“Not Athens, but the Athenians, were the polis.”
—Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, (University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 195.
“How can citizens participate effectively when the number of citizens becomes too numerous or too widely dispersed geographically (or both, as in the case of a country) for them to participate conveniently in making laws by assembling in one place?”
— Robert Alan Dahl, On Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 93