Intellectual freedom is essential -- freedom to obtain and distribute information, freedom for open-minded and unfearing debate and freedom from pressure by officialdom and prejudices. Such freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorship.
- Andrei Sakharov
source: Andrei D. Sakharov (1968). “Progress, coexistence, and intellectual freedom”
topic: Hypocrite, Hands, People, Treacherous, Intellectual Freedom
Democracy is the worst form of government. It is the most inefficient, the most clumsy, the most unpractical.... It reduces wisdom to impotence and secures the triumph of folly, ignorance, clap-trap, and demagogy.... Yet democracy is the only form of social order that is admissible, because it is the only one consistent with justice.
- Robert Briffault
source: Rational Evolution (The Making of Humanity) ch. 15 (1930) SeeWinston Churchill 34
topic: Ignorance, Government, Order, Impotence, Demagogy
Instead of looking at books and pictures about the New Testament I looked at the New Testament. There I found an account, not in the least of a person with his hair parted in the middle or his hands clasped in appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips of thunder and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils, passing with the wild secrecy of the wind from mountain isolation to a sort of dreadful demagogy; a being who often acted like an angry god — and always like a god.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton
source: Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.110, Simon and Schuster
topic: Book, Hair, Hands, Demagogy
Civilization is drugs, alcohol, engines of war, prostitution, machines and machine slaves, low wages, bad food, bad taste, prisons, reformatories, lunatic asylums, divorce, perversion, brutal sports, suicides, infanticide, cinema, quackery, demagogy, strikes, lockouts, revolutions, putsches, colonization, electric chairs, guillotines, sabotage, floods, famine, disease, gangsters, money barons, horse racing, fashion shows, poodle dogs, chow dogs, Siamese cats, condoms, peccaries, syphilis, gonorrhea, insanity, neuroses, etc., etc.
- Henry Miller
source: Henry Miller (1961). “The Cosmological Eye”, p.177, New Directions Publishing
topic: Sports, Suicide, Fashion, Infanticide, Syphilis
It [defending Salmon Rushdie] was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual and the defense of free expression.
- Christopher Hitchens
source: "Rushdie and After" by David Remnick, www.newyorker.com. September 16, 2012. 
topic: Demagogy, Rushdie
