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# Weekend Words: Vote
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/weekend-words-vote/
- Published: 2016-11-06T14:30:03.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:28:30.000Z
- Description: "The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all."
- Author: Weekend Editors
- Tags: Art, Weekend, Weekend Words, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:23 (2016, 2017, part 2)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2016/11/vote.jpg)

William Hogarth, “Soliciting Votes” (1754), oil on canvas, 101,6 x 127 cm, Sir John Soane’s Museum, London (image via Web Gallery of Art)

This is it. Vote.

> The great thing about democracy is that it gives every voter a chance to do something stupid.  
>  
> **—Art Spander**

> Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.  
>  
> **—Gore Vidal**

> The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.  
>  
> **—John F. Kennedy, speech at Vanderbilt University, May 18, 1963**

> A vote is like a rifle; it’s usefulness depends on the character of the user.  
>  
> **—Theodore Roosevelt**

> The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.  
>  
> **—Joseph Stalin**

> Hell, I never vote *for* anybody. I always vote *against*.  
>  
> **—W. C. Fields**

> If the gods had intended us to vote they would have given us candidates.  
>  
> **—Howard Zinn**

> If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side.  
>  
> **—Orson Scott Card**

> Democracy will prevail when men believe the vote of Judas as good as that of Jesus Christ.  
>  
> **—Thomas Carlyle**

> Whenever a fellow tells me he is bipartisan, I know he’s going to vote against me.  
>  
> **—Harry S Truman**

> Republicans have been accused of abandoning the poor. It’s the other way around. They never vote for us.  
>  
> **—Dan Quayle**

> The polls \[…\] indicate that Nixon will get a comfortable majority of the youth vote. And that he might carry all fifty states. \[…\] This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves — that we really are just a nation of \[…\] used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anyone else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.  
>  
> **—Hunter S. Thompson, from *Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail*, written on the eve of the 1972 election**

> Every new baby is a blind desperate vote for survival: people who find themselves unable to register an effective political protest against extermination do so by a biological act.  
>  
> **\-Lewis Mumford**