minorities quotes

A. A. Milne: 

The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.

Eugene V. Debs: 

When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right.

Henry David Thoreau: 

A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.

Jesse Jackson: 

In politics, an organized minority is a political majority.

John Bright: 

Demand the ballot as the undeniable right of every man who is called to the poll, and take special care that the old constitutional rule and principle, by which majorities alone shall decide in Parliamentary elections, shall not be violated.

Jose Ortega y Gasset: 

Liberalism is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence itis the noblest cry that has ever resounded on this planet.

Leonard H. Robbins: 

How a minority,
Reaching majority,
Seizing authority,
Hates a minority!

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely.

Sam Adams: 

It is no dishonor to be in a minority in the cause of liberty and virtue.

Soren Kierkegaard: 

Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion—and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion ... while Truth again reverts to a new minority.

Thomas Jefferson: 

A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.

Wendell Phillips: 

Governments exist to protect the rights of minorities. The loved and the rich need no protection: they have many friends and few enemies.