewell prince without a land”, as written in ‚Uilenspiegel’ by Charles de Coster

The consumers are the sovereign people. The capitalists, the entrepreneurs, and the farmers are the people’s mandatories. If they do not obey, if they fail to produce, at the lowest possible cost, what the consumers are asking for, they lose their office. Their task is service to the consumer. Profit and loss are the instruments by means of which the consumers keep a tight rein on all business activities.
Source: Bureaucracy (1944), Chapter I: Profit Management, § 1: The Operation of The Market Mechanism

Adam Przeworski (1991) Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe, p. 26

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)

Source: The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind

As quoted in The Golden Treasury of Thought: A gathering of quotations from the best ancient and modern authors (1873) edited by John Camden Hotten.