Quotes About American Democracy

#1. My primary motivation for running for the 9th Congressional District is that I strongly believe that one of the hallmarks of the American democracy is a representative form of democracy.

Willie Herenton

#2. To protest against injustice is the foundation of all our American democracy.

Thurgood Marshall

#3. American democracy is spoiled by people buying everything in sight and then selling and buying everything in sight, including our politicians.

Russell Simmons

#4. Elvis [Presley] had a stepstool, if you will, to success because he came from the dominant culture. They identified with him. Michael Jackson had to come further and go deeper into the pit of possibility of American democracy and of cultural expression.

Michael Eric Dyson

#5. That's what separates out American democracy from dictators and horrible governments across the world and the reason why that works is that we have a president that can consult with congress before making big decisions. That doesn't just make a unilateral decision to go in for military conflict.

Charles R. Chamberlain

#6. American democracy must be a failure because it places the supreme authority in the hands of the poorest and most ignorant part of the society.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

#7. It would be easy to descend into despair, not only about the state of journalism, but the future of American democracy. But giving up is not an option. There is too much at stake.

Laurie Garrett

#8. I'm passionate about restoring the efficacy of American democracy, making capitalism sustainable, prioritizing advances in technology, and seizing the opportunities to use that kind of innovation to help usher in a new economy that doesn't rely on carbon-spewing fossil fuels.

Al Gore

#9. The survival of American democracy depends less on the size of its armies than on the capacity of its individual citizens to rely ... on the strength of their own thought.

Lewis H. Lapham

#10. The history of American democracy, to say the least, has been checkered. Our nation was founded at a time when people of African descent were held in bondage. After slavery was abolished, they were forced to endure legal discrimination for another 100 years.

Bernie Sanders

#11. If you care for the quality of life in our American democracy, then you have to be for censorship.

Irving Kristol

#12. The United States stands at the pinnacle of world power. This is a solemn moment for the American democracy. For with primacy in power is joined an awe-inspiring accountability for the future.

Winston Churchill

#13. If sexual relations between consenting adults are not part of the right to privacy guaranteed by the Constitution, then American democracy is in trouble.

Coretta Scott King

#14. The great gift of American democracy is freedom to think, act, and carry out our lives in a manner that imbues meaning not only to our own life but enhances other people's lives through our everyday actions.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#15. Super PACs and a corrupt campaign finance system are destroying American democracy. We're proud that we have received four million individual contributions, more than any candidate in American history at this point.

Bernie Sanders

#16. If American democracy is to remain the greatest hope of humanity, it must continue abundantly in the faith of the Bible

Calvin Coolidge

#17. I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#18. When Jefferson and the Republicans rallied to the Union and to the existing Federalist organization, the fabric of traditional American democracy was almost completely woven.

Herbert Croly

#19. H.L.Mencken's war aims, according to the handful of observers who deigned to notice his conflict, were the overthrow of American Democracy, the Christian religion, and the YMCA. He was also credited with trying to wipe out poets and luncheon orators.

Ben Hecht

#20. The atomic weapons race and the secrecy surrounding it crushed American democracy. It induced us to conduct government according to lies. It distorted justice. It undermined American morality.

Stewart Udall

#21. The danger of having the Constitution twisted and misconstrued to support vested interests and prejudices must be guarded against if American democracy is to maintain a progressive character.

Helen Keller

#22. It [concentration of wealth and power] has been a menace to ... American democracy.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#23. I am especially proud of taking on issues most central to the health of our American democracy.

Chellie Pingree

#24. Resurrecting American democracy is vital to averting climate catastrophe. We must first repeal the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, which has flooded elections with billions of oily petrodollars from carbon tycoons.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

#25. Faith in the power of reason - the belief that free citizens can govern themselves wisely and fairly by resorting to logical debate on the basis of the best evidence available, instead of raw power - was and remains the central premise of American democracy. This premise is now under assault.

Al Gore

#26. What do I believe in? Belief means faith, and there's only one damned thing in the world I have any faith in. That's the idea of American democracy, because it seems to me so obvious that that's the only sensible way to run human affairs.

Rex Stout

#27. We must never stop fighting for a vision of American democracy in which we strive for and encourage the highest levels of voter turnout and participation.

Eric Schneiderman

#28. There is a reason why these people [from Wall Street] are putting huge amounts of money into our political system. And in my view, it is undermining American democracy and it is allowing Congress to represent wealthy campaign contributors and not the working families of this country.

Bernie Sanders

#29. Find the enemy that wants to end this experiment (in American democracy) and kill every one of them until they're so sick of the killing that they leave us and our freedoms intact.

James Mattis

#30. Men and women have served and died to protect American democracy, but their sacrifice will be for naught if that democracy dies from the poison the Supreme Court has injected into our political organs.

Jennifer Granholm

#31. The problem with American democracy is the American corporation, which is a slave holder construct, pure and simple. It's totally invasive, and people are as tightly controlled within the walls of a corporation as they are in a totalitarian society.

Richard Grossman

#32. Public control of the political process requires public financing. The restoration of our American Democracy depends upon public financing.

Dennis Kucinich

#33. In democracy, as quaintly understood, voters pick their representatives. American democracy increasingly reverses that. Legislative districts are drawn to protect incumbents who, effectively, pick their voters.

George Will

#34. American democracy in the past has always been known for its large middle class and its relatively few very wealthy people and very few very poor people, but that is gone to today and the middle class is shrinking.

Os Guinness

#35. 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.

#36. American democracy and the Soviet system may peacefully exist side by side and compete with each other. But one cannot evolve into the other.

J. Stalin

#37. American democracy has been hacked.

Al Gore

#38. I am not a pessimist, but I am not an optimist about the future of American democracy.

David Souter

#39. It's important to address young people in the reopening of New Orleans. In rebuilding, let's revisit the potential of American democracy and American glory.

Wynton Marsalis

#40. Political civility is not about being polite to each other. It's about reclaiming the power of 'We the People' to come together, debate the common good and call American democracy back to its highest values amid our differences.

Parker Palmer

#41. Hamilton's besetting fear was that American democracy would be spoiled by demagogues who would mouth populist shibboleths to conceal their despotism.

Ron Chernow

#42. Campaign ads are the backbone of American democracy if American democracy suffered a gigantic spinal injury.

John Oliver

#43. It's easier for Europeans to give money to a movie that says a blow job is what brought down American democracy.

Julie Delpy

#44. 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

#45. A more important antidote to American democracy is American gerontocracy. The positions of eminence and authority in Congress are allotted in accordance with length of service, regardless of quality.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#46. And I'd like to say to the Senate, I hope you will say yes to a stronger American democracy in the year 2000.

William J. Clinton

#47. Soft citizens of the American democracy learned to kick a man below the belt and make the bastard scream.

Kurt Vonnegut

#48. Fundamental problem in American democracy is that we are allowing congressmen and senators to be bought and sold like sneakers.

Alex Gibney

#49. We need a very progressive and strong agenda to bring people into the political process because I worry very much about the future of the American democracy where so many people are giving up.

Bernie Sanders

#50. The separation of church and state has been a cornerstone of American democracy for over two hundred years. Getting rid of it was long overdue.

Samuel Alito

#51. Franklin may ... be considered one of the founding fathers of American democracy, since no democratic government can last long without conciliation and compromise.

Samuel Eliot Morison

#52. 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

#53. American democracy is the inalienable right to sit on your front porch, in your pyjamas, drinking a can of beer and shouting out 'Where else is this possible?' Which doesn't seem to me to be freedom, really.

Peter Ustinov

#54. We've got to understand that the whole nature of the way American democracy guards its freedom has been changed.

John Ashcroft

#55. American democracy is capsizing as a result of the vast increase in the number of government dependents and government employees.

James Bovard

#56. There is no more important struggle for American democracy than ensuring a diverse, independent and free media. Free Press is at the heart of that struggle.

Bill Moyers

#57. Up until the First World War, when people turned anti-German, Germany had been described by American political scientists as the model of democracy.

Noam Chomsky

#58. They [American forces] are there as an expression of the American national interest to prevent the Iranian combination of imperialism and fundamentalist ideology from dominating a region on which the energy supplies of the industrial democracies depend.

Henry A. Kissinger

#59. We believe in equality for all, and privileges for none. This is a belief that each American regardless of background has equal standing in the public forum, all of us. Because we believe this idea so firmly, we are an inclusive, rather than an exclusive party. Let everybody come.

Barbara Jordan

#60. Our democracy, our constitutional framework is really a kind of software for harnessing the creativity and political imagination for all of our people. The American democratic system was an early political version of Napster.

Al Gore

#61. That does not mean we won't experience the tragedy of the loss of some American lives. We will have an opportunity to instill a democracy in Iraq which will be an example and perhaps force other nations in that region to move in the same direction.

John McCain

#62. We discussed the history of postwar Japan and how Japan had missed an opportunity to build a more functional democracy because of the focus on fighting communism driven in large part by the American occupation.

Joichi Ito

#63. My favorite forgotten President in American history is James Buchanan, who in defending really robust and sharp-elbowed debates said, "I like the noise of democracy. I like the sound of people in the streets making noise."

Jeff Sharlet

#64. The prose is deeply inspired by the tension between post- totalitarianism and consumer democracy. I am constantly probing the soft fleshy parts of the American dream.

Alina Stefanescu

#65. Billionaires like the Koch brothers, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, and political puppet master Karl Rove should not be able to buy our elections. Secret money should not be able to drown out the voices of the American people and sell our Democracy to the highest bidder.

Hank Johnson

#66. There is a long American tradition of suspicion of concentrated economic power because of its tendency to corrupt government and turn it from a democracy into a plutocracy.

Zephyr Teachout

#67. At a time when 2500 American soldiers have given their lives for the cause of bringing democracy to Iraq, it is sad and frustrating to watch the Republican establishment disgrace the exercise of democracy in our own House of Representatives.

Earl Blumenauer

#68. Liberals could not be less interested in democracy when it came to taking out Saddam Hussein Now a loyal American ally [Mubarak] comes under attack and they are burning for democracy.

Ann Coulter

#69. The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.

James A. Baldwin

#70. From my intimate discussions with President Obama, it is evident that India figures significantly in American geo-political, economic and strategic thinking. India is the largest democracy in the world.

Narendra Modi

#71. We are inclined to confuse freedom and democracy, which we regard as moral principles, with the way in which they are practiced in America with capitalism, federalism, and the two-party system, which are not moral principles but simply the preferred and accepted practices of the American people.

J. William Fulbright

#72. This is the democratic process at work, What you're seeing with this process is the Iraqi people embracing American-style democracy.

Condoleezza Rice

#73. Throughout American history many of our social gains and much of our progress toward democracy were made possible by the active intervention of the federal government.

Harold Washington

#74. The American public should simply accept no distractions. In our democracy, it is our duty to hold our elected leaders accountable. We do it at the ballot box.

Wesley Clark

#75. We have a wonderful history behind us ... If you are unable to demonstrate to the world that you have this record, the world will say to you, 'You are not worthy to enjoy the blessings of democracy or anything else'.

Carter G. Woodson

#76. From the very beginning, the American dream meant proving to all mankind that freedom, justice, human rights and democracy were no utopia but were rather the most realistic policy there is and the most likely to improve the fate of each and every person.

Nicolas Sarkozy

#77. One of the things we're going to have to discuss and debate is how are we striking this balance between the need to keep the American people safe and our concerns about privacy. Because there are some trade-offs involved. I welcome this debate, and I think it's healthy for our democracy.

Barack Obama

#78. Of course I wrote most of the Constitution myself. I remember hesitating for a long time over the US presidential system. But it wouldn't have done - we were too trained in English democracy to sit down under a dictatorship which is what the American system really is.

Eamon De Valera

#79. Being 'at the mercy of legislative majorities' is merely another way of describing the basic American plan: representative democracy.

Robert Bork

#80. I can't think of anything that would do more toward putting us back on the road to liberty and personal responsibility than for the average American, and for the news media, to come to the understanding that we are not a democracy, nor were we supposed to be.

Neal Boortz

#81. The American polity is infected with a serious imbalance of power between elites and masses, a power which is the principal threat to our democracy.

Paul Wellstone

#82. Mr Jefferson meant that the American system should be a democracy, and he would rather have let the whole world perish than that this principle, which to him represented all that man was worth, should fail. Mr Hamilton considered democracy a fatal curse, and meant to stop its progress.

Henry Adams

#83. He wants to believe that Shakespeare wrote all those books, that Lincoln fought the Civil War to free the slaves and the United States fought World War II to rescue the Jews and keep the world safe for democracy, that Jesus and the double feature are coming back. But I'm no Panglossian American.

Paul Beatty

#84. Thus, until we have truly become a democracy, every American, white as much as black, red, or yellow, lives not in his skin but on it. If one person is called "colored", let all be colored.

Russell Banks

#85. If the American people really tire of democracy and want to make a trial of Fascism, I shall be the last person to object. But if that is their mood, then they had better proceed toward their aim by changing the Constitution and not by forgetting it.

H.L. Mencken

#86. The American principles of democracy expresses the deepest values of the Sharia both structurally and in the government ... Sharia requires us Muslims anywhere to abide by the law of the land.

Feisal Abdul Rauf

#87. Speaking as a Democrat, all my life battling for what I conceived to be Democracy, and what I conceived to be right, I am yet an American above Democracy.

Richard Parks Bland

#88. Mr. Speaker, democracy works best when the American electorate is engaged and informed.

Melissa Bean

#89. We should insist that governments receiving American aid live up to standards of accountability and transparency, and we should support countries that embrace market reforms, democracy, and the rule of law.

Lee H. Hamilton

#90. While we use American power to fight hard for democracy against extremism on both left and right, our critics seem suspicious of any assertion of United States power or influence against any government or group that claims to be on the left.

Elliott Abrams

#91. In questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution.

Thomas Jefferson

#92. And you know, we were talking about American identity, and where we've come from and where we are and where we're headed. We knew that we wanted to have a hopeful ending and we wanted it to be pro-community, and a pro-democracy type of movie.

Matt Damon

#93. America is a democracy and has no Hitler, but I am afraid for her future; there are hard times ahead for the American people, troubles will be coming from within and without. America cannot smile away their Negro problem nor Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are cosmic laws.

Albert Einstein

#94. I understand the sacrifices American servicemen and women have made to protect freedom and democracy in my country and around the world.

Psy

#95. Many who wave American flags also practice discrimination on the basis of race. Many who wave American flags practice anti-Semitism. We think that betrays the fundamental ideals of our democracy.

Billy Campbell

#96. What are the American ideals? They are the development of the individual for his own and the common good; the development of the individual through liberty; and the attainment of the common good through democracy and social justice.

Louis D. Brandeis

#97. The American flag is the most recognized symbol of freedom and democracy in the world.

Virginia Foxx

#98. Supporting American technology companies is one of the most patriotic things you can do - the technology industry is the reason our country has such a high-standard of living and why we can afford to spread the democracy virus around the globe.

Jason Calacanis

#99. The Arab Spring showed that people are not going to wait for an American president to make good on his big talk about democracy and human rights; they are going to fight for those rights themselves and overthrow pro-American dictators who stand in their way.

Pankaj Mishra

#100. Let's remember that the revolution in Tahrir Square was not anti-American, it was not anti-Israeli, it was for democracy and freedom. That's a good thing.

Stephen Hadley