Free Elections Quotes

#1. Well I haven't seen any free elections in the Arab world. They may be coming someday, except for in Israel. In Israel, Arabs have a chance to participate in free elections. Nowhere else really.

Moshe Arens

#2. I am sometimes accused of being a dictator because I provoked the extraordinary elections by nominating the interim government. Can you imagine any dictator who provokes free elections in his own country?

Milos Zeman

#3. In Iran, there is no freedom of the press, no freedom of speech, no independent judiciary, no free elections. There is no freedom of religion - not even for Shiites, who are forced by Iran's theocracy to adhere to one narrow set of official rules.

Elliott Abrams

#4. [W]e have a democracy that uses free elections to put in place known obstructionists, and a media that disproportionately gives a forum to economically driven ideology over sound science.

Noam Chomsky

#5. If a nation wishes, it can have both free elections and slavery.

Garry Wills

#6. I reassure all Nigerians and the international community of our firm commitment to free, fair and credible elections. My commitment to free elections and one man, one vote remains unwavering.

Goodluck Jonathan

#7. The people are fed up with corruption and embezzlement. They object to censorship. The first thing that the people of Iran want is free elections.

Shirin Ebadi

#8. In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

Matt Taibbi

#9. America must begin the struggle for democracy at home. The advocacy of free elections in Europe by American officials is hypocrisy when free elections are not held in great sections of America.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#10. As someone who is in awe and grateful every day to be in a country where freedom of the press, free speech and free elections are a way of life, I am wowed, amazed and excited by the opportunity to moderate a 2012 presidential debate.

Candy Crowley

#11. The trouble with free elections is, you never know who is going to win.

Leonid Brezhnev

#12. The trouble with free elections is that you never know how they are going to to turn out.

Vyacheslav Molotov

#13. Obviously, Turkey is not a typical authoritarian regime, and obviously it's very important that there are free elections. But it's also obvious that this is not a liberal, mature democracy. This is why I call Turkey a wobbly democracy. At any time, it can tip over and fall down.

Elif Safak

#14. The only logical solution to solve the Palestinian issue is to hold free elections with the participation of Palestinians inside and outside the occupied territories and a recognition of the nation's legitimacy

Ali Khamenei

#15. The crisis of modern democracy is a profound one. Free elections, a free press and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities available on sale to the highest bidder.

Arundhati Roy

#16. Democracy in China is like Viagra; no such thing as free elections.

George Montgomery

#17. I well remember a leading Egyptian liberal saying to me in 2003 that she did not favor free elections right then in Egypt; she favored them in a decade's time if she and others had those 10 years to organize freely.

Elliott Abrams

#18. Self-government will not work unless the citizens bear the responsibility to vote in such a way that continues their freedoms and their ability to have free elections, that continues their economic prosperity. They have to vote in a way that does not trade the future for the present. This

Eric Metaxas

#19. How the Committee of 300 Arranges Elections The term "fair and free elections" has no meaning in the U.S. The candidates for the presidency are selected by the Committee of 300 so in reality it does not matter who "wins" the election and goes on to the White House. The

John Coleman

#20. The regime is afraid of the people because it knows that free and fair elections will bring about its end.

Viktor Yushchenko

#21. Elections matter, but how much they matter depends entirely on how free, open and fair they are.

Elliott Abrams

#22. We can not have free government without elections; and if the rebellion could force us to forego, or postpone a national election it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us.

Abraham Lincoln

#23. My view is that the time has come for the international community to act on Zimbabwe in the way that it did in Bosnia - I do not think that we are going to get free and fair elections in Zimbabwe

Raila Odinga

#24. When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, it becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues.

Thomas L. Friedman

#25. Leave us to our free election.

William Shakespeare

#26. Several amendments should be made to the primary and general election laws to improve them, but such changes must in no way interfere with a full and free expression of the people's choice in naming the candidates to be voted on at general elections.

Arthur Capper

#27. That U.N. Security Council resolution requires getting Syrian troops and intelligence officials out of Lebanon so that the Lebanese can have elections here this spring that are free and fair and free of outside influence.

Stephen Hadley

#28. The first time Haiti had free and fair democratic elections was 1990, when I was elected.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide

#29. Both groups [of pundits] were critics, and that is the heart of the problem. If you are a pundit, you seem so smart when you are telling the President what he did wrong ... This [is] mostly BS.

Jeffrey A. Miller

#30. The government of Iran claims that every two years there are elections. But none of them are free.

Shirin Ebadi

#31. Until fighting ends and there are conditions, which allow the free expression of will by the people, there can be no elections and elections are not held in these circumstances anywhere in the world.

Aslan Maskhadov

#32. Suppose the elections are free and fair and those elected are racists, fascists, separatists", said the American diplomat Richard Holbrooke about Yugoslavia in 1990s. "that is the dilemma

Fareed Zakaria

#33. The law is the anchor of our feelings. If the law holds our feelings well, it directs our feelings well. If however, the laws fails to hold our feelings well, our feelings become free enough for us to do what we feel freely

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#34. We hope and we've made clear that the forces need to come out. It needs to be full and complete withdrawal. Our position is it needs to be done as soon as possible so that the elections can be free, fair and free of outside influence.

Stephen Hadley

#35. Elections are an enduring spectacle of free India, and have provided foreign journalists with the opportunity to remind the world that India remains the world's largest democracy.

Shashi Tharoor

#36. My critics always forget to mention that I was democratically elected, the others were not. Everyone in Uganda can challenge me, everyone can vote, the elections are free. Not many countries have achieved what we did.

Yoweri Museveni

#37. In November 2000, the Republicans stole from America our most precious right of all: the right to free and fair elections ... Now President Bush occupies the White House, but with questionable legitimacy.

Cynthia McKinney

#38. Our elections are free-it's in the results where eventually we pay.

Bill Stern

#39. Millions like me in Russia want a free press, the rule of law, social justice, and free and fair elections. My new job is to fight for those people and to fight for these fundamental rights.

Garry Kasparov

#40. Corruption is the bane of Nigeria. Buhari is against corruption. Buhari is not corrupt. He is very clean and disciplined. Election rigging is worse than armed robbery. Buhari wants free, fair and credible elections in Nigeria.

Tam David-West

#41. A government with all this mass of favours to give or to withhold, however free in name, wields a power of bribery scarcely surpassed by an avowed autocracy, rendering it master of the elections in almost any circumstances but those of rare and extraordinary public excitement.

John Stuart Mill

#42. Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.

Rosa Luxemburg

#43. Not surprisingly, in most Sunni regions there has little appetite for free U.S.-sponsored elections.

Richard Engel

#44. The idea that corporations have the same First Amendment protections of free speech as people is troubling. Corporations are not people. They don't attend our schools, get married and have children. They don't vote in our elections.

Hank Johnson

#45. You cannot have free and fair elections while one party controls completely and monopolizes the instrument of power and .. Tsvangirai is in and out of police cells almost on a daily basis, when people are being arrested, people are being beaten up.

Raila Odinga

#46. In the midst of these pleasing ideas we should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections.

Samuel Adams

#47. Organising free and fair elections is more important than the result itself.

Fatos Nano

#48. If free will exists, why do the tallest candidates with the best hair usually win elections ?

Scott Adams

#49. Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.

Herbert Marcuse

#50. The government that came into power after the April 1994 elections was going to need a budget. It was drafted by our finance minister, Derek Keys, and he convinced them of the necessity to stay within the free-market principles that had been in force in South Africa for decades.

F. W. De Klerk