Top 100 Quotes About Democracy
#2. I'm all for experimenting with sortition - randomly selected representative bodies of citizens. But I don't favor direct democracy. We're busy. We have lives. There is reddit. Who has time to work out the right answer to the thousand policy choices a gov't must make all the time?
Lawrence Lessig
#3. Too many in your state [Pennsylvania], as in this [New York], love pure democracy dearly. They seem not to consider that pure democracy, like pure rum, easily produces intoxication, and with it a thousand mad pranks and fooleries.
John Jay
#4. We have proved that the true strength of our nation comes not from the scale of our wealth but from the power of our ideals - opportunity, democracy, liberty and hope.
Barack Obama
#5. The democracy process provides for political and social change without violence.
Aung San Suu Kyi
#6. What you have when everyone wears the same playclothes for all occasions, is addressed by nickname, expected to participate in Show And Tell, and bullied out of any desire form privacy, is not democracy; it is kindergarten.
Judith Martin
#7. You know, real life doesn't just suddenly resolve itself. You have to keep working at it. Democracy, marriage, friendship. You can't just say, 'She's my best friend.' That's not a given, it's a process.
Viggo Mortensen
#8. Even if their outward fortunes could be absolutely equalized, there would be, from individual constitution alone, an aristocracy and a democracy in every land. The fearful by nature would compose an aristocracy, the hopeful by nature a democracy, were all other causes of divergence done away.
Harriet Martineau
#9. The nature of democracy is such that when there's - there'll be revulsion, obviously, towards - that's never going to happen again.
Warren Buffett
#10. What I hear every day on talk radio is America's lack of education - and I don't mean lack of college degrees. I mean lack of the basic art of democracy, the ability to seek the great truths that can come only by synthesizing the small truths possessed by each of us.
Donella Meadows
#11. Being surrounded by educated people makes democracy stronger, and it benefits our entire economy.
Seth Godin
#12. China recognizes and also respects the universality of human rights. We will continue our efforts to promote democracy and the rule of law.
Hu Jintao
#13. 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
#14. Over the course of my life, I have made many transitions - most of them taking me further away from my Somali roots and steadily toward the enlightened mentality of Western democracy.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#15. Like democracy itself, jazz has structure, but within it you can say almost anything.
Susan Rice
#16. A democracy is ... accounted the meanest and worst of all forms of government.
John Winthrop
#17. The defense of our democracy against the forces that threaten it from without has made some of its failures to function at home glaringly apparent.
Wendell Willkie
#18. From leading the world into the age of democracy to spearheading the technological revolution, America has always been at the forefront of greatness.
Charles B. Rangel
#19. Democracy is our commitment. It is our great legacy, a legacy we simply cannot compromise. Democracy is in our DNA.
Narendra Modi
#20. The beauty of our democracy lies in the American value of equality: if you vote, you have a seat at the table. If you speak, you have a chance to persuade others. A billionaire and a minimum wage earner have the same power at the ballot box.
Christine Pelosi
#21. In a racially divided society, majority rule is not a reliable instrument of democracy.
Lani Guinier
#22. Even the Founding Fathers of the U.S., nowadays considered the model of a democracy, were strictly opposed to it. Without a single exception, they thought of democracy as nothing but mob-rule.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
#23. Those who wash regularly should not stoop to democracy.
Fred Reed
#24. The word 'democracy' and the name of Assad do not blend very well in much of Syria.
Robert Fisk
#25. Peace should be understood in a human way - in a broad social, political and economic way. Peace is threatened by unjust economic, social and political order, absence of democracy, environmental degradation and absence of human rights.
Muhammad Yunus
#26. The test of a democracy is not the magnificence of buildings or the speed of automobiles or the efficiency of air transportation, but rather the care given to the welfare of all the people.
Helen Keller
#28. 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
#29. Social pressure is the fascism of the democracies. Fascism is the democracy of the ruthless. Social engineering is the opiate of romantic intellectuals.
Michael D. O'Brien
#30. When free discussion is denied, hardening of the arteries of democracy has set in, free institutions are but a lifeless form, and the death of the republic is at hand.
William Randolph Hearst
#31. It's not a democracy here, it's the Middle East.
Silvan Shalom
#32. Reformist kings can save their dynasties now by helping their countries move smoothly into democracy, or they will end their years in exile like the Russian aristocrats of a century earlier.
Elliott Abrams
#33. LIBERTY!
FREEDOM!
DEMOCRACY!
True anyhow no matter how many
Liars use those words.
Langston Hughes
#34. If left unattended by nonvigilant citizens, the freedoms of democracy can be lost to an all-powerful state, and citizens can become transformed into subjects of the government they failed to keep in check.
Christine Barbour
#35. Don't Dare take your college as a matter of course- because like freedom and democracy, many people you'll never know anything about have broken their hearts to get it for you.
Alice Duer Miller
#36. Privatization and deregulation constitute the outsourcing of democratically elected government with a moral mission to corporations that have a profit-making mission. The effect is to turn democracy into corporatocracy. PROFIT
George Lakoff
#37. Of governments there are said to be only two forms - democracy and oligarchy. For aristocracy is considered to be a kind of oligarchy, as being the rule of a few, and the so-called constitutional government to be really a democracy.
Aristotle.
#38. LENIN = "Revolutionary Social Democracy"
American Socialists = "Democratic Socialism". What is the difference? The USSR held democratic referendums too; all of which increased the power of the central planners and reduced the individual to nothingness.
A.E. Samaan
#39. Despite what many Americans think, most Soviets do not yearn for capitalism or Western-style democracy.
Dan Rather
#40. I'm such a sap for democracy and politics that I get weepy when I see anybody voting.
Tucker Carlson
#42. We've got to understand that the whole nature of the way American democracy guards its freedom has been changed.
John Ashcroft
#43. Intimidation, harassment and violence have no place in a democracy.
Mo Ibrahim
#44. On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy has given the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had.
Sinclair Lewis
#45. In the long and dogged crusade that the human race has fought in favor of democracy, the ideal of liberty, of freedom, has always been the goal.
John Allen Fraser
#46. If the great story of the last century was the conflict among various political ideologies-communism, fascism and democracy-then the great narrative of this century will be the changes wrought by astonishing scientific breakthroughs
Cynthia Tucker
#47. Elections remind us not only of the rights but the responsibilities of citizenship in a democracy.
Robert Kennedy
#48. I have a lot of respect for countries where the practice of democracy is highly developed. I think, however, that each country has to have its own specific features of democracy.
Mohammed VI Of Morocco
#49. We can no longer allow multinationals to parade as agents of progress and democracy in the newspapers, even as they subvert it at the workplace.
John Sweeney
#50. We learned in World War II that no single nation holds a monopoly on wisdom, morality or right to power, but that we must fight for the weak and promote democracy.
Joe Baca
#51. The gentlemen who wrote the Constitution were as suspicious of efficient government as they were wary of democracy, a "turbulence and a folly" that was associated with the unruly ignorance of an urban mob.
Lewis H. Lapham
#52. If voting doesn't change anything, it is just a drama of democracy.
Shesh Nath Vernwal
#53. Democracy without morality is impossible.
Jack Kemp
#54. It's true that the war in Iraq opened a distance in relations between part of Europe and the U.S. government, but our basic ties are stronger than that. We share democracy, free markets and a commitment to Western security. We differ on how to guarantee that security.
Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero
#55. The true policy of government is to make use of aristocracy, but under the forms and in the spirit of democracy.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#56. A democracy is a system in which you are free to do whatever you like as long as you do what we tell you.
Noam Chomsky
#57. American democracy is capsizing as a result of the vast increase in the number of government dependents and government employees.
James Bovard
#59. A politician who brings personal integrity into leadership helps us reclaim the popular trust that distinguishes true democracy from its cheap imitations.
Parker J. Palmer
#60. Democracy cannot be forced upon a society, neither is it a gift that can be held forever. It has to be struggled hard for and defended everyday anew.
Heinz Galinski
#61. I noticed that democracy was broken and tried to work on fixing that in Japan. Then I realized that it was broken all over the place and decided to work on that too.
Joichi Ito
#62. Democracy means doing whatever you want without asking permission of anybody but your boss, your doctor, your lawyer, your landlord, your bank, your city, your state and federal authorities, and your wife and children.
Sam Levenson
#63. I am convinced that the majority of American people do understand that we have a moral responsibility to foster the concepts of opportunity, free enterprise, the rule of law, and democracy. They understand that these values are the hope of the world.
Richard Lugar
#64. Iraq is part of a legitimate American effort not to have democracy everywhere but to have democracy somewhere.
Dinesh D'Souza
#65. Women are half the society. You cannot have a revolution without women. You cannot have democracy without women. You cannot have equality without women. You can't have anything without women.
Nawal El Saadawi
#66. Peace cannot exist without justice, justice cannot exist without fairness, fairness cannot exist without development, development cannot exist without democracy, democracy cannot exist without respect for the identity and worth of cultures and peoples.
Rigoberta Menchu
#67. In a democracy, every little wrong idea may grow up to become national policy.
Ashleigh Brilliant
#68. Crime is fast destroying the moral fabric of South African cities, and is becoming a major threat to South African democracy as well as the prominent manifestation of a "class war" that is largely a continuation of the "race war" of yesterday.
Achille Mbembe
#69. The dictatorship of hate has by now completely vanquished the democracy of pleasure.
Angelos Michalopoulos
#70. Amnesty International continues to report that extra judicial tortures and murders continue. This is not democracy that we are exporting to Mexico, and this is certainly not what the Mexican workers signed up for.
Stephen F. Lynch
#71. We can speak of the triumph of capitalism in the world, but we cannot yet speak about the triumph of democracy. There is a serious mismatch between the political and the economic conditions that prevail in the world today.
George Soros
#72. In Democracy, man exploits man; in Communism, it's the other way round.
Ken Wilber
#73. Talent and worth are the only eternal grounds of distinction. To these the Almighty has affixed His everlasting patent of nobility. Knowledge and goodness,
these make degrees in heaven, and they must be the graduating scale of a true democracy.
Catharine Sedgwick
#74. "Democracy" means nothing else other than, "rule of the people", in Greek. There is nothing democratic about the political concepts of the United States and Europe.
Andre Vltchek
#76. So the first thing in democracy, people must have satisfaction. If you don't have satisfaction, it's not going to work out.
Nirmala Srivastava
#78. Our model of politics is one that it is inclusive of all members of the society; all should be represented. That is the nature of our democracy.
Colin Powell
#79. Elections are a festival of democracy. Everyone must join this festival of democracy and strengthen it.
Narendra Modi
#80. Liberal democracy is a powerful unifying mechanism, blurring differences between people and imposing uniformity of views, behavior, and language.
Ryszard Legutko
#81. Everybody counts in applying democracy. And there will never be a true democracy until every responsible and law-abiding adult in it, without regard to race, sex, color or creed has his or her own inalienable and unpurchasable voice in government.
Carrie Chapman Catt
#82. Democracy is itself, a religious faith. For some it comes close to being the only formal religion they have.
E.B. White
#83. Democracy is an excellent way of ensuring that nothing much gets done. There are always interests that might get trampled upon [and no elected politician would wish to make permanent enemies by trampling upon others' interests].
Edward De Bono
#84. In Afghanistan, there is a plan to build democracy; hundreds of thousands of troops are protecting it. There is a plan to rebuild and reconstruct there. But many thousands of Americans die from violence and poverty every year and we don't have a plan for reconstruction at home.
Jesse Jackson
#85. Without a strong educational system democracy is crippled. Knowledge is not only key to power. It is the citadel of human freedom.
Harry S. Truman
#86. Chris. What do you want, child?"
I sighed and walked another three steps forward. I stared into his eyes and spoke the one word that terrified him, "Democracy.
Yanan Melo
#87. What good is democracy if you can't get what you want?
Drew Carey
#88. Earth Democracy connects people in circles of care, cooperation, and compassion instead of dividing them through competition and conflict, fear and hatred.
Vandana Shiva
#89. Jazz is about freedom within discipline. Usually a dictatorship like in Russia and Germany will prevent jazz from being played because it just seemed to represent freedom, democracy and the United States.
Dave Brubeck
#90. I've never understood multi-party democracy. It's hard enough with two parties.
Hillary Clinton
#91. Instead of a thoroughgoing democracy, Americans have settled for democratic stagecraft.
Nancy Isenberg
#92. Democracy no longer means what it was meant to. It has been taken back into the workshop. Each of its institutions has been hollowed out, and it has been returned to us as a vehicle for the free market, of the corporations. For the corporations, by the corporations.
Arundhati Roy
#94. We had in the West a very romantic vision of Russia back in 1991, when the Soviet Union died and whatever is Russia began to emerge. And we began to think of it as a democracy. We're going to bring it into the West. All is going to be wonderful. That was never in the cards.
Marvin Kalb
#95. The Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders, in open court before an international tribunal, had a profound long-term effect in bringing Germans back to democracy and humanity.
Anthony Lewis
#96. A nation that hates politics will not long survive as a democracy.
E. J. Dionne
#97. We're not a democracy. It's a terrible misunderstandin g and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us that. In reality, we're a plutocracy: a government by the wealthy.
Ramsey Clark
#98. On my travels around the world, I've met people in countries where democracy doesn't exist and if it does, they are intimidated into voting in a certain way.
Ross Kemp
#99. Naples was the great European metropolis where faith in technology, in science, in economic development, in the kindness of nature, in history that leads of necessity to improvement, in democracy, was revealed, most clearly and far in advance, to be completely without foundation.
Elena Ferrante
#100. When are people going to learn? Democracy doesn't work.
Homer
