Thought of the Day

History does not repeat, but it does instruct. As the Founding Fathers debated our Constitution, they took instruction from the history they knew. Concerned that the democratic republic they envisioned would collapse, they contemplated the descent of ancient democracies and republics into oligarchy and empire. As they knew, Aristotle warned that inequality brought instability, while Plato believed that demagogues exploited free speech to install themselves as tyrants. In founding a democratic republic upon law and establishing a system of checks and balances, the Founding Fathers sought to avoid the evil they, like the ancient philosophers, called tyranny. They considered the usurpation of power by a single individual or group or the circumvention of law by rulers for their own benefit.

From the introduction of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century , Timothy Synder, Random House