Two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three.

Forster coined this formulation in the late 1930s as European democracies faced pressure from fascism and communism and were also being criticized for their own complacencies and imperial entanglements. In an essay-lecture setting, he defended democracy not as a perfect system deserving uncritical celebration, but as a political arrangement that protects pluralism and—crucially—the right to dissent. The deliberately restrained “two cheers” registers both his commitment to liberal democratic freedoms and his refusal to romanticize the state or mass politics. The line became one of Forster’s best-known political epigrams, often cited as a succinct statement of skeptical liberalism.

The “two cheers” are a measured endorsement. Forster praises democracy less for efficiency or virtue than for the space it makes: it “admits variety” (tolerates difference, minority views, eccentricity) and “permits criticism” (institutionalizes dissent and self-correction). Withholding the third cheer signals that democracy remains flawed—capable of injustice, mediocrity, and coercive majorities—so it should never demand reverence. The aphorism argues that democracy’s strength lies in its openness to being challenged; the ability to criticize is not a threat to the system but one of its defining achievements. It is a defense of democratic habits rather than democratic triumphalism.