You will not find the word "democracy" in any of our founding documents or the Federalist Papers.
“It has been observed by an honorable gentleman, that a pure democracy, if it were practicable, would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved, that no position in politics is more false than this. The ancient democracies, in which the people themselves deliberated, never possessed one feature of good government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.”
Alexander Hamilton, Speech to Congress, June 21, 1788
“The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind.”
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to William Hunter, 1790
“The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all.”
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Abigail Adams, February 22, 1787
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide.”
John Adams
"Democracy, will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes, and no man's life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure and every one of these will soon mold itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues, and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit, and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few."
John Adams
“Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.
Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.”
James Madison
“The same disease magnified and intensified by liberty overmasters democracy – the truth being that the excessive increase in anything often causes a reaction in the opposite direction. The excess of liberty, whether in States or individuals, seems only to pass into excess slavery…And so tyranny naturally arises out of democracy.”
Plato
The United States shall guarantee to every State in the Union a Republican form of government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened), against domestic violence.
Article IV, Section 4, U.S. Constitution
"A simple democracy is the devil's own government."
Benjamin Rush
“Democracy, in its best state, is but the politics of Bedlam; while kept chained, its thoughts are frantic, but when it breaks loose, it kills the keeper, fires the building, and perishes.”
Fisher Ames
“At no time, at no place, in solemn convention assembled, through no chosen agents, had the American people officially proclaimed the United States to be a democracy. The Constitution did not contain the word or any word lending countenance to it, except possibly the mention of ‘We, the People,’ in the preamble…. When the Constitution was framed no respectable person called himself or herself a democrat.”
Charles and Mary Beard, American historians, 1939
“The honest and serious student of American history will recall that our Founding Fathers managed to write both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution without using the term ‘democracy’ even once. No part of any of the existing state Constitutions contains any reference to the word. [The men] who were most influential in the institution and formulation of our government refer to ‘democracy’ only to distinguish it sharply from the republican form of our American Constitutional system.”
Clarence Manion, dean of Notre Dame Law School, 1950
“The first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy. For what purpose? To abolish private property”; to “wrest, by degrees, capital from the bourgeoisie”; to “centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State.
Karl Marx
You will not find the word "democracy" i... (
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