Social Democracy Quotes

#1. For German Social Democracy, Europe is vital to the national interest.

Martin Schulz

#2. Socialism's not a word that I use. I say 'social democracy' because I don't think the government needs to own all the means of production.

David Cunliffe

#3. People who object to weapons aren't abolishing violence, they're begging for rule by brute force, when the biggest, strongest animals among men were always automatically 'right.' Guns ended that, and social democracy is a hollow farce without an armed populace to make it work.

L. Neil Smith

#4. 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

#5. An American parliamentary system with proportional representation wouldn't immediately or inexorably lead to a flourishing social democracy, but it would at least correct the overrepresentation of an ideological minority and cut down on intentional tactical economic sabotage.

Alex Pareene

#6. Passive fatalism can never be the role of a revolutionary party, like the Social Democracy.

Karl Liebknecht

#7. Rosa Luxemburg was - still is for me - a great personal and intellectual heroine. Her analysis of Leninism and capitalism and social democracy are all worth reading. I wouldn't consider anyone truly politically literate if they hadn't given her work at least some study.

Christopher Hitchens

#8. Social Democracy preached against capitalism for half a century. After the November revolution the Reds had the opportunity to direct capitalism into the proper paths: but nothing happened!

Julius Streicher

#9. I do not think you can push public expenditure significantly above 60 per cent and maintain the values of a plural society with adequate freedom of choice. We are here close to one of the frontiers of social democracy

Roy Jenkins

#10. Social democracy ... is only the advance guard of the proletariat, a small piece of the total working masses; blood from their blood, and flesh from their flesh.

Rosa Luxemburg

#11. If we put our trust in the common sense of common men and 'with malice toward none and charity for all' go forward on the great adventure of making political, economic and social democracy a practical reality, we shall not fail.

Henry A. Wallace

#12. As long as you continue to tar social democracy with all the crimes of communism, I feel equally entitled to tar the free market with the crimes of slavery, segregation, colonialism and genocide; piss me off and I'll add fascism and the Nazis.

Greg Erwin

#13. He saw during the Weimar Republic that the left intelligentsia hated capitalism, and hence social democracy as well, far too much to think that Nazism could be worse.

Clive James

#14. The more that social democracy develops, grows, and becomes stronger, the more the enlightened masses of workers will take their own destinies, the leadership of their movement, and the determination of its direction into their own hands.

Rosa Luxemburg

#15. Contemporary social democracy is what I believe is the right concept.

Mikhail Gorbachev

#16. Social democracy seeks and finds the ways, and particular slogans, of the workers' struggle only in the course of the development of this struggle, and gains directions for the way forward through this struggle alone.

Rosa Luxemburg

#17. The sorry existence to which this mental tendency was condemned in recent decades by the powerful development of social democracy in Germany may, to a certain extent, be explained by the exclusive domination and long duration of the parliamentary period. A

Rosa Luxemburg

#18. Political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it social democracy. What does social democracy mean? It means a way of life which recognizes liberty, equality and fraternity as the principles of life.

B.R. Ambedkar

#19. Social democracy does not represent an ideal future; it does not even represent the ideal past.

Tony Judt

#20. Kids automatically teach each other how to use technology, but they're not going to teach each other about the history of democracy, or the importance of taking their voices into the public sphere to create social change.

Howard Rheingold

#21. We began to temper Western democracy with what I'd call a social contract. We put in Social Security, graduated income tax, workers' compensation. We developed strong unions to negotiate with business owners so workers got an equitable share of the profits.

John Shelby Spong

#22. The measure of man's ability to extend the sphere of social possibility can only start with the values of democracy.

Auliq Ice

#23. Being human means throwing your whole life on the scales of destiny when need be, all the while rejoicing in every sunny day and every beautiful cloud.

Rosa Luxemburg

#24. We cannot afford to be discouraged from challenging the corporate control of our food system, our genetic commons, our shared resources, or our democracy. The history of social change in our nation shows that the political system can be reformed, even if the road is long and zigzag.

Wenonah Hauter

#25. This is taking place inside Europe. This is taking place inside a once great nation. The nation that invented democracy. We are on the edge of total social breakdown. And frankly, as far as the euro is concerned and the austerity measures are concerned, the medicine is killing the patient.

Nigel Farage

#26. The public is not cognizant of the real value of education, and does not realize that education as a social force is not receiving the kind of attention it has the right to expect in a democracy.

Edward L. Bernays

#27. It is my expectation that Teacher Education for Democracy and Social Justice will become a rich resource for continuing this multi-layered conversation-from democratic belief to democratic action-that is the hallmark of educational renewal.

John Goodlad

#28. If allowed to run free of the social system, capitalism will attempt to corrupt and undermine democracy, which is after all not a natural state.

John Ralston Saul

#29. We Social-Democrats always stand for democracy, not "in the name of capitalism," but in the name of clearing the path for our movement, which clearing is impossible without the development of capitalism.

Vladimir Lenin

#30. Internal democracy in schools is as important in order to ensure the true democratization of education.

Sharad Vivek Sagar

#31. If the country is to survive as a democracy it will depend on voters who understand how our political institutions have evolved and the events that went into their creation. A nation's sense of its history is indistinguishable from its social cohesion.

Alan Bullock

#32. Jazz is democracy in music.

Wynton Marsalis

#33. Constitutional democracy has created astonishing and apparently irreversible social progress. All we're interested in is talking about when government doesn't work.

Tony Kushner

#34. The fight for truth ... is not just our right as free citizens of free societies. It is our duty as citizens of the earth.

Vandana Shiva

#35. If political rights are necessary to set social rights in place, social rights are indispensable to make political rights 'real' and keep them in operation. The two rights need each other for their survival; that survival can only be their joint achievement.

Zygmunt Bauman

#36. 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

#37. Living democracy grows like a tree, from the bottom up.

Vandana Shiva

#38. 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

#39. Democracy is not compatible with capitalism but is congruent with a version of democratic socialism in which the wealth, resources, and benefits of a social order are shared in an equitable and just manner.

Henry Giroux

#40. The struggle for democracy and human rights in Burma is a struggle for life and dignity. It is a struggle that encompasses our political, social and economic aspirations.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#41. 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

#42. The democracy process provides for political and social change without violence.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#43. However, it was the great 18th century social philosophers John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau who brought the concept of a social contract between citizens and governments sharply into political thinking, paving the way for popular democracy and constitutional republicanism.

Simon Mainwaring

#44. Everyone living under the social contract we call democracy has a duty to act responsibly, to obey the laws, and to abandon certain types of self-interested behaviors that conflict with the general good.

Simon Mainwaring

#45. Thus was parliamentary democracy finally interred in Germany. Except for the arrests of the Communists and some of the Social Democratic deputies, it was all done quite legally, though accompanied by terror. Parliament

William L. Shirer

#46. In fact the Guild, he liked to think, practiced the ultimate democracy. You didn't need intelligence, social position, beauty or charm to hire it. You just needed money which, unlike the other stuff, was available to everyone. Except for the poor, of course, but there was no helping some people.

Terry Pratchett

#47. Democracy is the most realistic way for diverse peoples to resolve their differences, and share power, and heal social divisions without violence or repression.

Condoleezza Rice

#48. Schools need not preach political doctrine to defend democracy. If they shape men capable of critical thought and trained in social attitudes, that is all that is necessary.

Albert Einstein

#49. My dear, it is very nice here, every day two or three persons are stabbed by soldiers in the city; there are daily arrests, but apart from these it is pretty gay..

Rosa Luxemburg

#50. And was disposed too often to idealize as a virtue that habit of mean subservience to wealth and social position which, after more than half a century of political democracy, is still the characteristic and odious vice of the Englishman.

R. H. Tawney

#51. Bipartisan democracy presupposes the individual, whose welfare is identical with that of the community in which he lives, the absence of coherent social classes, a basic uniformity of interest throughout.

Learned Hand

#52. Reality has changed, and we changed with it. However, I never changed sides. I have always been on the side of justice, democracy and social equality.

Dilma Rousseff

#53. There does not have to be trade-off between growth and social protection. A democracy does not mean much if it doesn't respond to the needs and will of its people.

Michelle Bachelet

#54. In a true democracy is the cure for most of our social and political ills, but a few of them must remain to keep us going.

Ameen Rihani

#55. You have to stand guard over the development and maintenance of Islamic democracy, Islamic social justice and the equality of manhood in your own native soil.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah

#56. I'm against unanswerable concentrations of power, whether that be government or private industry or religious figures - anybody who is not accountable to the larger social climate or society for the power they wield, that concerns me. I'm very pro-democracy.

Daniel Suarez

#57. There is not Communism or Marxism, but representative democracy and social justice in a well-planned economy.

Fidel Castro

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

Francis Fukuyama

#59. 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

#60. The ideas and principles of democracy should not be limited to politics, but must pervade all areas of social life.

Bruno Kreisky

#61. I'm struck by how laughter connects you with people. It's almost impossible to maintain any kind of distance or any sense of social hierarchy when you're just howling with laughter. Laughter is a force for democracy.

John Cleese

#62. The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.

Joseph Schumpeter

#63. Democracy is the absolute value that makes for human dignity, as well as the only road to sustained economic development and social justice.

Kim Dae-jung

#64. To me, technology was a means to an end to achieve the social justice goals, stronger democracy and more effective government that is the aim of what I do.

Beth Simone Noveck

#65. The challenge as we saw in the Nigerian project was to restructure the economy decisively in the direction of a modern free market as an appropriate environment for cultivation of freedom and democracy and the natural emergence of a new social order.

Ibrahim Babangida

#66. Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share a common life. What matters is that people of different backgrounds and social positions encounter one another, and bump up against one another, in the course of ordinary life.

Michael Sandel

#67. The new social question is: democracy or the rule of the financial markets. We are currently witnessing the end of an era. The neoliberal ideology has failed worldwide. The U.S. movement Occupy Wall Street is a good example of this.

Sigmar Gabriel

#68. If democracy is control by the people, as it is supposed to be, it is the right form of government. I believe in a complete democracy - individual, political, social, economic. If we really had that, which we don't now, it would be in harmony with divine purpose.

Peace Pilgrim

#69. Governments, including free and democratic governments, are not really friendly to freedom and democracy. They abhor any rule of law that limits their powers and penchant for social engineering.

George Jonas

#70. The church does not exist to provide an ethos for democracy or any other form of social organization, but stands as a political alternative to every nation, witnessing to the kind of social life possible for those that have been formed by the story of Christ.

Stanley Hauerwas

#71. Progressivism is an active channel for social equity, social liberalism, and political rights for all people.

Henry Johnson Jr

#72. The Civil War won formal rights for Negroes, but failed to win social justice and factual democracy. The actual result has been segregation, and fear and ignorance for both whites and blacks.

Paul Goodman

#73. The left-right political dichotomy serves liberalism by not challenging it. Democracy sustains the status quo by offering the illusion of choice with no choice. Genuine opposition can only emerge if there is an alternative story with which to counter the current mythos.

John Dunn

#74. The freedom and human capacities of individuals must be developed to their maximum but individual powers must be linked to democracy in the sense that social betterment must be the necessary consequence of individual flourishing.

Henry Giroux

#75. The appeal by twentieth-century pluralists to scientific method was also ideologically - and even messianically - driven. It ignored scientific data that interfered with environmentalist assumptions and misrepresented socialist faith as "scientific planning.

Paul Edward Gottfried

#76. Count Coudenhove-Kalergi put it succinctly in one of his speeches when he declared his ambition that Europe "supersedes democracy" and that democracy be replaced by a "social aristocracy of the spirit."52

Yanis Varoufakis

#77. Those who deplore our militants, who exhort patience in the name of a false peace, are in fact supporting segregation and exploitation. They would have social peace at the expense of social and racial justice. They are more concerned with easing racial tension than enforcing racial democracy.

A. Philip Randolph

#78. I think there is a heritage which I'm proud of, which is a fight for democracy, a fight for social justice, a fight for freedom. My grandfather went to jail or exile six times in his life, fighting for his principles for democracy, or for his country. And my father twice.

George Papandreou

#79. We live in a system that espouses merit, equality, and a level playing field, but exalts those with wealth, power, and celebrity, however gained.

Derrick A. Bell

#80. Democracy cannot be static. Whatever is static is dead.

Eleanor Roosevelt

#81. In almost every successful social movement of the last century, from Gandhi's campaign against British rule to the Solidarity movement in Poland to the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, democracy was the result of a local awakening.

Barack Obama

#82. Francie, huddled with other children of her kind, learned more that first day than she realized. She learned of the class system of a great Democracy.

Betty Smith

#83. Journalism is what maintains democracy. It's the force for progressive social change.

Andrew Vachss

#84. The biggest danger I feel are an emerging group of Westernised, educated, champagne socialists and latte liberals who pontificate about social inequality, democracy and freedom in the comfort of their condos.

Calvin Cheng

#85. Universities are some of the few places left where a struggle for the commons, for public life, if not democracy itself, can be made visible through the medium of collective voices and social movements energized by the need for a politics and way of life counter to authoritarian capitalism.

Henry Giroux

#86. I feel uncomfortable with the words DEMOcracy, SOCIALism and COMMUNism. Common social demonocracy?

Robin Sacredfire

#87. No less characteristic in a democracy is social justice. This demands a solution to the frightening indexes of infant mortality, of malnutrition, lack of education illiteracy, wages not sufficient to sustain life

Rigoberta Menchu

#88. Democracy, like liberty, justice and other social and political rights, is not "given", it is earned through courage, resolution and sacrifice.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#89. Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.

Jean Baudrillard

#90. Community connectedness is not just about warm fuzzy tales of civic triumph. In measurable and well-documented ways, social capital makes an enormous difference in our lives ... Social capital makes us smarter, healthier, safer, richer, and better able to govern a just and stable democracy.

Robert D. Putnam

#91. 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

#92. The "democratization of education" is everyone's fight, everyone's right.

Sharad Vivek Sagar

#93. There is a very simple relationship between increased socioeconomic rifts in the society and increased violence, criminality, war, increased lack of trust between people, health problems and social exclusion - but it seems to be very difficult for people to understand this simple relationship.

Swami Dhyan Giten

#94. The philanthropic tradition is older than democracy, older than Christianity, and older than higher education. It gives form and purpose to personal and social life that cannot be provided by the self-interest of economic enterprise or required by the mandate of political institutions.

Robert L. Payton

#95. In the strict sense of the term, a true democracy has never existed, and never will exist. It is against natural order that the great number should govern and that the few should be governed.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#96. In Europe, it appears that in the name of democracy, elites are pursuing an autocratic, centralized power, seeking economic control and social regimentation.

Maggie Gallagher

#97. The form of government and the condition of society must always correspond. Social equality is therefore a postulate of pure democracy.

Lord Acton

#98. The reality is that we are hated not because of our democracy, freedoms, and generous social security system; rather, we are hated because of our involvement in foreign conflicts and quarrels that were never our concern.

Amir Butler