Democracy Philosophy Quotes

#1. India was the motherland of our race
and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's languages.
India was the mother of our philosophy,
of much of our mathematics, of the ideals embodied in
Christianity ... of self-government and democracy.
In many ways, Mother India is the mother of us all.

Will Durant

#2. The philosophy of Africanism holds out the hope of a genuine democracy beyond the stormy sea of struggle

Robert Sobukwe

#3. I would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Manhattan phone book than the entire faculty of Harvard.

William F. Buckley Jr.

#4. It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting.

Tom Stoppard

#5. You show me a capitalist, and I'll show you a bloodsucker

Malcolm X

#6. Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

#7. Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

Adam Smith

#8. But love, like the sun that it is, sets afire and melts everything. what greed and privilege to build up over whole centuries the indignation of a pious spirit, with its natural following of oppressed souls, will cast down with a single shove.

Jose Marti

#9. As much as I say that market economy is a more aggressive, expansile form of command economy, I say now that democracy is a more aggressive, expansile form of dictatorship. The sin of democracy and any types of -cracy is their numbers.

Andreas Laurencius

#10. Democracy is worth dying for, because it's the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man.

Ronald Reagan

#11. When you consider time and change, you realize that a people does not originate when individuals merge into a bigger thing. Instead, a people arises when many actions and movements combine into novel patterns of change. For a people is always in the making or unmaking.

Paulina Ochoa Espejo

#12. We honor the Greeks because in their art, literature, philosophy and civic history we discern the early stirrings of our own ideals - rationalism, humanism, democracy - which first took firm root in Athenian soil.

Caroline Alexander

#13. Democracy should always be viewed with a philosophical perspective rather than a political one, because after all democracy was born to a philosopher and murdered by a politician.

Aysha Taryam

#14. Thought's a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?

Graham Greene

#15. We have really, that I know of, no philosophical basis for high and low. Moreover, the vegetable kingdom does not culminate, as the animal kingdom does. It is not a kingdom, but a common-wealth; a democracy, and therefore puzzling and unaccountable from the former point of view.

Asa Gray

#16. Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#17. Democracy is a suggestion box for slaves.

Stefan Molyneux

#18. Democracy is not perfect. It is an imperfection that the majority choose to support.

Debasish Mridha

#19. Everything is relative in this world, where change alone endures.

Leon Trotsky

#20. To define twentieth-century humanism briefly, I would say that it is a philosophy of joyous service for the greater good of all humanity in this natural world and advocating the methods of reason, science, and democracy.

Corliss Lamont

#21. The only way we'll get freedom for ourselves is to identify ourselves with every oppressed people in the world. We are blood brothers to the people of Brazil, Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba
yes Cuba too.

Malcolm X

#22. The principle of democracy is a recognition of the sovereign, inalienable rights of man as a gift from God, the Source of law.

Fulton J. Sheen

#23. Education is a human right with immense power to transform. On its foundation rest the cornerstones of freedom, democracy and sustainable human development.

Kofi Annan

#24. A child who does not think about what happens around him and is content with living without wondering whether he lives honestly is like a man who lives from a scoundrel's work and is on the road to being a scoundrel.

Jose Marti

#25. The left-right political dichotomy serves liberalism by not challenging it. Democracy sustains the status quo by offering the illusion of choice with no choice. Genuine opposition can only emerge if there is an alternative story with which to counter the current mythos.

John Dunn

#26. Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

#27. The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.

Joseph Schumpeter

#28. Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.

Norman Mailer

#29. The Reservoir plan is an engineering mechanism applied to the field of economics, and in its essence it has nothing to do with democracy or any other political philosophy.

Benjamin Graham

#30. Democracy is a poor system; the only thing that can be said for it is that it's eight times as good as any other method.

Robert A. Heinlein

#31. Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers' cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

#32. This philosophy of hate, of religious and racial intolerance, with its passionate urge toward war, is loose in the world. It is the enemy of democracy; it is the enemy of all the fruitful and spiritual sides of life. It is our responsibility, as individuals and organizations, to resist this.

Mary Heaton Vorse

#33. Democracy is dying. We are ruled by faceless bureaucrats and lecherous puritans ... You think about it. 'All right for me but not for you' is their philosophy.

Anne Stevenson

#34. The Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn, art introduced me to the Revolution!

Albert Einstein

#35. Democracy and tyranny are not distant relatives. They're bedfellows."

-General John James
Commandant, USMC
December 11th, 2032

L. Douglas Hogan

#36. Democracy may have arisen in the West as the way of striving for the universal aspiration to dignity and freedom, but it isn't alien to the underlying concepts that infuse religion and moral philosophy everywhere.

Flora Lewis

#37. The first duty of a man is to think for himself

Jose Marti

#38. What is democracy? It is what it says, the rule of the people. It is as good as the people are, or as bad.

Mary Renault

#39. Democracy is not a form of government. It is a political philosophy that can be embodied in various systems of government.

John Allen Fraser

#40. The lesson we are indebted to Egypt for, our future generations learned that in the face of oppression silence is never golden.

Aysha Taryam

#41. Democracy is good, but it is not good for an uneducated dogmatic society. Often, that society does not know how to choose wisely.

Debasish Mridha

#42. I knew I was alone in a way that no earthling has ever been before.

Michael Collins

#43. The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.

Leon Trotsky

#44. Success of democracy lies within the analytical thought of a common man.

M.H. Rakib