Top 100 Democracy Vote Quotes
#1. I'd rather vote for something I want and not get it than vote for something I don't want, and get it.
Eugene V. Debs
#2. We, the people, are not free. Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means we choose between Tweedledee and Tweedledum. We elect expensive masters to do our work for us, and then blame them because they work for themselves and for their class.
Helen Keller
#3. The Greens have every right to run, that's what democracy is, and they should argue their point by saying how they think people should vote, not by telling us to be silent.
Peter Camejo
#4. There are some flaws in the assumptions made for democracy. It is assumed that all men and women are equal or should be equal. Hence, one-man-one-vote. But is equality realistic? If it is not, to insist on equality must lead to regression.
Lee Kuan Yew
#5. Our society will always remain an unstable and explosive compound as long as political power is vested in the masses and economic power in the classes. In the end one of these powers will rule. Either the plutocracy will buy up the democracy, or the democracy will vote away the plutocracy.
Irving Fisher
#6. I'm fed up with democracy. In a democracy, people vote for the mayors. I wanted to build a city where I will choose the citizens.
Emir Kusturica
#8. American democracy is supposed to be the paradigm for the rest of the world, and it no longer is. Citizens cannot be guaranteed that they can walk into a voting booth with any assurance that their vote will be counted.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
#9. Optimists - people who believe in Britain, who believe in democracy - they're the people I believe who will vote for us to leave and take back control.
Michael Gove
#10. Because we live in a democracy, and the people can't govern themselves well if they don't know the truth about the world we live in. What if our rich citizens never hear of the poverty and suffering of the rest of the city? Why should they ever give to charity or vote for reform?
Rosslyn Elliott
#11. Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.
G.K. Chesterton
#12. If we vote to Leave and take back control, all sorts of opportunities open up. Including doing new free trade deals around the world, restoring Britain's seat on all sorts of international bodies, restoring health to our democracy and belief to our democracy.
Boris Johnson
#13. I think 'one man, one vote,' just unrestricted democracy, would not be wise. There needs to be some kind of protection for the minority which the white people represent now, a minority, and they need and have a right to demand a protection of their rights.
Pat Robertson
#14. The struggle to avert catastrophic climate change is bigger than all the other struggles, whether it is slavery, democracy struggles, the woman's right to vote, and so on I would argue that if what is at stake is securing life as we know it, then there can be no bigger struggle that we face.
Kumi Naidoo
#15. In a democracy, people always vote for their alike! Pig for the pig, raven for the raven! Dull for the dull, wise for the wise!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#16. A great democracy doesn't make it harder to vote than to buy an assault weapon.
William J. Clinton
#17. Democracy will prevail when men believe the vote of Judas as good as that of Jesus Christ.
Thomas Carlyle
#18. Democracy is not just the right to vote, it is the right to live in dignity.
Naomi Klein
#19. Democracy was a terrifying concept for the old world of Europe, and even the new world of North America, where income inequality was rife. The finest minds of the nineteenth century warned against giving the vote to the workingman, for fear of mob rule or the tyranny of the majority.
George Megalogenis
#20. If we reject, as we must, the doctrine that the majority is always right, to submit moral issues to the vote is to gamble that what we believe to be right will come out of the ballot with more votes behind it than what we believe to be wrong; and that is a gamble we will often lose.
Peter Singer
#21. It is a mistake to apply American democratic procedures to the faith and the truth. You cannot take a vote on the truth. The value of democracy stands or falls with the values which it embodies and promotes.
Pope John Paul II
#22. Being adequately informed is a democratic duty, just as the vote is a democratic right. A misinformed electorate, voting without knowledge, is not a true democracy.
Jay Griffiths
#23. Why was I condemned to live in a democracy where every fool's vote is equal to a sensible man's?
John Wyndham
#24. The right to vote should be considered sacred in our democracy.
Charles B. Rangel
#25. Vote?" Matthew said, incredulous. "Since when did we vote in this family?" "Since Marcus took over the Knights of Lazarus," Gallowglass replied, drawing a silver lighter from his pocket. "We've been choking on democracy since the day you left.
Deborah Harkness
#26. Having a vote once every four years is not the same thing as democracy.
Hugh Laurie
#27. The beauty of our democracy lies in the American value of equality: if you vote, you have a seat at the table. If you speak, you have a chance to persuade others. A billionaire and a minimum wage earner have the same power at the ballot box.
Christine Pelosi
#28. You study any pretty democracy, from the ancient Greeks forward, and you'll see that the only way each system functions is with a working class of slaves. Peons to haul the garbage so the upper crust can campaign and vote.
Chuck Palahniuk
#29. One-man-one-vote combined with "free entry" into government-democracy
implies that every person and his personal property comes within reach of-and is up for grabs by-everyone else: a "tragedy of the commons" is created.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
#30. The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting.
Charles Bukowski
#31. For me, a better democracy is a democracy where women do not only have the right to vote and to elect but to be elected.
Michelle Bachelet
#32. Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
H.L. Mencken
#33. Obamacare is a crime against democracy because a material part of that bill was not disclosed to the Senate nor to the House of Representatives. The funding was hidden in the bill. That was fraud and I can't vote for any budget that fails to bring back that money from Obamacare.
Michele Bachmann
#34. Democracy is a form of government that cannot long survive, for as soon as the people learn that they have a voice in the fiscal policies of the government, they will move to vote for themselves all the money in the treasury, and bankrupt the nation.
Karl Marx
#35. Once you don't vote your ideals ... that has serious undermining affects. It erodes the moral basis of our democracy.
Ralph Nader
#36. There's an assault on human sexuality, as Judge Scalia said, they've taken sides in the culture war and on top of that if we have a democracy, the democratic processes should be that we can elect representatives who will share our point of view and vote those things into law.
Pat Robertson
#37. The 'democracy gap' in our politics and elections spells a deep sense of powerlessness by people who drop out, do not vote, or listlessly vote for the 'least worst' every four years and then wonder why after every cycle the 'least worst' gets worse.
Ralph Nader
#39. If you have democracy, people will vote for washing machines. They love them!
Hans Rosling
#40. Term limits mean that you don't trust the voters. 'Stop me before I vote again.'
Garry Wills
#41. Chant back to us our platitudes about democracy, greatness, and freedom. Vote in our rigged corporate elections. Send your young men and women to fight and die in useless, unwinnable wars that provide huge profits for corporations.
Chris Hedges
#42. We want the will of the people, not the votes of the people; and to give a man a vote against his will is to make voting more important than the democracy it declares.
G.K. Chesterton
#43. ultimately, the long-term goal is to have a critically informed public vote out of office representatives that are sacrificing children to the corporate bottom line with prepackaged teacher-proof curricula, standardized tests, and accountability schemes.
Pepi Leistyna
#44. Art is not a democracy. People don't get to vote on how it ends.
George R R Martin
#45. When bad news sells, money politics buys.
Toba Beta
#46. If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side.
Orson Scott Card
#48. Democracy is not just a question of having a vote. It consists of strengthening each citizen's possibility and capacity to participate in the deliberations involved in life in society.
Fernando Henrique Cardoso
#49. What we say is that democracy means that you have the right to vote without intimidation and undue burdens. But if you stand in line for six hours, technically, today there is no document, no standard, no law that says that that's wrong.
DeForest Soaries
#50. Democratic Socialism is simply Totalitarianism that allows you the illusion of a voice in the matter.
A.E. Samaan
#51. You don't give up on democracy every time you lose a vote, Ethel said crisply.
Ken Follett
#52. The first step toward liberation of any group is to use the power in hand ... And the power in hand is the vote.
Helen Gahagan Douglas
#53. Vote? What's so fun about voting? You should never vote, everyone knows that. If you vote and your guy wins you can't later complain because you helped put him there. That's why I never vote, so I can later complain.
Sergio De La Pava
#54. If one man offers you democracy and another offers you a bag of grain, at what stage of starvation do you prefer the grain to the vote?
Bertrand Russell
#55. I vote because it's what small-d democracy is about. Because there are places where people fight for generations and stand for hours to cast a ballot knowing what we ought to remember: that it makes a difference. Not always a big difference. Not always an immediate difference. But a difference.
Ellen Goodman
#56. In democracy, our most important tool is to vote. But our power tool is when we have the power to influence others on who to vote for.
Ben Tolosa
#57. If you want to reinstate the 14.4 billion dollars that Bush cut out of the veterans program then vote democrat.
David Cross
#58. A vote is like a rifle: its usefulness depends upon the character of the user.
Theodore Roosevelt
#59. The way to make the giving a free vote safe for a totalitarian capitalist regime is simple - make all political parties the same!
Dave Mearns
#60. You cannot say we are a healthy, dynamic democracy when one party wins almost two-thirds of the vote.
F. W. De Klerk
#61. Let the people decide whom to vote for, who has more authority. And only people, only our citizens, are able to place the final emphasis, voting for this or that person or political force, or rejecting it. That's democracy.
Dmitry Medvedev
#62. When people first vote for democracy, they have extremely high hopes, excessive expectations, and they're not realized. They don't instantly get richer and the schools don't instantly get better and the garbage isn't instantly picked up quicker. So they get disillusioned.
Jimmy Carter
#63. Take it from me - every vote counts. In our Democracy, every vote has power. And never forget - that power is yours. Don't let anyone take it away or talk you into throwing it away. And let's make sure that this time every vote is counted.
Al Gore
#64. The role of citizen in our democracy does not end with your vote.
Barack Obama
#65. People should vote for democracy, and Britain should vote for hope.
Michael Gove
#66. See, whoever said I was an autocrat was clearly mistaken. I represented the height of representative democracy where everyone gets a vote. Mine just counted for more than all the other ones combined, when you read the final tally; that's all.
Luke Sky Wachter
#67. A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won't cross the street to vote in a national election.
Bill Vaughan
#68. We women of America tell you that America is not a democracy. Twenty million women are denied the right to vote.
Alice Paul
#69. To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.
Louis L'Amour
#70. The Roman Empire, born out the Roman Republic, with its ideas of democracy among a certain group of wealthy men (no vote for men without land -as with our Founding Fathers- and certainly no vote for women and slaves. Why are democracies built on top of one form of slavery or another?)
Tina Packer
#71. Democracy matters because it reflects an idea of equality and an idea of liberty. It reflects an idea of dignity, the dignity of the individual, the idea that each individual should have an equal vote, an equal say, in the formation of their government.
Rory Stewart
#72. Freedom has nothing to do with having the right to vote for your oppressor; freedom is not having any form of oppression.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#73. Everybody in America has been dependent on the government at some time. We owe everybody in America the right to vote and access to capital. What I say is, let's make America work, let's make democracy and free enterprise work for everybody.
Andrew Young
#74. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it ... which for the majority translates as 'Bread and Circuses'.
Robert A. Heinlein
#75. Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee ...
Howard Zinn
#76. Democracy means far more than the right to vote every five years. It means the right to participate in every aspect of national and community life. The people must believe that they can take part.
Michael Manley
#77. The whole idea of a democracy is that we ourselves, the people, are supposed to make a path of our politics, and it is we who with our feet and our vote and our labors and our vigilance are supposed to shape our country.
Eugene Jarecki
#78. The American system of democracy is founded on the concept that every citizen has the right to vote, to know that their vote is counted, and that the vote is counted accurately.
Barbara Mikulski
#79. Democracy means that people can say what they want to. All the people. It means that they can vote as they wish. All the people. It means that they can worship God in any way they feel right, and that includes Christians and Jews and voodoo doctors as well.
Dalton Trumbo
#80. We don't vote for people because they are the exact embodiment of our values, but because they are likely to be the most responsive to them.
Charles M. Blow
#81. Remember, the Islamist view of democracy is: one man, one vote, one election, and that's it.
John Fund
#82. How can you put human rights to a popular vote and call it democracy? How many times do you need to redefine or haggle about the meaning of the word EQUALITY?
Christina Engela
#83. Break ups aren't fair. Why does only one person have power? We both agreed to start dating. Why do you get to make the decision to end it? Shouldn't it be a joint decision too?
Relationships aren't a democracy. Not everyone gets an equal vote.
Alyssa Ivy Rose
#84. I think if people value democracy, they had damn well better get out and exercise their right to vote while their vote still means something.
Bob Weir
#85. Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote.
Terry Pratchett
#86. When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you're using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived.
Robert A. Heinlein
#87. Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!
Benjamin Franklin
#88. Television is the most perfect democracy. You sit there with your remote control and vote.
Aaron Brown
#89. If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don't know how to read, you don't know how to decide. That's the great thing about our country - we're a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.
Ray Bradbury
#90. It is wrong to ask who will rule. The ability to vote a bad government out of office is enough. That is democracy.
Karl Popper
#91. With effort we can protect the foundation of our democracy, for which so many marched across this bridge, the right to vote.
Barack Obama
#92. Forget the conspiracy theories! God gave us the right to vote, and He gave the United States, and all of its citizens, freedom through democracy.
Monica Johnson
#93. Democracy is being allowed to vote for the candidate you dislike least.
Robert Byrne
#94. Democracy is about voting and it's about a majority vote. And it's time that we started exercising the Democratic process.
Debbie Stabenow
#96. People often say that, in a democracy, decisions are made by a majority of the people. Of course, that is not true. Decisions are made by a majority of those who make themselves heard and who vote - a very different thing.
Walter Judd
#97. I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for superior men if they ran for office, but there can be no doubt that such men do not run.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#98. I say us - obviously I don't vote as I believe democracy is a pointless spectacle where we choose between two indistinguishable political parties, neither of whom represent the people but the interest of powerful business elites that run the world.
Russell Brand
#99. The well being of democracies regardless of their type and status is dependent on one small technical detail: The right to vote. Everything else is secondary.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#100. The great majority of women are more intelligent, better educated, and far more moral than multitudes of men whose right to vote no man questions.
Lucy Stone
