“A false ideal of democracy can lead only to disillusionment and to meddlesome tyranny. The public must be put in its place, so that each of us [responsible men] may live free of the trampling and roar of the bewildered herd.”
“Ours must be a leadership democracy administered by the intelligent minority who know how to regiment and guide the masses. Is this government by propaganda? Call it, if you prefer, government by education.”
“Landholders … ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The Senate, therefore, ought to be this body.”
“Men in general in every society, who are wholly destitute of property, are also too little acquainted with public affairs to form a right judgment, and too dependent upon other men to have a will of their own.”
“The United States crusade against Communism is a campaign against development … to suppress every popular movement that aims to overthrow ancient or modern tyranny & begin to find a way to overcome poverty & establish national self-respect.”
“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’. That hurts you … So you say stuff like ‘states’ rights’… and all of these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and the byproduct of them is: Blacks get hurt.”
“By getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. … Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
“Our primary objective is to establish conditions which will bring home to the Cuban people the cost of Castro’s policies and of his Soviet orientation. … If the Cuban people are hungry, they will throw Castro out.”
“Castro has provided … a highly exploitable example of revolutionary achievement and successful defiance of the United States.”
“We should cease to talk about … unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”
“The employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of people … The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, … generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”
“I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
