Quotes About Democracy In The Middle East

#1. You know who is against democracy in the Middle East? The husbands. They got used to their way of life. Now, the traditional way of life must change. Everybody must change. If you don't give equal rights to women, you can't progress.

Shimon Peres

#2. A central claim of the Bush administration's foreign policy is that the spread of democracy in the Middle East is the cure for terrorism.

Timothy Garton Ash

#3. Israel, the Jewish state, the only democracy in the Middle East, continues to shine as a beacon of light in the darkest region of the world.

Brigitte Gabriel

#4. Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.

Jack Schwartz

#5. Egypt was the first democracy in the Middle East. Women were unveiled in the 1920s. Egypt is a country of civilization, of culture. It shouldn't be suffering.

Ahmed Zewail

#6. A democracy in the Middle East must be more than a democracy in name only - it must live out its principles.

Kay Granger

#7. Iraq can emerge as a beacon of hope and democracy in the Middle East, and the world, with our help.

Chris Chocola

#8. Now the question is, now that we are there, what should we do in the best interest of the U.S., not only from a standpoint of the necessity of some stable democracy in the Middle East ...

Mike Huckabee

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. If the people of the Middle East are not sure what democracy means, let them look to Israel.

Hillary Clinton

#12. If ideas and beliefs are to be denied validity outside the geographical and cultural bounds of their origin, Buddhism would be confined to north India, Christianity to a narrow tract in the Middle East and Islam to Arabia.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#13. Egypt had the first constitution in the Middle East that allowed for liberty. And it had democracy.

Ahmed Zewail

#14. Each Middle East country has their own unique kinds of challenges; but the fundamentals, the desire for democracy and freely elected governments is a common thread throughout.

John McCain

#15. 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

#16. New political systems and philosophies were imported into the Near East under the general term democracy and grafted artificially into a society which was feudal in nature and theocratic in spirit. The results were not happy...

Gerald De Gaury

#17. Morocco has a lot to do in terms of democracy. The daily practice of democracy evolves in time. Trying to apply a Western democratic system to a country of the Maghreb, the Middle East, or the Gulf would be a mistake. We are not Germany, Sweden or Spain.

Mohammed VI Of Morocco

#18. Our first and immutable commitment must be to the security of Israel, our only true ally in the Middle East and the only democracy

Barack Obama

#19. We have to have a more realistic foreign policy and not a utopian one where we say, oh, we're going to spread freedom and democracy, and everybody in the Middle East is going to love us. They are not going to love us.

Rand Paul

#20. The war against ISIS will pose many new challenges for the next commander-in-chief. The last two presidents [George W. Bush and Barack Obama] pursued a Middle East policy that supported toppling dictators to try to promote democracy.

Wolf Blitzer

#21. It's not a democracy here, it's the Middle East.

Silvan Shalom

#22. For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region, here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither.

Condoleezza Rice

#23. The issue is: $1 trillion or $2 trillion is a lot of money. If our objective is to have stability in the Middle East, secure oil, or extend democracy, you can do a lot of democracy buying for this sum. To put it in context: The whole world spends $50 billion a year on foreign aid.

Joseph Stiglitz

#24. What makes the Arabs suitable candidates for democracy is their heritage as human beings, not their specific cultural or historical antecedents.

Gwynne Dyer

#25. Therefore, the question is not whether such democratization is possible, but instead how to meet the yearning of the masses in the Middle East for democracy; in other words, how to achieve democratization in the Middle East.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan

#26. I think a lot it was the theology, that the road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad, that somehow if we broke apart the rejectionist states, like Iraq, then the whole Middle East would reconfigure itself into a more favorable environment for democracy and Israel and us.

Chris Matthews

#27. According to this view, democracy is a product of western culture, and it cannot be applied to the Middle East which has a different cultural, religious, sociological and historical background.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan

#28. Democracy or breakdown in Syria would change the whole Middle East overnight.

Paul Krugman

#29. King Abdullah has died. A divisive figure in the Middle East. The sad irony is that the USA preached democracy in the face of absolute rule.

Immortal Technique

#30. Democracy isn't just for people in the Middle East, but Britons, too.

Heather Brooke

#31. Similarly, it is argued that the culture of Islam is incompatible with democracy. Basically, this conventional perspective of the Middle East thus contends that democracy in that region is neither possible nor even desirable.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan

#32. We want to be, I think, an example for the rest of the Arab world, because there are a lot of people who say that the only democracy you can have in the Middle East is the Muslim Brotherhood.

Abdallah II Of Jordan

#33. I'm worried about people who say Bush is lying. It's much more frightening that he's not lying, that he believes what he believes: that it's his mission to change the Middle East into a democracy. That's more unnerving.

Seymour Hersh

#34. When you look at - when you talk to people in Africa and across the Middle East, they're not satisfied with the way things are going. Sure, this idea of democracy was injected into the region, but it has brought mostly chaos.

Richard Engel