Did Churchill Say ‘Best Argument Against Democracy’ Is 5-Minute Conversation with Average Voter?

For years, internet users have shared a saying about democracy and the average voter attributed to Winston Churchill, the British statesman who served as U.K. prime minister during World War II.

As quoted in posts on platforms including X (archived), Facebook (archived), and Reddit (archived), as well as on quote meme sites like BrainyQuote (archived), the full saying was: “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

(Facebook page The Week UK)

However, there is no demonstrable evidence that Churchill ever actually said these words.

Richard M. Langworth, a Churchill scholar at Hillsdale College, identified the quote in question here as a common misattribution in 2008’s “Churchill by Himself: The Definitive Collection of Quotations.” There, Langworth, who served as the book’s editor, wrote that the saying was “commonly quoted, but without attribution.”

The International Churchill Society also singled out this quote about democracy on a page the society maintains of “Attributed Churchill Quotes which Winston Never Uttered,” noting: “Though he sometimes despaired of democracy’s slowness to act for its preservation, Churchill had a more positive attitude towards the average voter.”

In our independent investigation of the quote, we found no instances of the quote — whether attributed to Churchill or not — published before the mid-1990s when it began to appear in newspapers and books.

In the early 2000s, the quote appeared in anthologies including “Cassel’s Humorous Quotations,” “The Quotable Politician,” and “The Quotable Winston Churchill,” all of which attributed the quote to Churchill but did not cite when or where he allegedly said it.

Churchill died in 1965, meaning there was a roughly three-decade gap between his death and the earliest securely datable instances we found of the quote. Such gaps between a public figure’s death and the emergence of a quote attributed to that figure are a common red flag that a quote has been misattributed.

In summary, although the quote “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter” has been widely attributed to Churchill, Churchill experts have not identified a primary source — such as a published or archival document, or a transcript or recording of a speech — proving the prime minister ever said these words.

Instead, the quote appears to have begun to circulate in the 1990s, decades after Churchill died, without reference to any verifiable primary source. As such, we’ve rated this quote as misattributed.

We’ve previously investigated other quotes commonly attributed to Churchill, including “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

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