"Democracy... while it lasts is more bloody than either aristocracy or monarchy. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide"
About this Quote
Adams isn`t doing fortune-cookie pessimism here; he`s issuing a clinician`s warning from inside the experiment. The ellipses and piling verbs - "wastes, exhausts, and murders" - are the rhetoric of attrition, a sense that democratic breakdown isn`t a lightning strike but a slow self-sabotage. He frames democracy as uniquely violent not because kings are gentle, but because popular rule can turn cruelty into a mass hobby: factions sanctify their appetites as "the people`s will", and political opponents become traitors to be purged rather than rivals to be defeated.
The subtext is patrician fear sharpened into constitutional design. Adams believed humans are ambitious, vain, and tribal; a system that flatters those instincts without restraint will combust. So this isn`t an argument against elections so much as an argument against unmediated majoritarianism. It`s why he pushed for checks and balances, bicameral legislatures, an independent judiciary - brakes on the crowd and, just as importantly, on charismatic leaders who claim to embody it.
Context matters: the quote comes from a revolutionary who watched republics in history collapse into strongman rule, and who lived through early American volatility - debtor uprisings, vicious press warfare, and the French Revolution`s slide from liberation into the Terror. When Adams says democracy "commits suicide", he`s indicting a cycle: high ideals, then grievance politics, then revenge, then the bargain for order at any price. It`s a bleak line, but it`s also a job description for the Constitution: make the system sturdy enough to outlast its worst impulses.
The subtext is patrician fear sharpened into constitutional design. Adams believed humans are ambitious, vain, and tribal; a system that flatters those instincts without restraint will combust. So this isn`t an argument against elections so much as an argument against unmediated majoritarianism. It`s why he pushed for checks and balances, bicameral legislatures, an independent judiciary - brakes on the crowd and, just as importantly, on charismatic leaders who claim to embody it.
Context matters: the quote comes from a revolutionary who watched republics in history collapse into strongman rule, and who lived through early American volatility - debtor uprisings, vicious press warfare, and the French Revolution`s slide from liberation into the Terror. When Adams says democracy "commits suicide", he`s indicting a cycle: high ideals, then grievance politics, then revenge, then the bargain for order at any price. It`s a bleak line, but it`s also a job description for the Constitution: make the system sturdy enough to outlast its worst impulses.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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