More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
There are men who are naturally intelligent and can learn, and there are men who are naturally stupid and cannot.
They reach, say, the mental age of ten or twelve, and then they develop no more. Physically, they become men, and sprout beards, political delusions, and the desire to propagate their kind. But mentally they remain on the level of schoolboys.
Democracy, alas, is also a form of theology, and shows all the immemorial stigmata.
They contemplate, now bitterly, now admiringly, the backsides of those who are above them. They are bitter when they sense anything rationally describable as actual superiority; they admire when what they see is fraud.
mental baggage is often little more than a vast mass of such things. It has anxieties, horrors, even superstitions. And as it increases in years it adds constantly to the stock. The process of education is largely a process of getting rid of such fears.
The ideal educated man is simply one who has put away as foolish the immemorial fears of the race—of strange men and strange ideas, of the powers and principalities of the air. He is sure of himself in the world; no dread of the dark rides him; he is serene. To produce such men is the central aim of every rational system of education;
the vast majority of men are congenitally incapable of any such intellectual progress. They cannot take in new ideas, and they cannot get rid of old fears.
the lower orders of men, though they seem superficially to use articulate speech and thus to deal in ideas, are actually but little more accomplished in that way than so many trained animals. Words, save the most elemental, convey nothing to them. Their minds cannot grasp even the simplest abstractions;
The whole history of the country has been a history of melodramatic pursuits of horrendous monsters, most of them imaginary: the red-coats, the Hessians, the monocrats, again the red-coats, the Bank, the Catholics, Simon Legree, the Slave Power, Jeff Davis, Mormonism, Wall Street, the rum demon, John Bull, the hell hounds of plutocracy, the trusts, General Weyler, Pancho Villa, German spies, hyphenates, the Kaiser, Bolshevism.
It was long ago observed that the plain people, under democracy, never vote for anything, but always against something.
The yokel not only believes that all heretics are doomed to be roasted in hell through all eternity; he also holds that they should be harassed as much as possible on this earth.
The yokel has room in his head for only one. That is the idea that God regards him fondly, and has a high respect for him—that all other men are out of favour in heaven and abandoned to the devil.
When the city mob fights it is not for liberty, but for ham and cabbage. When it wins, its first act is to destroy every form of freedom that is not directed wholly to that end.
There was no liberty anywhere in Europe, even in name, until 1789, and there was little in fact until 1848.
The whole progress of the world, even in the direction of ameliorating the lot of the masses, is always opposed by the masses.
It is axiomatic that all measures for safeguarding the public health are opposed by the majority,
What happened in Los Angeles when a vaccination ordinance was submitted to a popular referendum is typical of what would happen anywhere under the same circumstances.
the first chapter of Genesis is so simple that a yokel can grasp it instantly. It collides ludicrously with many of the known facts, but he doesn't know the known facts.
Learning survives among us largely because the mob has not got news of it.
What is worth knowing he doesn't know and doesn't want to know; what he knows is not true.
Is it argued by any rational man that the debased Christianity cherished by the mob in all the Christian countries of to-day has any colourable likeness to the body of ideas preached by Christ?
It was thus that the plain people were shoved into the late war, and it is thus that they will be shoved into the next one.
realization, if it should ever be attained by miracle, would materially change the main outlines of the democratic process. What is genuinely important is not that the will
The American people, true enough, are sheep. Worse, they are donkeys. Yet worse, to borrow from their own dialect, they are goats. They are thus constantly bamboozled and exploited by small minorities of their own number, by determined and ambitious individuals, and even by exterior groups.
they are even kept free, by a tradition as old as the Republic itself, of foreign alliances which would condition their autonomy.
It seems to me that the common people, under such a democracy as that which now prevails in the United States, are more completely sovereign, in fact as well as in law, than any of these ancient despots.
American Negroes vote in spite of the opposition of the poor whites, their theological brothers and economic rivals,
The populace simply passed over the matters principally at issue as incomprehensible or unimportant, and voted irrelevantly or wantonly.
The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
Has the United States ever seen a more violent and shameless demagogue than Theodore Roosevelt?
I do not say that a gentleman may not thrust himself into politics under democracy; I simply say that it is almost impossible for him to stay there and remain a gentleman.
they seem to be quite content to enforce any sort of law that is provided for their use by ignorant and corrupt legislators, regardless of its conflict with fundamental human rights.
To a democrat any attitude based upon a concept of honour, dignity and integrity seems contemptible and offensive.
The typical American editor, save in a few of the larger towns, may be described succinctly as one who has written a million words in favour of Coolidge and half a million against Darwin.
dismissed at once as what is now called a Bolshevik, i.e., one harbouring an occult and unintelligible yearning to put down the Republic and pull God off His throne,
after 1832, when his hopes of getting into the White House were finally extinguished, he devoted himself whole-heartedly to preparing the way for the Civil War.
his frenzied campaign against the teaching of evolution—perhaps the most gross attack upon human dignity and decorum ever made by a politician, even under democracy, in modern times.
The truth is that the common man's love of liberty, like his love of sense, justice and truth, is almost wholly imaginary.
The average man doesn't want to be free. He simply wants to be safe. Nietzsche, with his usual clarity of vision, saw the point clearly.
it is precisely the superior individual who is the chief victim of the democratic process.
The day after a successful revolution is a blue day for the late autocrat, but it is also a blue day for every other superior man.
It is not actually a sign of spiritual eminence to be moral in the Puritan sense: it is simply a sign of docility, of lack of enterprise and originality, of cowardice.
In the whole history of human lawmaking there is no record of a failure worse than that of Prohibition in the United States.
democratic law tends more and more to be grounded upon the maxim that every citizen is, by nature, a traitor, a libertine, and a scoundrel.
a man who stands in contempt of the prevailing ideology has no rights under the law is so thoroughly democratic that in the United States it is seldom questioned save by romantic fanatics,
Theoretically, the American people should be happier than any other; actually, they are probably the least happy in Christendom.
The trouble with them is that they do not trust one another—and without mutual trust there can be no ease, and no genuine happiness.
Why should democracy rise against bribery? It is itself a form of wholesale bribery. In place of a government with a fixed purpose and a visible goal, it sets up a government that is a mere function of the mob's vagaries, and that maintains itself by constantly bargaining with those vagaries.
I have never encountered any actual evidence, convincing to an ordinary jury, that vox populi is actually vox Dei. The proofs, indeed, run the other way.
it is not by accident that Christianity, a mob religion, paves heaven with gold and precious stones, i.e., with money.
