A Quote by Jean Jaures

Revolutions can no longer be achieved by minorities. No matter how energetic and intelligent a minority may be, it is not enough, in modern times at least, to make a revolution. The cooperation of a majority, and a large majority too, is needed.

Jean Jaures

Quote Topics

Achieved Cooperation Energetic Enough How Intelligent Large Least Longer Majority Make Matter May Minorities Minority Modern Modern Times Needed Revolution Revolutions Times Too

Quote Author

Jean Jaures
French - Politician
September 3, 1859 - July 31, 1914

Rules of Order state that ... No minority has a right to block a majority from conducting the legal business of the organisation .... but No majority has a right to prevent a minority from peacefully attempting to become the majority.

Robert M. Pirsig

Majorities can be wrong, majorities can overrule rights of minorities. If majorities ruled, we could still have slavery. 80% of the population once enslaved 20% of the population. While run by majority rule that is ok. That is very flawed notion of what democracy is. Democracy has to take into account several things - proportionate requirements of people, not just needs of the majority, but also needs of the minority. Majority, especially in societies where the media manipulates public opinion, can be totally wrong and evil. People have to act according to conscience and not by majority vote.

Howard Zinn

Majorities are of two sorts: (1) communal majority and (2) political majority. A political majority is changeable in its class composition. A political majority grows. A communal majority is born. The admission to a political majority is open. The door to a communal majority is closed. The politics of political majority are free to all to make and unmake. The politics of communal majority are made by its own members born in it.

B. R. Ambedkar

A fatal defect in majority rule is that by its very nature it abolishes itself. Majority rule must inevitably become minority rule: the majority is too big to handle itself; it organizes itself into committees ... which in their turn resolve themselves into a committee of one.

Mary Parker Follett

We are so concerned to flatter the majority that we lose sight of how very often it is necessary, in order to preserve freedom for the minority, let alone for the individual, to face that majority down.

William F. Buckley, Jr.

World history is made by minorities when this minority of number embodies the majority of will and determination.

Adolf Hitler

It is only because the majority opinion will always be opposed by some that our knowledge and understanding progress... it is always from a minority acting in ways different from what the majority would prescribe that the majority in the end learns to do better.

Friedrich August von Hayek

In East, South and Central Africa, the minority manipulated the majority into believing the minority was the majority, that there were more whites in the world than blacks; instilled in the blacks a sense of inferiority, inadequacy, worthlessness.

Peter Abrahams

Demographically speaking, young white people are not in the majority in this country; they're in the minority. My question is, if they're not the majority anymore, then what happens? How do things change? Or do they change at all?

Jose Antonio Vargas

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.

Soren Kierkegaard

We [women] are the majority of the population, majority of the electorate, majority of the workforce... and yet we're still doing majority of family unpaid or low paid labor. And we live longer. Our stuff is not "special interest" stuff. Our stuff is the stuff of the future, of the whole.

Ai-jen Poo

What is needed to pass gay marriage is not a Democratic majority - this past year has proven that to be true - but politicians and judges comfortable enough to ignore what the majority of the voters want and do what is uncomfortable, unpopular - and morally right.

Richard Grenell

By and large, the answer to the question "How do large institutions survive?" is "They don't!" The vast majority of large modern-day institutions - some of them extremely vital to the functioning of our complex civilization - simply fail to exist in the first place.

Eliezer Yudkowsky

It is unnatural for a majority to rule, for a majority can seldom be organized and united for specific action, and a minority can.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

We in the United States believe in the protection of minorities; we recognize the contributions that they can make and the leadership that they can provide; and we do not believe that any people - whether majority or minority, or individual human beings - are 'expendable' in the cause of theory or of policy.