Author Diane Duane recently had a phrase pop into her head out of nowhere:
"Be Like Stalks".
After thinking about it for a while, she remembered the source.
On her blog, she explains that it's a quote from an article C.S. Lewis wrote for The Guardian in 1961, revisiting the main character of his Screwtape Letters.
You remember how one of the Greek Dictators (they called them "tyrants" then) sent an envoy to another Dictator to ask his advice about the principles of government. The second Dictator led the envoy into a field of grain, and there he snicked off with his cane the top of every stalk that rose an inch or so above the general level. The moral was plain. Allow no preeminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser or better or more famous or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level: all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals.* Thus Tyrants could practise, in a sense, "democracy." But now "democracy" can do the same work without any tyranny other than her own. No one need now go through the field with a cane. The little stalks will now of themselves bite the tops off the big ones. The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their desire to Be Like Stalks.
Screwtape later goes on to point out:
We, in Hell, would welcome the disappearance of democracy in the strict sense of that word, the political arrangement so called. Like all forms of government, it often works to our advantage, but on the whole less often than other forms. And what we must realize is that "democracy" in the diabolical sense (I’m as good as you, Being Like Folks, Togetherness) is the fittest instrument we could possibly have for extirpating political democracies from the face of the earth.
For "democracy" or the "democratic spirit" (diabolical sense) leads to a nation without great men, a nation mainly of subliterates, full of the cocksureness which flattery breeds on ignorance, and quick to snarl or whimper at the first sign of criticism. And that is what Hell wishes every democratic people to be.
Duane quotes from the article at length; see the link above to find the other passage she found most interesting, and check out the comments on the LiveJournal mirror blog for some thoughtful discussion on this and related topics.
(Full disclosure: I moderate Duane's Young Wizards discussion forum, but I'm posting only for myself here.)