Top 15 Elmer Eric Schattschneider Quotes

Government is the most successful idea in the world, but for all its success and importance it is something imperfect. There is no ideal state. After thousands of years it is still a mixture of good and evil.

Democracy has no place for the kind of justice implied in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Democracy is a system for the resolution of conflict, not for vengeance. Simple black-white notions of right and wrong do not fit into democratic politics. Political controversies result from the fact that the issues are complex, and men may properly have differences of opinion about them. The most terrible of all over-simplifications is the notion that politics is a contest between good people and bad people. Democracy is based on a profound insight into human nature, the realization that all men are sinful, all are imperfect, all are prejudiced, and none knows the whole truth. That is why we need liberty and why we have an obligation to hear all men. Liberty gives us a chance to learn from other people, to become aware of our own limitations, and to correct our bias. Even when we disagree with other people we like to think that they speak from good motives, and while we realize that all men are limited, we do not let ourselves imagine that any man is bad. Democracy is a political system for people who are not sure that they are right.

Democracy begins as an act of imagination about people. For this reason democracy is a doctrine of social criticism.

The love of people goes far beyond liberty, rights, equality, and justice. It is something positive, seeks the fullest possible self-realization; it contemplates happiness, overflows all differences, and creates the kind of wealth that can be produced only by people who enjoy their common participation in a community.

People who do not know what government is are not likely to know what democracy is either, for democracy is only what the soft inside of the oyster looks like.

What is government? From the outside it looks like a security system based on the marriage of land and people, From the inside, it looks like and attempts to create a community. A government is like an oyster, hard on the outside and soft on the inside, and the outside and inside are utterly dependent on each other.

Democracy is a competitive political system in which competing leaders and organizations define the alternatives of public policy in such a way that the public can participate in the decision-making process.

Sectionalism tends strongly to depress party organization because elections in one-party areas are won not by competing with the opposition party but by eliminating it.

There is a perpetual effort of the parties to isolate each other. To say it crudely, all radical proposals for the re-organization of American politics propose to isolate the rich.

The substitution of conflicts is the most devastating kind of political strategy. Alliances are formed and re-formed; fortresses, positions, alignments and combinations are destroyed or abandoned in a tremendous shuffle of forces redeployed to defend new positions or to take new strong points. In politics the most catastrophic force in the world is the power of irrelevance which transmutes one conflict into another and turns all existing alignments inside out.

Political conflict is not like an intercollegiate debate in which the opponents agree in advance on a definition of the issues. As a matter of fact, the definition of the alternatives is the supreme instrument of power; the antagonists can rarely agree on what the issues are because power is involved in the definition.

In the competition of conflicts there is nothing sacred about our preference for big or little conflicts. All depends on what we want most. The outcome is not determined merely by what people want but by their priorities.

The failure to understand that unification and division are a part of the same process has produced some illusions about politics.

Most of the organizational problems of the parties are unique. The party system is by a wide margin the largest mobilization of people in the country. The parties lack many of the qualities of smaller organizations, but they have one overwhelming asset of their own. They are the only organizations that can win elections.

The power of pressure groups tends to evaporate when it is translated into other dimensions of politics because the calculus of party politics is entirely different from the calculus of pressure politics. Numbers are everything in one dimension and very little in the other. We are dealing with two different strategies of politics and two different concepts of political organization. Moreover, the end product of party politics is inevitably different from that of pressure politics. Inevitably some people prefer one game to the other.