If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for ... but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong.
-Robert A. Heinlein

Helping

Helping an individual is hard. Developing a grandiose plan to save the world is not.
-Rufus T, comment 15 at Dirty Harry's Place

"Warm Body" Democracy

The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a "warm body" democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction.... [O]nce a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader — the barbarians enter Rome.
-Robert A. Heinlein, To Sail Beyond the Sunset

Never Learned Anything

What experience and history teach is this -- that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.
-Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, German philosopher