The Problem of Democracy Quotes

“What can be more false and heartless,” Adams logged in his diary, “than this doctrine which makes the first and holiest rights of humanity to depend upon the color of the skin?”
― Nancy Isenberg, The Problem of Democracy: The Presidents Adams Confront the Cult of Personality

“Jackson’s party was actually composed of “obsequious champions of executive power,” acolytes of a warrior-based cult of personality who wallowed in a fantasy view of the glamour of conquest. Which was decidedly not democracy. The Massachusetts congressman thoroughly despised the current political cant. Jacksonians had concocted their so-called democracy and cast it as—here Adams satirized them—“the government of the whole people and nothing but the people; that no fraction of the people, not the purest, not the strongest, not the wealthiest, not the wisest, no—the whole people, man, woman, child, born or unborn, foreigner and native—the lunatic, the lover and the poet, all must govern—and that is Democracy”
― Nancy Isenberg, The Problem of Democracy: The Presidents Adams Confront the Cult of Personality