The ultimate enemy of Democracy is not the drug dealer of the crooked politician or the crazed skinhead. The ultimate enemy is the New King that has become so powerful it can murder its own citizens with impunity.
Interpretation
Democracy faces a greater threat from an oppressive authority than from visible external forces.
In this quote, Gerry Spence highlights that the most significant threat to democracy is not overtly recognizable adversaries like drug dealers or corrupt politicians, but rather a powerful ruling entity that possesses the capability and willingness to impose violence and injustice against its own citizens without fear of consequences. This underlying message urges individuals to be vigilant against the often subtle erosion of democratic principles by those in power.
In practice
This quote can be used in a political speech to emphasize the importance of protecting democratic values.
Today the insatiable quest for profit promotes the new slavery. In bewildering ways, the new is more pernicious than the old, for the New American Slave is told he is free, and he clings to that myth as if his life depended upon it, a suspicion that cannot be totally ignored.
The best antidote for crime is justice. The irony we often fail to appreciate is that the more justice people enjoy, the fewer crimes they commit. Crime is the natural offspring of an unjust society.
When any system has for its goal the advancement of the system over the betterment of its individual members, such a system is embedded in slavery.
The erosion of a nation's concern for life and for individual rights, has always preceded the intrusion of tyranny.
The true test of liberty is the right to test it, the right to question it, the right to speak to my neighbors, to grab them by the shoulders and look into their eyes and ask, “Are we free?” I have thought that if we are free, the answer cannot hurt us. And if we are not free, must we not hear the answer?
The function of the law is not to provide justice or to preserve freedom. The function of the law is to keep those who hold power, in power.
I cannot believe that the most delicious things were placed here merely to test us, to temp us, to make it the more difficult for us to capture the grand prize: the safety of the void. To fashion of life such a petty game is unworthy of both men and gods.
Our behavior toward each other is the strangest, most unpredictable, and most unaccountable of all the phenomena with which we are obliged to live. In all of nature, there is nothing so threatening to humanity as humanity itself.
Force is the only language the imperialists can hear, and no country became free without some sort of violence.
I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world.
Anything that you throw comes back. All your actions are echoes.
If the wine drinker has a deep gentleness in him, he will show that when drunk. But if he has hidden anger and arrogance, those appear.
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