demagogues – Uncommon Sense

Helping themselves

When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear. People with careers as ethnic leaders usually tell their followers what they want to hear.

How demagogues work

Intellectuals may like to think of themselves as people who ‘speak truth to power,’ but too often they are people who speak lies to gain power.

Trading down

If we become a people who are willing to give up our money and our freedom in exchange for rhetoric and promises, then nothing can save us.

The pretense of caring

The great inlet by which a color for oppression has entered into the world is by one man’s pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another.

Traitors

No punishment, in my opinion, is too great for a man who can build his greatness upon his country’s ruin.

Don’t be talked out of your liberties

Be not intimidated … nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery, and cowardice.

Demagogues and bureaucrats

He who is unfit to serve his fellow citizens wants to rule them.

Letter from President Donald J. Trump to the Speaker of the House of Representatives

The Honorable Nancy Pelosi
Speaker of the House of Representatives
Washington, D.C. 20515

Dear Madam Speaker:

I write to express my strongest and most powerful protest against the partisan impeachment crusade being pursued by the Democrats in the House of Representatives. This impeachment represents an unprecedented and unconstitutional abuse of power by Democrat Lawmakers, unequaled in nearly two and a half centuries of American legislative history.

Character matters

It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

Addicted to power

Those who have been intoxicated with power … can never willingly abandon it.