Top 87 Democracies Have Quotes
#1. We in the United States are very often - since we are a democracy and we have national interests, we've often made the mistake that a democracy has to adopt America's interests, and that is a contradiction because a democracy basically is people deciding what their interests are.
George Soros
#2. It is a law of governance that democracies have to spend themselves dizzy. Citizens of democracies can, after all, tell their government to give them things.
P. J. O'Rourke
#3. All democracies are based on the proposition that power is very dangerous and that it is extremely important not to let any one person or small group have too much power for too long a time
Aldous Huxley
#4. As long as the differences and diversities of mankind exist, democracy must allow for compromise, for accommodation, and for the recognition of differences.
Eugene McCarthy
#5. Laws provide against injury from others; but not from ourselves.
Thomas Jefferson
#6. Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.
John Dewey
#7. The diverse natures of men, combined with the necessity to satisfy in some manner the sentiment which desires them to be equal, has had the result that in the democracies they have endeavored to provide the appearance of power in the people and the reality of power in an elite.
Vilfredo Pareto
#8. Dictatorships are one-way streets. Democracy boasts two-way traffic.
Alberto Moravia
#9. It is interesting to note that an overwhelming majority of citizens in the world's three largest democracies have different religions: India (81 percent Hindu), the United States (76 percent Christian), and Indonesia (87 percent Muslim). Two of them have elected women as leaders of their government.
Jimmy Carter
#10. I realized that democracy is indivisible, or rather, that freedom is indivisible. There are many clown-democracies in the Arab world, which have nothing to do with freedom.
Walid Jumblatt
#11. Democracies don't prepare well for things that have never happened before.
Richard A. Clarke
#12. How have relations with Iran and Belarus benefited Venezuela? We are interested in countries that have democracies, that respect human rights, that we have an affinity with. What affinity do we have with Iran?
Henrique Capriles Radonski
#13. The boundaries of democracy have to be widened so as to include economic equality also. This is the great revolution through which we are all passing.
Jawaharlal Nehru
#14. Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.
P. J. O'Rourke
#15. The descendants of Holy Roman Empire monarchies became feeble-minded in the twentieth century, and after World War I had been done in by the democracies; some were kept on to entertain the tourists, like the one they have in England.
Ishmael Reed
#16. Democracy has nothing to do with freedom. Democracy is a soft variant of communism, and rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
#17. You are never wrong when you have voted because you've acted in accordance with your conscience and your beliefs, and you've exercised your democratic right, which is, you know, perfectly legitimate in our democracies.
Christine Lagarde
#18. Whatever modern democracies may tell themselves about their commitment to free speech and to diversity of opinion, the values of a given society will uncannily match those of whichever organizations have the scale to pay for runs of thirty-second slots around the nightly news bulletin.
Alain De Botton
#19. Acts of anti-Semitism in countries throughout the world, including some of the world's strongest democracies, have increased significantly in frequency and scope over the last several years.
Tim Holden
#20. As the largest and most developed democracies of Asia (India and Japan), we have a mutual stake in each other's progress and prosperity.
Manmohan Singh
#21. I would argue that in times of war, sealed lips sink entire democracies. If we don't have access to vital information, we lose everything.
Ted Gup
#22. Democracy has many definitions, but what's in it for me is not an element of any of them.
Jeff Cooper
#23. There are ways to pursue political change. In a democracy, it's through the ballot box. There are other ways, and many democracies have many different systems of democracy.
Richard Armitage
#24. In a democracy, the individual enjoys not only the ultimate power but carries the ultimate responsibility.
Norman Cousins
#25. Jews have not only become equal citizens in Western democracies, they have become leading citizens. And, of course, the reestablishment of the State of Israel has given Jews a political presence in the world they have not had since biblical times.
David Novak
#26. The contribution of the Western democracies to the awakening of the East has been indirect and certainly unintended. They have kindled an enthusiasm of resentment against the West; and it is this anti-Western fervor which is at present rousing the Orient from its stagnation of centuries.2
Eric Hoffer
#27. Democracy, by its very nature, can't be imposed on people. Democracy has to be the people deciding for themselves.
George Soros
#28. In view of China's growing military strength and intentions, the best way to safeguard Asia's permanent peace and prosperity is to have all Asian countries join forces with other democratic countries in the world to form a global community of democracies.
Jim Costa
#29. however, is that there is no alternative. Communist societies, social democracies, and even modest social welfare states like the United States have all failed, the neoliberals proclaim, and their citizens have accepted neoliberalism as the only feasible course.
Noam Chomsky
#30. Democracies have to be careful that they do not become so process-driven.
Hillary Clinton
#31. We can be proud of our record as an international beacon of liberty. From fostering democracies in Eastern Europe to the stabilization of Iraq and Afghanistan, we have been true to that calling and helped spread freedom to oppressed peoples everywhere.
Kay Bailey Hutchison
#32. So much of democracy is built on antagonism. It institutionalizes a certain kind of antagonism. This is not to say that we shouldn't have any democracy, but the fact is that democracy has hardened political identities and made them more violent.
Pankaj Mishra
#33. Globally, democracies have also acted in ways that suggest an outright renunciation of their principles at home.
Nayef Al-Rodhan
#34. Democracies must have equilibrium ... and the entanglement of politics and information must be minimized.
Romano Prodi
#35. I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization, or both.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#36. The tragedy of modern democracies is that they have not yet succeeded in effecting democracy.
Jacques Maritain
#37. The spirit of democracy cannot be established in the midst of terrorism, whether governmental or popular.
Mahatma Gandhi
#38. Many of the Western democracies - including the U.S. - have a problem that voters want benefits they don't want to pay for.
Henry Paulson
#39. For our democracy has been marred by imperialism, and it has been enlightened only by individual and sporadic efforts at freedom.
Pearl S. Buck
#40. You can't have an industrial revolution, you can't have democracies, you can't have populations who can govern themselves until you have literacy. The printing press simply unlocked literacy.
Howard Rheingold
#41. Down to the present day the luminous image of democracy has often served as a pretext for the most undemocratic actions.
Randal Marlin
#42. Democracy and religion stand or fall together. Where democracy has been destroyed, religion has been doomed. Where religion has been trampled down, democracy has ceased to exist ... Tyrants have come and have had their day and then have passed while religion has survived them all.
Herbert H. Lehman
#43. Democracy is four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
Ambrose Bierce
#44. It may be concluded that a pure democracy ... can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction.
James Madison
#45. Democracy has proved only that the best way to gain power over people is to assure the people that they are ruling themselves. Once they believe that, they make wonderfully submissive slaves.
Joseph Sobran
#46. No democracy has ever long survived the failure of its adherents to be ready to die for it. My own conviction is this, the people must either go on or go under.
David Lloyd George
#47. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppose.
Frederick Douglass
#48. In America, unlike England, unlike Israel, unlike Japan, other democracies, we have elections that have staggered terms.
Barney Frank
#49. We have to implant democracies where there are now dictatorships.
Tom Tancredo
#50. The war waged against terror since September 11 puts a strain on democracy itself, because it is mostly waged in secret, using means that are at the edge of both law and morality. Yet democracies have shown themselves capable of keeping the secret exercise of power under control.
Michael Ignatieff
#51. Democracy has no convictions for which people would be willing to stake their lives.
Ernst Hanfstaengl
#52. Although Christianity has never been the guarantee of a democratic state anywhere in the world, no democracy has ever thrived successfully for any period of time outside of Christian influence.
Theodore White
#53. Democracy has two excesses to avoid: the spirit of inequality, which leads to an aristocracy, or to the government of a single individual; and the spirit of extreme equality, which conducts it to despotism, as the despotism of a single individual finishes by conquest.
Baron De Montesquieu
#54. Constitutional democracy has created astonishing and apparently irreversible social progress. All we're interested in is talking about when government doesn't work.
Tony Kushner
#55. In 1956, I shall not go to the polls. I have not registered. I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no 'two evils' exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#56. Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.
John Marshall
#57. American democracy has been hacked.
Al Gore
#58. What nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland.
Robert Pape
#59. Efforts to bring about democracy have hit a wall and are going backwards.
John McCain
#60. I believe that all of us have gangster proclivities and greedy orientations that need accountability. That's why democracies are necessary. We have to have institutions to try to curtail the use of arbitrary power so that our greedy orientations and gangster-like proclivities don't get out of hand.
Cornel West
#61. If you had said to anyone in 1945, at the end of the Second World War with the continent it ruins, that you could have a European Union of 28 member states stretching from Portugal in the West to Estonia in the East, all of them more-or-less liberal democracies - they wouldn't have believed you.
Timothy Garton Ash
#62. That's what American democracy has come down to at these town hall meetings: old people and gun nuts, which is a terrible combination. I heard somebody yell 'AK-47!' and a lady yelled, 'Bingo!'
Bill Maher
#63. I understand democracy as something that gives the weak the same chance as the strong.
Mahatma Gandhi
#64. If you look at weak democracies, the oligarchies that have taken undue control of them always seek to tamper with the vote. It is important for oligarchs to have elections to give their guy a veneer of legitimacy - and important for the vote always to turn out 'their way.'
Naomi Wolf
#65. Democracy has not failed; the intelligence of the race has failed before the problems the race has raised
Robert M. Hutchins
#66. Capitalism under democracy has a further advantage: its enemies, even when it is attacked, are scattered and weak, and it is usually easily able to array one half of them against the other half, and thus dispose of both.
H.L. Mencken
#67. I don't think that India is much celebrated for its democracy. Democracy has been a very neglected commodity at home and abroad.
Amartya Sen
#68. Nor is the people's judgment always true: the most may err as grossly as the few.
John Dryden
#69. Once the philosophical foundation of democracy has collapsed, the statement that dictatorship is bad is rationally valid only for those who are not its beneficiaries, and there is no theoretical obstacle to the transformation of this statement into its opposite.
Max Horkheimer
#70. Democratic institutions form a system of quarantine for tyrannical desires.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#71. Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death.
James Madison
#72. Google has withdrawn from China, arguing that it is no longer willing to design its search engine to block information that the Chinese government does not wish its citizens to have. In liberal democracies around the world, this decision has generally been greeted with enthusiasm.
Peter Singer
#73. Our democracy has been around far longer than European democracy.
Hillary Clinton
#74. Democracy has at least one merit, namely that a Member of Parliament cannot be stupider than his constituents, for the more stupid he is, the more stupid they were to elect him.
Bertrand Russell
#75. The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance. The growth of democracy; the growth of corporate power; and the growth of corporate propaganda against democracy.
Alex Carey
#76. It is so important for European countries, post-Second World War, to prove that they can be successful multiethnic and multiracial democracies. I think we in Britain have had great success in avoiding the hatreds and prejudices of the past.
David Cameron
#77. The paradox of American democracy has been that its slogan of equal opportunity has meant, often, equal opportunity to get power over your fellows.
Mary Parker Follett
#78. Lincoln
they used to talk about him almost as bad as they talk about me. So democracy has never been for the faint of heart.
Barack Obama
#79. Democracy has turned out to be not majority rule but rule by well-organized and well-connected minority groups who steal from the majority.
Llewellyn Rockwell
#80. It would perhaps be as well if things were to remain quiet for a few years yet, so that all this 1848 democracy has time to rot away.
Karl Marx
#82. Democracy has now become corrupted by the nature of the funders.
George Hamilton
#83. We once again man the barricades
alone. Berated by our smug, so-called allies, of the Western Democracies. Islam is going to turn this world inside out before this century is out and you'd better have enough guts to deal with it.
Leon Uris
#84. When free discussion is denied, hardening of the arteries of democracy has set in, free institutions are but a lifeless form, and the death of the republic is at hand.
William Randolph Hearst
#85. On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy has given the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had.
Sinclair Lewis
#86. Acts of terror have never brought down liberal democracies. Acts of parliament have closed a few.
William Eldridge Odom
#87. The greatest task of democracy, its ritual and feast - is choice.
H.G.Wells
