I learned to ignore
criticism and advice from experts and quasi-experts, especially academics in
the social and political sciences. They have pet theories on how a society
should develop to approximate their ideal, especially how poverty should be
reduced and welfare extended. I always try to be correct, not politically
correct.———Chapter 8: The Future of Democracy
I do not take anything
all that seriously. If I did, I would be quite a sick man. A number of foolish
things will be said about you. If you take them all seriously, you will get
quite demented.———Chapter 8: The Future
of Democracy
Government, to be
effective, must at least give the impression of enduring, and a government
which is open to the vagaries of the ballot box… is a government which is
already weakened before it starts to govern.———Chapter 8: The Future of Democracy
My idea of popular
government is that you do not have to be popular all the time when you are
governing… There are moments when you have to be thoroughly unpopular… If you
want to be popular all the time, you will misgovern.———Chapter 8: The Future of Democracy
I have never been
over-concerned or obsessed with opinion polls or popularity polls. I think a
leader who is, is a weak leader. If you are concerned with whether your rating
will go up or down, then you are not a leader. You are just catching the wind…
you will go where the wind is blowing… What the crowd thinks of me from time to
time, I consider totally irrelevant… The whole ground can be against, but if I
know this is right, I set out to do it, and I am quite sure, given time, as
events unfold, I will win over the ground.”———Chapter 8: The Future of Democracy
[N]owhere in the world
today are [rights and freedoms] allowed to be practiced without limitations,
for blindly applied, these ideals can work toward the undoing of organized
society.———Chapter 8: The Future of Democracy
For the acid test of
any legal system is not the greatness or the grandeur of its ideal concepts,
but whether, in fact, it is able to produce order and justice in the
relationships between person and person, and between person and the state. To
maintain this order with the best degree of tolerance and humanity is a problem.———Chapter 8: The Future of Democracy