Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.

• democracy

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right.

• government
• democracy

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed [and hence clamorous to be led to safety] by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

• politics

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.

• tyranny

The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.

• education

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

• government

The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to prevailing superstition or taboo.

• government
• thought
• self reliance

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.

• government

Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.

• politics