“We are beginning to see that government by majorities means abandoning all the affairs of the country to the tide-waiters who make up the majorities in the House and in election committees; to those, in a word, who have no pinion of their own.”
Source: The Conquest of Bread (1892), Ch. 3 : Anarchist Communism, p. 81
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Peter Kropotkin 141
Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scie… 1842–1921Related quotes
Television broadcast (October 1964), after winning the general election, quoted in David Butler, Coalitions in British Politics (Macmillan, London, 1978), p. 99.
Prime Minister
2011 English Language Leaders' Debate, April 12, 2011, http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20110413/main-election-110413/20110413?s_name=election2011.
2011
There can be no excuse for disobeying the laws when each has established the law for himself.
De concordantia catholica (The Catholic Concordance) (1434)
Simon Hoggart, Hoggart's Guardian column 11 Sep 2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2004/sep/11/politics.guardiancolumnists
“There are those in this country who threaten direct action to force their will, upon a majority.”
Woodrow Wilson: "7th Annual Message", December 2, 1919. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29560#axzz2g0trF1OV
1910s
Context: There are those in this country who threaten direct action to force their will, upon a majority. Russia today, with its blood and terror, is a painful object lesson of the power of minorities. It makes little difference what minority it is; whether capital or labor, or any other class; no sort of privilege will ever be permitted to dominate this country. We are a partnership or nothing that is worth while. We are a democracy, where the majority are the masters, or all the hopes and purposes of the men who founded this government have been defeated and forgotten. In America there is but one way by which great reforms can be accomplished and the relief sought by classes obtained, and that is through the orderly processes of representative government. Those who would propose any other method of reform are enemies of this country. America will not be daunted by threats nor lose her composure or calmness in these distressing times. We can afford, in the midst of this day of passion and unrest, to be self - contained and sure. The instrument of all reform in America is the ballot. The road to economic and social reform in America is the straight road of justice to all classes and conditions of men. Men have but to follow this road to realize the full fruition of their objects and purposes. Let those beware who would take the shorter road of disorder and revolution. The right road is the road of justice and orderly process.
Source: Zimbabwe: Gender Equality A Right (2010)
Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 233
"How to Tell a Major Poet from a Minor Poet" in The New Yorker (1938); reprinted in Quo Vadimus: Or, the Case for the Bicycle (1939)
As quoted in Frederick Douglass: The Colored Orator (1969) by Frederic May Holland, p. 212 http://books.google.it/books?id=GLbBa5OOhxMC&pg=PA212