"After all, the practical reason why, when..." - Quote by Henry David Thoreau
After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it.
More by Henry David Thoreau
“Not by constraint or severity shall you have access to true wisdom, but by abandonment, and childlike mirth-fulness. If you would know aught, be gay before it.”
“In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident.”
“My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks.”
More on Government
“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.”
“Congress is hard to deal with, dealing with, you know, multiple parliaments and commissions and unions and this and that and the other, that's very complicated.”
“Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-long debates about the role of government for all time, but it does require us to act in our time.”
More on Justice
“Violence becomes imperative when an attempt is made to assert rights without any reference to duties.”
“Is not the action of nature like the stretching of a bow? The high, it pulls down; the low, it lifts up; It takes from what is in excess In order to make good of what is deficient. Who can take what they have in excess and offer it to others?”
“There is a certain right by which we many deprive a man of life, but none by which we may deprive him of death; this is mere cruelty.”