Trials of the State Quotes

“Majority rule is the basic principle of democracy. But that only means that a majority is enough to authorise the state’s acts. It is not enough to make them legitimate. This is because majority rule is no more than a rule of decision. It does nothing to accommodate our differences. It just restates them in numerical terms. Democracies cannot operate on the basis that a bare majority takes 100 per cent of the political spoils. If it did, it would harbour large and permanently disaffected groups in their midst, who had no common bonds to transcend their differences with the majority.”
― Jonathan Sumption, Trials of the State: Law and the Decline of Politics