Old Democracy Quotes

#1. Our constancy, same might call it our madness, was necessary to wear down the oppressive forces of the old democracy which, in Spain, was a hundred years behind the times.

Federica Montseny

#2. Our representative democracy is not working because the Congress that is supposed to represent the voters does not respond to their needs. I believe the chief reason for this is that it is ruled by a small group of old men.

Shirley Chisholm

#3. I don't believe any more in democracy. But I can't believe in the old sort of aristocracy, either, nor can I wish it back, splendid as it was. What I believe in is the old Homeric aristocracy, when the grandeur was inside a man, and he lived in a simple wooden house.

D.H. Lawrence

#4. New Englanders began the Revolution not to institute reforms and changes in the order of things, but to save the institutions and customs that already had become old and venerable with them; and were new only to a few stupid Englishmen a hundred and fifty years behind the times.

Edward Pearson Pressey

#5. Democracy, with its promise of international peace, has been no better guarantee against war than the old dynastic rule of kings.

Jan Smuts

#6. Political struggle is the most important thing any of us can do as a citizen in a democracy; and that means the old joining the young to fight for elemental kinds of justice.

Jonathan Kozol

#7. That which now calls itself democracy differs from older forms of government solely in that it drives with new horses: the streets are still the same old streets, and the wheels are likewise the same old wheels.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#8. The old idealistic republicans used to found democracy on the idea that all men were equally intelligent. Believe me, the sane and enduring democracy is founded on the fact that all men are equally idiotic.

G.K. Chesterton

#9. Liberal democracy - as you know, in the old days, we were saying we want socialism with a human face. Today's left effectively offers global capitalism with a human face, more tolerance, more rights and so on. So the question is, is this enough or not? Here I remain a Marxist: I think not.

Slavoj Zizek

#10. Thank the Lord, Germanic democracy means just this: that any old climber or moral slacker cannot rise by devious paths to govern his national comrades, but that, by the very greatness of the responsibility to be assumed, incompetents and weaklings are frightened of.

Adolf Hitler

#11. 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

#12. That's why I think that cultivation, 'becoming a real human being,' really is the primary leadership issue of our time, but on a scale never required before. It's a very old idea that may actually hold the key to a new age of 'global democracy.

Peter M. Senge

#13. There is an old saying that the course of civilization is a race between catastrophe and education. In a democracy such as ours, we must make sure that education wins the race.

John F. Kennedy

#14. 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

#15. Just the concept of personal freedom within a democracy, for instance, is a relatively young idea - only about 300 years old in this country.

Daniel Greenberg

#16. Finally democracy is catching up with the old, hierarchical, father-dominated family: the family is being democratized.

Shere Hite

#17. during transitions to democracy, nations often undergo political convulsions that make them hard to govern, thus feeding nostalgia for their old authoritarian order.

Moises Naim

#18. democracy just seemed like the same old thing with a bigger group of idiots running the show.

Robert Kroese

#19. It's the good old paradox of democracy. We are individually pretty small drops in the bucket, but collectively we are all powerful.

Damian Kulash

#20. A nation can be one or the other, a democracy or an imperialist, but it can't be both. If it sticks to imperialism, it will, like the old Roman Republic, on which so much of our system was modeled, like the old Roman Republic, it will lose its democracy to a domestic dictatorship.

Chalmers Johnson

#21. You have to understand that to have a revolution when you are 18 years old is completely different from normal political leaders who were born in a democracy and will die in a democracy and never to have experienced that change. I have seen that change.

Jose Manuel Barroso

#22. In Europe democracy is a falsehood. I do not know where it will end, but it cannot end in a quiet old age.

Klemens Von Metternich

#23. Let's face it: however old-fashioned and out of date and devaluated the word is, we like the way of living provided by democracy.

Eve Curie

#24. Time is the ultimate democracy. Rich and poor, young and old, male and female: all have 24 hours in a day and 7 days in a week.

Elizabeth Grace Saunders

#25. I think the good old British democracy should keep scrutinising and pressing to get the truth out.

Clare Short

#26. Democracy involves that old-fashioned thing called working it out.

Peggy Noonan

#27. Christ was the first true democrat that ever breathed, as the old dramatist Dekkar said he was the first true gentleman.

James Russell Lowell

#28. I think it's hard to learn democracy when we make children prisoners until they're nineteen years old.

Mimsy Sadofsky