Quotes About Liberal Democracy

#1. In a jungle full of totalitarian monsters liberal democracy needs teeth.

Robert Conquest

#2. Liberal democracy is a powerful unifying mechanism, blurring differences between people and imposing uniformity of views, behavior, and language.

Ryszard Legutko

#3. Christians - at least Christians in a liberal democracy - have accepted, after Thomas Hobbes, that they must obey the secular rule of law; that there must be a separation of church and state.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

#4. Europe's exhausted elites were ready to concede both liberal democracy and redistributive welfare states to ensure social peace.

Francis Fukuyama

#5. Islam is not a race ... Islam is simply a set of beliefs, and it is not 'Islamophobic' to say Islam is incompatible with liberal democracy.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

#6. If every inhabitant of a liberal democracy believes in liberal democracy, then it doesn't matter what creed or colour they are.

Martin Amis

#7. Citizenship of a democratic state means living by the laws of the country. A liberal democracy cannot survive when part of the population believes that divine laws trump those made by man.

Ian Buruma

#8. 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

#9. I think Russians today have a distorted picture of capitalism, liberal democracy and market economy.

Garry Kasparov

#10. Liberal democracy must finally become the vital element of our society.

Gustav Heinemann

#11. Only together do Europe and the U.S. stand a chance of keeping liberal democracy as the central doctrine for organizing world affairs.

Victor Ponta

#12. The only way that we can win over potential jihadists to liberal democracy is by winning the battle of ideas.

Maajid Nawaz

#13. The only right we do not and should not have in a liberal democracy is a right not to be offended.

Flemming Rose

#14. Fascism is a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline.

Robert O. Paxton

#15. To try to turn Iraq into a liberal democracy is absolutely crazy. Islam has no understanding of the separation between church and state because they don't understand Islam to be a church.

Stanley Hauerwas

#16. Of all the principles which constitute Liberal Democracy, internationalism is the clearest, the most distinctive, and the one with the longest history.

Charles Kennedy

#17. What we have to do is to definitively remove the last vestiges of power from those who treat terms such as 'liberal democracy,' 'free markets' and 'Europe' with suspicion.

Donald Tusk

#18. 'Solutionism' for me is, above all, an unthinking pursuit of perfection - by means of technology - without coming to grips with the fact that imperfection is an essential feature of liberal democracy.

Evgeny Morozov

#19. Those who believe that liberal democracy and the free market can be defended by the force of law and regulation alone, without an internalised sense of duty and morality, are tragically mistaken.

Jonathan Sacks

#20. Liberal Democracy is all about extending choice. Give people the option to decide their retirement age, and you immediately extend their freedom in a very significant way.

Charles Kennedy

#21. Liberal democracy has endured because its institutions are designed for handling morally hazardous forms of coercive power. It puts the question of how far government should go to the cross fire of adversarial review.

Michael Ignatieff

#22. IPod liberalism [is] where we assume that every single Iranian or Chinese who happens to have and love his iPod will also love liberal democracy.

Evgeny Morozov

#23. I did not dwell on the issue of Europe during either the 2001 or the 2005 campaigns - despite it being a pivotal personal concern and despite seeing it as something of a litmus test for liberal democracy.

Charles Kennedy

#24. Noam Chomsky has a book, which I read for the first time when I was in Spain, called 'Fear of Democracy'. There is your answer. Fear of democracy. In Honduras, they had a sham democracy. It was run by elites, what was called a liberal democracy, but in reality was a false democracy.

Hugo Chavez

#25. In liberal democracy and anxious anarchy, the traditional classic dance, compact of aristocratic authority and absolute freedom in a necessity of order, has never been so promising as an independent expression as it is today.

Lincoln Kirstein

#26. It should be no surprise that religion in the non-western world has failed to disappear under the juggernaut of industrial capitalism, or that liberal democracy finds its most dedicated saboteurs among the new middle classes.

Pankaj Mishra

#27. China is not going to become a liberal democracy; if it did, it would collapse. I do not believe you can impose on other countries standards which are alien and totally disconnected with their past.

Lee Kuan Yew

#28. Acts of terror have never brought down liberal democracies. Acts of parliament have closed a few.

William Eldridge Odom

#29. The American Jews are liberal en masse because the 'Bill Of Rights' guarantees for them (through their evolutionist Justices) to keep the majority and their 'Democracy' in check.

Ibrahim Ibrahim

#30. Liberal comes from the Latin liberalis, which means pertaining to a free man. In politics, to be liberal is to want to extend democracy through change and reform. One can see why that word had to be erased from our political lexicon.

Gore Vidal

#31. The populist mode of democracy is a politics of arousal more than of reason, but also a politics of diversion from serious concerns that need settling in either a liberal democratic or a civic republican manner.

Bernard Crick

#32. If you had said to anyone in 1945, at the end of the Second World War with the continent it ruins, that you could have a European Union of 28 member states stretching from Portugal in the West to Estonia in the East, all of them more-or-less liberal democracies - they wouldn't have believed you.

Timothy Garton Ash

#33. Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness.

Leo Strauss

#34. Why is it that aggression in the name of God shocks secular liberal sensibilities, whereas the act of killing in the name of the secular nation, or of democracy, does not?

Talal Asad

#35. Democracy has become Empire's euphemism for neo-liberal capitalism.

Arundhati Roy

#36. In my lifetime, the world has become better, not worse. And the world is moving, very slowly but surely with more democracy and more liberal way of thinking, more inclusion and more diversity.

Isabel Allende

#37. The liberal arts inform and enlighten the independent citizen of a democracy in the use of his own resources ... They enlarge his capacity for self-knowledge and expand his opportunities for self-improvement ... They are the wellsprings of a free society.

Alfred Whitney Griswold

#38. Britain, the first industrial nation, had offered the world a remarkable public experiment in liberal, capitalist democracy whose success was premised upon free trade and world peace. Tuesday, 4 August 1914 brought that experiment to an abrupt halt.

Kenneth O. Morgan

#39. It is possible for a dictator to govern in a liberal way. And it is also possible for a democracy to govern with a total lack of liberalism. Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism.

Friedrich August Von Hayek

#40. I believe in a relatively equal society, supported by institutions that limit extremes of wealth and poverty. I believe in democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law. That makes me a liberal, and I'm proud of it.

Paul Krugman

#41. Captured by the ideological animus, both socialist and liberal-democratic art abandoned the criterion of beauty - considered anachronistic and of dubious political value - and replaced it with the criterion of correctness.

Ryszard Legutko

#42. The changes that take place when liberal Democrats replace not so liberal or compassionate Republicans (or Democrats) are merely cosmetic.

David T. Dellinger

#43. Obviously, Turkey is not a typical authoritarian regime, and obviously it's very important that there are free elections. But it's also obvious that this is not a liberal, mature democracy. This is why I call Turkey a wobbly democracy. At any time, it can tip over and fall down.

Elif Safak

#44. One of the strengths, and weaknesses, of liberal democratic societies is giving the benefit of the doubt even to one's enemies

Garry Kasparov

#45. What a liberal really wants is to bring about change that will not in any way endanger his position.

Stokely Carmichael

#46. Belief in liberal freedom and democracy is always belief in it in a particular place, in a national home with histories that only those who are born in a place or who adopt its citizenship can hope to understand.

Michael Ignatieff