"Ignorant participation is not democratic." - attributed to Thomas Jefferson
"Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated." - G. K. Chesterton, New York Times, February 1, 1931
"Democracy means government by discussion but it is only effective if you can stop people talking." - Clement Attlee, in Anatomy of Britain (Anthony Sampson, 1962)
"Man's capacity for evil makes democracy necessary and man's capacity for good makes democracy possible." - Reinhold Niebuhr, quoted by Anthony Wedgwood Benn in The Times, July 18, 1977
"It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting." - Tom Stoppard, Jumpers, 1972
"No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." - Winston Churchill
"Democracy is a State which recognizes the subjection of the minority to the majority, that is, an organization for the systematic use of force by one class against the other, by one part of the population against another." - Lenin, State and Revolution