The Open Society and Its Enemies QUOTES

101 " The book offers an explanatory hypothesis for the persistent hostility to the open society. Totalitarian ideologies are interpreted as reactions to what is described as the strain of civilization, or the sense of drift which is associated with the transition from the closed tribal societies of the past to the individualistic civilization that originated in Athens in the fifth century B.C. "

― Karl Popper , The Open Society and Its Enemies

103 " One particular form of this logical argument is directed against a too naïve version of liberalism, of democracy, and of the principle that the majority should rule; and it is somewhat similar to the well-known ‘paradox of freedom’ which has been used first, and with success, by Plato. In his criticism of democracy, and in his story of the rise of the tyrant, Plato raises implicitly the following question: What if it is the will of the people that they should not rule, but a tyrant instead? The free man, Plato suggests, may exercise his absolute freedom, first by defying the laws and ultimately by defying freedom itself and by clamouring for a tyrant "

― Karl Popper , The Open Society and Its Enemies

105 " The theory I have in mind is one which does not proceed, as it were, from a doctrine of the intrinsic goodness or righteousness of a majority rule, but rather from the baseness of tyranny; or more precisely, it rests upon the decision, or upon the adoption of the proposal, to avoid and to resist tyranny. "

― Karl Popper , The Open Society and Its Enemies