Democracy is reproached with saying that the majority is always right. But progress says that the minority is always right.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the tension between majority rule and minority rights in a democracy.
Gilbert K. Chesterton's quote emphasizes the importance of minority voices in the context of democracy, suggesting that while the majority often has the power, true progress comes from listening to and valuing the perspectives of minorities. This reflects a philosophical viewpoint that champions individual rights and dissent as essential to societal advancement, challenging the notion that popularity equates to correctness.
In practice
During a political speech to emphasize the importance of listening to underrepresented voices.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.
The land on which the cattle grazed was communal property. It was owned by no one. It was nobody's private farm. It was the common property of the people, shared by the people. So the practice of sharing was central to the concept of ownership of property.
The worse a person is the less he feels it.
Any attempt at understanding humanity must include an explanation of the hold that supernatural belief continues to have on most of the human race.
Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.
The idea of Buddha consciousness is that all beings are Buddha beings, and your whole function in meditation and everything else is to find that Buddha consciousness within and live out of that, instead of the interests of the eyes and ears.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.