Those people aren't ready for democracy ...

What a marvelous quote.

When people say, as they often do, with a glint of ethnic or cultural superiority in their angry eyes, that Arabs or Africans or Persians or Turks just aren't "ready" for democracy, that such people prefer tyrants, or that they have no history of democracy and are hence incapable of it, or they have no middle class, without which no stable democracy can exist, or they believe in Islam, which brooks no democracy, I try to remind them that some of the worst tyrannies came from highly cultured Christian countries with glorious democratic and humanistic traditions. And I don't think that Periclean Athens boasted a large and flourishing middle class.

Michael Ledeen, "When People Freely Choose Tyranny," National Review Online, January 31st 2006.

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