On Democracy
E.B. White
Top 10 Best Quotes
“[Writers] are feared by every tyrant--who shows his fear by burning the books and destroying the individuals.”
“Who is there big enough to love the whole planet? We must find such a people for the next society.”
“To be free, in a planetary sense, is to feel that you belong to earth. To be free, in a social sense, is to feel at home in a democratic framework.”
“There is a vague feeling that after great evil comes great good; after trouble comes absence of trouble; after war, peace. It is a mystical, rather than logical, presentiment. History does not offer any very impressive corroboration; flip over its pages and you are apt to find the disagreeable reminder that after trouble comes more trouble. Yet it is a feeling everyone must hold to.”
“The beauty of free speech which is free is that it is self-annihilating, whether in tiny amounts or in great amounts; and the menace of speech which is not free is that it is self-perpetuating, like a cellar full of rats.”
“Men are not merely annihilating themselves at a great rate these days, but they are telling one another enormous lies, grandiose fibs...they are more destructive than dive bombers and mine fields, for they challenge not merely one's immediate position but one's main defenses.”
“It is easier for a man to be loyal to his club than his planet; the by-laws are shorter, and he is personally acquainted with the other members. A club, moreover, or a nation, offers the right to be exclusive. There are not many of us who are physically constituted to resist this strange delight, this nourishing privilege. It is at the bottom of all fraternities, societies, orders. It is at the bottom of most trouble. The planet holds out no such inducement. The planet is everybody's. All it offers is the grass, the sky, the water, and the ineluctable dream of peace and fruition.”
“I think a good many people, here and everywhere, have a feeling in their bones that some sort of large-scale reawakening is in the cards for humanity.”
“Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn't been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It's the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.”
“But a man's free condition is of two parts: the instinctive freeness he experiences as an animal dweller on a planet, and the practical liberties he enjoys as a privileged member of human society.”
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Book Keywords:
club, misinformation, tyranny, fear, tribalism, book-burning, america, meaning-of-democracy, democracy, planet, government, post-war, hope, peace, humanity, writers, tyrants, reawakening, lies, politics, in-group-favoritism, freedom, truth, free-speech, exclusivity, feeling
