A genuinely political society, in which discussion and debate are an essential technique, is a society full of risks. - Moses I. Finley

Perhaps the best known, and certainly the most vaunted, "discovery" of modern public opinion research is the indifference and ignorance of a majority of the electorate in western democracies.

for it is conflict combined with consent, not consent alone, which preserves democracy from eroding into oligarchy.

From Aristophanes to Aristotle, the attack on the demagogues always falls back on the one central question: in whose interest does the the leader lead?