Democracy: The state of affairs in which you consent to having your pocket picked, and elect the best man to do it.

Cast as a sardonic dictionary-style definition, the line treats democracy less as popular self-rule than as a mechanism for legitimizing exploitation. “Consent” implies that citizens, by participating in elections, tacitly authorize actions that harm them—here figured as being “pocket picked,” a metaphor for taxation, corruption, or elite self-dealing. The sting of “elect the best man to do it” suggests that electoral competition may merely select the most skilled exploiter rather than prevent exploitation. The quote belongs to a long tradition of anti-democratic or radically skeptical political aphorisms that use criminal imagery to question whether formal consent meaningfully restrains power.