The Americans were aware that democracy might be weak and unintelligent, but also that it might be despotic and oppressive.

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.

If the majority could believe in freedom, we would be free.

Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.

We are so concerned to flatter the majority that we lose sight of how very often it is necessary, in order to preserve freedom for the minority, let alone for the individual, to face that majority down.

It is the besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which the masses of men exhibit their tyranny.

[T]o every Subject the right to give his opinion on all public matters, and by thus influencing the sentiments of the Nation, to influence those of the Legislature itself (which is sooner or later obliged to pay a deference to them) procures to him a sort of Legislative authority of a much more efficacious and beneficial nature than any formal right he might enjoy of voting by a mere yea or nay, upon general propositions suddenly offered to him, and which he could have neither a share in framing, nor any opportunity of objecting to and modifying.

[E]xperience must have taught you...that a great body of men cannot act, without being, though they are not aware of it, the instruments of the designs of a small number of persons; and that the power of the People is never any thing but the power of a few Leaders, who...have found means to secure to themselves the direction of its exercise.

[I]n a pure democracy the governing power is and can be exercised by only a part of the people, a majority it may be, but still only a part. This part are the governors. The other part...are governed. Friction and even factious strife would still exist.

EMERY, LUCILIUS A., Concerning Justice, Chapter V, Best Form of Government

[A] government by pure democracy ruling directly would probably be more arbitrary than any other...as was the case in Athens. The government by one, or that by a few, would be restrained to some extent by public opinion, would refrain from extreme measures lest they excite effectual resistance.

EMERY, LUCILIUS A., Concerning Justice, Chapter V, Best Form of Government

A government directly by the people is of course in practice a government by a shifting and often narrow majority of the people. It is not yet demonstrated by experience a reason that such a government, unlimited, would be as regardful of individual rights or welfare as a republican form of government with its checks and balances and constitutional restrictions. The excesses of the unlimited democracies of ancient Greece and of the unrestrained democracy of France during and after the revolution of 1789 and the lynchings in this country do not contribute to such demonstration.

EMERY, LUCILIUS A., Concerning Justice, Chapter VI, Bill Of Rights

Nothing is more revolting than the majority; for it consists of few vigorous predecessors, of knaves who accommodate themselves, of weak people who assimilate themselves, and the mass that toddles after them without knowing in the least what it wants.

The fashionable concentration on democracy as the main value threatened is not without danger. It is largely responsible for the misleading and unfounded belief that, so long as the ultimate source of power is the will of the majority, the power cannot be arbitrary...it is not the source but the limitation of power which prevents it from being arbitrary. Democratic control may prevent power from becoming arbitrary, but it does not do so by its mere existence.

Despite the preaching of our present-day textbook writers and government social planners, democracy is not the goal of America. Democracy can be and has been many times an instrument for the abuse of individuals. Our goal is, and must continue to be, individual freedom.

HUSTED, RALPH, The Moral Foundation of Freedom, The Freeman, March 1966

The majority never has right on its side. Never I say! That is one of the social lies that a free, thinking man is bound to rebel against. Who makes up the majority in any given country? Is it the wise men or the fools? I think we must agree that the fools are in a terrible overwhelming majority, all the wide world over.

[A]s Madison wrote in his famous essay on "Sovereignty," a majority may do only those things "that could be rightfully done by the unanimous concurrence of the members."

JAFFA, HARRY V., Storm Over the Constitution (1999)

The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society.

Liberty has not unfrequently been defined as consisting in the rule of the majority...Suppose the majority bid you drink hemlock, is there liberty for you?

LIEBER, FRANCIS, On Civil Liberty and Self-Government (1853), Chapter II

All despotism, without a standing army, must be supported or acquiesced in, by the majority. It could not stand otherwise.

LIEBER, FRANCIS, On Civil Liberty and Self-Government (1853), Chapter II

[E]quality and democracy of themselves are far from constituting liberty. They may be the worst of despotisms; the one by annihilating individuality, the other, if it means democratic absolutism, by being real sweeping power itself...power without personal responsibility. It acts; but where is the actor, who is responsible, who can be made responsible, who will judge?

LIEBER, FRANCIS, On Civil Liberty and Self-Government (1853), Chapter XXIV

Where any one, or any two, or any three, or any thousand, or any million can do what they have the power to do, there is no liberty. Arbitrary power does not become less arbitrary because it is the united power of many.

LIEBER, FRANCIS, On Civil Liberty and Self-Government (1853), Chapter XXIV

[W]here liberty is believed to consist in the unlimited power of the people, the inevitable practical result is neither more nor less than the absolutism of the majority, and the total want of protection of the minority.

LIEBER, FRANCIS, On Civil Liberty and Self-Government (1853), Chapter XXXI

[W]e meet in history with the invariable result, that virtually one man rules where absolute power of the people is believed to exist.

LIEBER, FRANCIS, On Civil Liberty and Self-Government (1853), Chapter XXXI

Reshuffling the occupants of Westminster or the White House via periodic elections may not guarantee streams of statesmanlike benefactors, but at least it seems to relieve us of rule by Ceausescus, pol Pots, and Saddams.

Political theory is incapable of providing a convincing theoretical justification for preferring a regime of democratically elected nonentities to rule by a virtuous meritocracy pledge to serve the common good...but those aren’t the choices on offer. Benevolent despots tend to remain much more reliably despotic than benevolent, and Lockean rights typically receive short shrift at their hands.

[In a pure democracy] there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.

It has been said that more than a majority ought to have been required for a quorum; and in particular cases, if not in all, more than a majority of a quorum for a decision. That some advantages might have resulted from such a precaution cannot be denied...But...[i]t would be no longer the majority that would rule: the power would be transferred to the minority...an interested minority might take advantage of it to screen themselves from equitable sacrifices to the general weal, or, in particular emergencies, to extort unreasonable indulgences. Lastly, it would facilitate and foster the baneful practice of secessions...a practice subversive of all the principles of order and regular government; a practice which leads more directly to public convulsions and the ruin of popular governments than any which has yet been displayed among us.

MADISON, JAMES, The Federalist Papers, No. 58

[W]herever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Governments the real power lies in the majority of the community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the Constitutents.

The zealots of democracy are beginning to forget, or conveniently to put aside, the enormous majorities by which the French nation, now supposed to be governing itself as a democracy, gave only the other day to a military despot any answer which he desired.

A...conception bequeathed to us by Rousseau is that of the omnipotent democratic State rooted in natural right; the State which has at its disposal everything which individual men value, their property, their persons, and their independence; the State which is bound to respect neither precedent nor prescription; the State which may make laws for its subject ordaining what they shall drink or eat, and in what way they shall spend their earnings; the State which can confiscate all the land of the community, and which...may force us to labour on it when the older incentives to toil have disappeared...The despotic sovereign of the "Contrat Social," the all-powerful community, is an inverted copy of the King of France.

[N]owhere in the American colonial civil order was there ever the trace of a democracy. The political structure was always that of the merchant-State; Americans have never known any other. Furthermore, the philosophy of natural rights and popular sovereignty was never once exhibited anywhere in American political practice during the colonial period, from the first settlement in 1607 down to the revolution of 1776.

Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy the whores are us.

Unlimited majority rule is an instance of the principle of tyranny.

There is nothing sacrosanct about the majority; the lynch mob, too, is the majority in its own domain.

[M]ajority rule is for the sake of securing rights possessed equally by the majority and the minority. Whether anyone’s rights to life, liberty, or property ought to be protected is not itself supposed to be subject to majority rule.

Majority faction is the particular danger of popular government precisely because under popular government majorities can tyrannize under the cover of law.

Tyranny of the Majority.

TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS DE, Democracy in America, Chapter XV Heading

When I see that the right and the means of absolute command are conferred on a people or upon a king, upon an aristocracy or a democracy, a monarchy or a republic, I recognize the germ of tyranny.

 TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS DE, Democracy in America, Chapter XV

What is called the republic in the United States, is the tranquil rule of the majority, which after having had time to examine itself, and to give proof of its existence, is the common source of all the powers of the State. But the power of the majority is not of itself unlimited. In the moral world humanity, justice, and reason enjoy an undisputed supremacy; in the political world vested rights are treated with no less deference. The majority recognizes these two barriers.

 TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS DE, Democracy in America, Chapter XIVII

The Greatest Dangers of the American Republics Proceed from the Unlimited Power of the Majority

TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS DE, Democracy in America, Chapter XV, Subchapter Heading

It is a mistaken notion in government, that the interest of the majority is only to be consulted, since in society every man has a right to everyman’s assistance in the enjoyment and defense of his private property; otherwise the greater number may sell the lesser, and divide their estates amongst themselves; and so, instead of a society, where all peaceable men are protected, become a conspiracy of the many against a minority. With as much equity may one man wantonly dispose of all, and violence may be sanctified by mere Power.

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the Public Treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the Public Treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy always followed by dictatorship.

The Greeks...labored under the delusion that their democracy was a guarantee of peace and plenty, not realizing that unrestrained majority rule always destroys freedom, puts the minority at the mercy of the mob, and works at cross-purposes to the effective use of human energy and individual initiative.