"I do not believe in democracy but I am perfectly willing to admit that it provides the only really amusing form of government ever endured by mankind."
"[I]ncurable idiots may conceivably constitute an absolute majority of the population."
The common citizen or voter "is never dangerous so long as his belly is filled and his eyes kept a-pop" and "[h]e still believes in ghosts, and has only shifted his belief in witches to the political sphere." These are the men and women deciding who will be in charge in a democracy. "What is worth knowing, he doesn't know and doesn't want to know; what he knows is not true."
The common man has no interest in liberty: "he is not actually happy when free; his is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. He longs for the warm reassuring smell of the herd, and is willing to take the herdman with it."
Democracy may be self-devouring and distrusts itself, "abandoning its whole philosophy at the first sign of strain." When national safety is threatened "[a]ll the great tribunes of democracy . . . convert themselves . . . into despots of an almost fabulous ferocity."
and finally:
"Public estimation of eminence runs in reverse ratio to its genuineness, the sort of eminence that the mob esteems most highly is precisely the sort that has least grounding in solid worth and honest accomplishment."
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