Top 81 Quotes About Democracy In America
#1. I consider anybody a twerp who hasn't read 'Democracy in America' by Alexis de Tocqueville. There can never be a better book than that one on the strengths and vulnerabilities inherent in our form of government.
Kurt Vonnegut
#2. Tocqueville remarks on this in Democracy in America. "An American," he wrote, "cannot converse, but he can discuss, and his talk falls into a dissertation.
Neil Postman
#3. Let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve of monarcy, that in America the law is King. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.
Thomas Paine
#4. I like the Americans for a great many reasons. I like them because even the modern thing called industrialism has not entirely destroyed in them the very ancient thing called democracy. I like them because they have a respect for work which really curbs the human tendency to snobbishness.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#5. America is stronger than ever. We will forever remember those we lost on September 11, 2001. In honoring their memory, we will remain true to our commitment to freedom and democracy.
Evan Bayh
#6. America is the most violent democracy in the world. It's something that's met with great shock, horror, and mystery when I travel to other countries. They ask, Why are there so many shootings in America? Why does everyone own a gun?
Patricia Cornwell
#7. America: An ongoing experiment in democracy controlled largely by insanely wealthy people. And that's just the way we like it, thank you very much.
James Napoli
#8. America's corporate and political elites
now form a regime of their own and
they're privatizing democracy. All the
benefits - the tax cuts, policies and
rewards flow in one direction: up.
Bill Moyers
#9. America had the message of freedom and democracy, but we haven't actually shown that to be what we do in the world. So I think that's a terrifying thing.
Lesli Linka Glatter
#10. The United States exists as a sovereign nation. 'America,' in contrast, exists as a myth of democracy and equal opportunity to live by, or as an ideal goal to reach.
Bharati Mukherjee
#11. Martin Luther King Jr's agenda was not to help Negroes overcome American apartheid in the south. It was to make America democracy a better place, where everyday people, from poor people who were white and red and yellow and black and brown, would be able to live lives in decency and dignity.
Cornel West
#12. We say that if America has entered the war to make the world safe for democracy, she must first make democracy safe in America.
Emma Goldman
#13. The history of America is to expand civil liberties in a responsible and civil manner. We need to remember that our wonderful Democracy with its freedoms has been working.
James McGreevey
#14. While we enjoy the benefits of living in the greatest democracy in the world, we must be ever conscious of the fact that none of the achievements or freedoms enjoyed in America would be possible without the price that has been paid for by our servicemen and women.
Mark Kennedy
#15. We have bloated bureaucracies in Corporate America. The root of the problem is the absence of real corporate democracy.
Carl Icahn
#16. Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.
Anthony Burgess
#17. My parents were lured to America by the democracy here promised. In our family, freedom was a word to conjure by. Hoping for larger privileges for the growing family of children, they brought them to the New World, the world of many intellectual as well as material advantages.
Jenkin Lloyd Jones
#18. We seek in Central America not peace alone, not peace to be followed someday by political progress, but peace and democracy, together, indivisible, an end to the shedding of human blood, which is inseparable from an end to the suppression of human rights.
Oscar Arias
#19. It's an ancient idea that the leader of a democracy should not be the cleverest but the most average. That's an arguable point, but the world has decided otherwise - except in America, where it still divides the country right down the middle.
Martin Amis
#20. 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.
#21. Ours was the first nation to be founded on the idea that all are created equal and all deserve equal treatment under the law. Despite our missteps and shortcomings, these ideals still inspire hope among the oppressed and give us pride in being Americans.
Jimmy Carter
#22. All across the Middle East in the streets, people are demanding democracy. It's amazing. The only way in America you get people to get worked up like that is to threaten to give them health care.
Bill Maher
#23. Shall we have recourse to the art of printing? But this has not destroyed property or aristocracy or corporations or paper wealth in England or America, or diminished the influence of either; on the contrary, it has multiplied aristocracy and diminished democracy.
John Adams
#24. In 1940, President Roosevelt called on American industry to become the 'great arsenal of democracy.' Automotive manufacturers in Michigan responded and converted their assembly lines from cars to tanks and helped America win World War II.
Sander Levin
#25. I had this fantasy that in a democracy the government was the population. So I came to America and got a big slap in my face ... Americans were not what I thought. I thought I was going to see bastards and I saw nice people, very friendly to me.
Marjane Satrapi
#26. They were not mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, they were absent in the Constitution and they were invisible in the new political democracy. They were the women of early America.
Howard Zinn
#27. 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
#28. In America, our origins matter less than our destination, and that is what democracy is all about.
Ronald Reagan
#29. When the safety of America is threatened, we will spend any amount of money. The real safety of our nation is preparing this next generation so that they can take our place [in] thinking and technology and democracy.
Geoffrey Canada
#30. Better use has been made of association and this powerful instrument of action has been applied for more varied aims in America than anywhere else in the world.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#31. Before the military coup in Chile, we had the idea that military coups happen in Banana Republics, somewhere in Central America. It would never happen in Chile. Chile was such a solid democracy. And when it happened, it had brutal characteristics.
Isabel Allende
#32. The people who lead us are of us. We put them in office and we can take them out. America proves that the people can govern themselves.
Keith Ellison
#33. I look forward to an america in which commands respect throughout the world, not only for its strength, but for its civilization as well. And I look forward to a world in which we will be safe not only for democracy and diversity but also for personal distinction.
John F. Kennedy
#34. Through much of the last century, America's faith in freedom and democracy was a rock in a raging sea. Now it is a seed upon the wind, taking root in many nations.
George W. Bush
#35. What is music in America? It's this stand-in for political action in a lot of senses. We have no democracy and we have no art culture, and we've long considered politics nebbish-y and hopelessly unsexy. So a lot of what would be considered political activism is channeled into cultural work.
Ian Svenonius
#36. I think we are dying in America, I think our democracy is over.
Rickie Lee Jones
#37. I think Democracy is threatened in a way it hasn't been in two hundred years, and if America doesn't stand up, we're in big trouble.
Rosie O'Donnell
#38. We have been gradually finding out that there is more democracy in letting a committee or representative ten to details than in making everybody's business nobody's business.
Edward Pearson Pressey
#39. On December 7, 1941, an event took place that had nothing to do with me or my family and yet which had devastating consequences for all of us - Japan bombed Pearl Harbour in a surprise attack. With that event began one of the shoddiest chapters in the tortuous history of democracy in North America.
David Suzuki
#40. America cannot do most of what needs to be done alone. You need friends. And we have good friends around the world. We have friends with whom we share values in Europe and Asia - thanks to the forward march of democracy - in Latin America, in Africa, and increasingly in the Middle East.
Condoleezza Rice
#41. I grew up in San Francisco. And so I'm informed in a certain kind of way about, you know, believing in democracy and believing in America. And I'm a very ardent patriot.
George Lucas
#42. In Latin America, specialists and polling organisations have, for some time, observed that the extension of formal democracy was accompanied by an increasing disillusionment about democracy and a lack of faith in democratic institutions.
Noam Chomsky
#43. 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
#44. Democracy ... is a society in which the unbeliever feels undisturbed and at home. If there were only a half dozen unbelievers in America, their well-being would be a test of our democracy.
Alfred North Whitehead
#45. America's most dangerous and threatening black man is the one who has been kept sealed up by the Northerner in the black ghettos - the Northern white power structure's system to keep talking democracy while keeping the black man out of sight somewhere, around the corner.
Malcolm X
#46. 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
#47. If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our Democracy; Tonight is your answer.
Barack Obama
#48. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy
Martin Luther King Jr.
#49. The United States is democratic because its people live in conformity. It is the perfect country for mice.
Warren Eyster
#50. Because of my parents' love of democracy, we came to America after being driven twice from our home in Czechoslovakia - first by Hitler and then by Stalin.
Madeleine Albright
#51. 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
#52. Democracy
rule by the people
sounds like a fine thing; we should try it sometime in America.
Edward Abbey
#53. America has never seen itself as a national state like all others, but rather as an experiment in human freedom and democracy.
Brent Scowcroft
#54. The dynamic ideal we call democracy, gradually growing up in the human heart for two-thousand five hundred years, at least, has now every opportunity to found the natural democratic state in these United States of America by way of natural economic order and a natural, or organic, architecture.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#55. Events in America show the extent to which democracy there is fuelled by populism - Barack Obama's victory is a manifestation not of Washington's need for change, but of America's. That is not how democracy works in England.
Andrew O'Hagan
#56. We in the United States are very often - since we are a democracy and we have national interests, we've often made the mistake that a democracy has to adopt America's interests, and that is a contradiction because a democracy basically is people deciding what their interests are.
George Soros
#57. 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
#58. TO FOREIGN LANDS. I heard that you ask'd for something to prove this puzzle the New World, And to define America, her athletic Democracy, Therefore I send you my poems that you behold in them what you wanted.
Walt Whitman
#59. The democratic ideal has always been related to a moderate level of inequality. I think one big reason why electoral democracy flourished in 19th century America better than 19th century Europe is because you had more equal distribution of wealth in America.
Thomas Piketty
#60. Because America, being a democracy, could not strike first, but had to wait - wait in instant readiness - until she was actually attacked.
E.E. "Doc" Smith
#61. Nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with paltry interests, in one word, so anti-poetic, as the life of a man in the United States.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#62. Jazz is America's own. It is played and listened to by all peoples - in harmony together. Pigmentation differences have no place ... as in genuine democracy, only performance counts.
Norman Granz
#63. America is not the project of any one person. Because the single-most powerful word in our democracy is the word "We." "We The People." "We Shall Overcome." "Yes We Can." That word is owned by no one. It belongs to everyone.
Barack Obama
#64. President Reagan fueled the spirit of America. His smile, his optimism, his total belief in the ultimate triumph of democracy and freedom, and his willingness to act on that belief, helped end the Cold War and usher in a new and brighter phase of history.
Colin Powell
#65. There is something inherent in our democracy that tends to want to level. America is a little uncomfortable in the presence of someone who is distinctly superior in whatever way.
Carlisle Floyd
#66. America is a country ready to be taken, in fact, longing to be taken by political leaders ready to restore democracy and trust to the political process.
Arianna Huffington
#67. The building of America has had its fair share of mistakes, but it's a constitution that's the jewel of democracy, the envy of many, and it's the most generous nation in the world.
Gary Oldman
#68. Voting is completely important. People in America think democracy is a given. I think of it as an ecosystem, and what gets in the way of it is politicians and apathy.
Henry Rollins
#69. The governments and the hard-headed military establishment and the general conservative part of America have never taken much interest in democracy, anyway.
Amartya Sen
#70. America's greatness rests on far more than the power of our arms. Our greatness is also measured by our goodness, it's in the capacity of our minds, of our hearts, and it's in the strength of our democracy.
Howard Dean
#71. The Internet ... has become the voice of the people in the first genuine experiment in democracy yet conducted in America. It stands ready to serve every facet, every faction.
Gerry Spence
#72. Fifty years of isolating Cuba had failed to promote democracy, setting us back in Latin America. That's why we restored diplomatic relations, opened the door to travel and commerce, and positioned ourselves to improve the lives of the Cuban people.
Barack Obama
#73. Abortion on demand, throughout the full nine months of a pregnancy, for virtually any reason, became public policy in the United States of America. No other developed democracy had, or has, such a permissive abortion regime.
Robert Casey
#74. The only part of my mother's experience that still gets to me is the way she and people like her were looked down upon for asking America to be America, for asking for full and equal participation in our democracy.
Julian Castro
#75. America's objective in the Middle East is to create democracy in the same way that my goal on a first date to feed women.
Dov Davidoff
#76. 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
#77. My parents called themselves progressives. The agenda was a Soviet America ... the slogan of the communist party in those days was peace, jobs, democracy. Sound familar? The communist party is the democratic Party.
David Horowitz
#78. Small differences in a system of great power can have enormous consequences. [Source: Al Jazeera 'Upfront' interview]
Noam Chomsky
#79. In reality, at the end of World War II, America imposed democracy at the point of a bayonet on Japan and Germany, and it has proved a resounding success in both countries. The problem with liberals is that they never give bayonets a chance.
Dinesh D'Souza
#80. The few Americans he had encountered in his lifetime had all seemed flat to him, as if freedom weakened one's capacity for intense emotion by demanding too little of it.
G. Willow Wilson
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