This, my hypothetical young man, is very very bad, and you had best take immediate steps to correct it. “you think, really, that there is something unnatural, something positively abnormal about a young man dancing around with tears in his eyes for such a reason? Don’t you see that in this condition you scarcely present that bulwark of strength and self-assurance which a woman has a right to look for in a man? Don’t you see that you really don’t want a woman at all, as a woman? That you only want a mother to hold your head on her shoulder and dry your dancing-tears and flatter your delicate little egotism and tend to your little physical necessities for you. When you attempt to alter the workings of the system by means of violence or civil disobedience, this, it seems to me, can have only one of two implications either you do not believe in democracy at all and consider that society ought to be governed by enlightened minorities such as the one to which you, of course, belong or you consider that the present system is so imperfect that it is not truly representative, that it no longer serves adequately as a vehicle for the will of the majority, and that this leaves to the unsatisfied no adequate means of self-expression other than the primitive one of calling attention to themselves and their emotions by mass demonstrations and mass defiance of established authority.” Without it there could be no system of representative self-government at all. This willingness to accept, in principle, the workings of a system based on the will of the majority, even when you yourself are in the minority, is simply the essence of democracy.

“If you accept a democratic system, this means that you are prepared to put up with those of its workings, legislative or administrative, with which you do not agree as well as with those that meet with your concurrence.

American diplomacy kennan