Us Democracy Quotes

#1. For us democracy is a question of human dignity. And human dignity is political freedom.

Olof Palme

#2. People are always teaching us democracy but the people who teach us democracy don't want to learn it themselves.

Vladimir Putin

#3. Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a President and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#4. We believe in equality for all, and privileges for none. This is a belief that each American regardless of background has equal standing in the public forum, all of us. Because we believe this idea so firmly, we are an inclusive, rather than an exclusive party. Let everybody come.

Barbara Jordan

#5. Well, I would say that we've got to redefine democracy, that we have been stuck in concepts of representative democracy, that we believe that it's getting other people to do things for us that we progress.

Grace Lee Boggs

#6. The instinct of worship is still so strong upon us that, having nearly worn out our capacity for treating kings and such kind of persons as sacred, we are ready to invest a majority of our own selves with the same kind of reverence.

Auberon Herbert

#7. A generation of Earth Days has conditioned millions of us to be green in our homes yet we must apply the same ethic to our politics if we want to save our planet and our democracy.

Christine Pelosi

#8. For Russia, there is not and there may not be another political option but democracy. However, Russian democracy is ... not at all the realization of standards imposed on us from outside.

Vladimir Putin

#9. There is no reason that billionaires should crowd us out from our democracy.

Martin O'Malley

#10. The money pigs of capitalist democracy: Money has made slaves of us. Money is the curse of mankind. It smothers the seed of everything great and good. Every penny is sticky with sweat and blood.

Joseph Goebbels

#11. The Internet has done a wonderful thing for us. But democracy doesn't work unless people are well informed, and I don't know that we are. People just don't have the time.

Brad Pitt

#12. With us it is not a question of Bolshevism or democracy, but of life or death. A decision in favor of a Soviet could not be opposed by the Young Turks.

Djemal Pasha

#13. Empower yourselves with a good education, then get out there and use that education to build a country worthy of your boundless promise.

Michelle Obama

#14. That's what this democracy was for us, a huge supermarket of mass man where we could take a piece here and a piece there to make our personalities for ourselves instead of putting up with what was given at the beginning.

Seymour Krim

#15. We need to thank all of our troops, and particularly those for whom we can never express enough gratitude for they have given their lives so that all of us may be free and that our democracy can be a shining light for the rest of the world.

Virgil Goode

#16. For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.

Noam Chomsky

#17. Voting in particular is an embarrassment, being a public display of weak character and low intelligence. Let us face the truth: Democracy, like spitting in public or the Roman games, is the proper activity of the lower intellectual and moral classes. It amounts to collusion in one's own suckering.

Fred Reed

#18. Most people that I know don believe that a handful of corporations request sit together without disclosure, by the way, and pump hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars into the political process. That is not the democracy that many of us believe America should be.

Bernie Sanders

#19. When equality is treated ... as an ideal, we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority. That mind is the special disease of democracy, as cruelty and servility are the special diseases of privileged societies. It will kill us all if it grows unchecked.

C.S. Lewis

#20. This country has always been run by elite, and it's an elitist democracy. And that's not a radical concept. It's elitist democracy. When people talk about democracy, they don't talk - really talk about participatory democracy, until the point that we get us at Election Day.

Danny Glover

#21. The US has not imposed democracy in Yemen, its people have.

Ali Abdullah Saleh

#22. I believe that here in South Africa, with all our diversities of colour and race; we will show the world a new pattern for democracy. There is a challenge for us to set a new example for all. Let us not side step this task.

Albert Lutuli

#23. When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that, in our democracy, government is us.

Barack Obama

#24. 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

#25. We have a wonderful history behind us ... If you are unable to demonstrate to the world that you have this record, the world will say to you, 'You are not worthy to enjoy the blessings of democracy or anything else'.

Carter G. Woodson

#26. As for democracy, the men of sense among us knew what it was, and I perhaps as well as any, as I have more cause to complain of it; but there is nothing new to be said of a patent absurdity-meanwhile we did not think it safe to alter it under the pressure of your hostility.

Thucydides

#27. Those of us who decided to work for democracy in Burma made our choice in the conviction that the danger of standing up for basic human rights in a repressive society was preferable to the safety of a quiescent life in servitude

Aung San

#28. Of course I wrote most of the Constitution myself. I remember hesitating for a long time over the US presidential system. But it wouldn't have done - we were too trained in English democracy to sit down under a dictatorship which is what the American system really is.

Eamon De Valera

#29. Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.

P. J. O'Rourke

#30. Not democracy caused the downfall of Athens, as the European glorifiers of princes and lickspittle schoolmasters would have us believe, but slavery ostracizing the labor of the free citizen. The

Friedrich Engels

#31. Let us in education dream of an aristocracy of achievement arising out of a democracy of opportunity

Thomas Jefferson

#32. Despite what the pundits want us to think, contested primaries aren't civil war, they are democracy at work, and that's beautiful.

Sarah Palin

#33. democracy without real patriotism moves toward the destruction of the ordered liberty bequeathed to us by the founders.

Eric Metaxas

#34. Fundamentalist Christianity is not just a threat to lesbians and gays, but to all Americans who cherish democracy and the rights and protections guaranteed us by the U.S. constitution.

Mel White

#35. The corporatist-economic model of society appears to be governing us. Economists, often in the pay of transnationals, are deciding, for us, what democracy is, and will be.

B.W. Powe

#36. We recall our terrible past so that we can deal with it, to forgive where forgiveness is necessary, without forgetting; to ensure that never again will such inhumanity tear us apart; and to move ourselves to eradicate a legacy that lurks dangerously as a threat to our democracy.

Nelson Mandela

#37. I can't think of anything that would do more toward putting us back on the road to liberty and personal responsibility than for the average American, and for the news media, to come to the understanding that we are not a democracy, nor were we supposed to be.

Neal Boortz

#38. Either we are all free, or we fail; democracy must belong to all of us.

Dennis Chavez

#39. For us to become a nation, everyone - including Arabs, Druze, ultra-Orthodox and new immigrants - must feel that they belong. Their success is extremely important to us. If they succeed, they will come to understand the advantages of democracy and freedom.

Stef Wertheimer

#40. I say us - obviously I don't vote as I believe democracy is a pointless spectacle where we choose between two indistinguishable political parties, neither of whom represent the people but the interest of powerful business elites that run the world.

Russell Brand

#41. Our enemy sees us clearly. They will not start a war. They're worried about one thing: If democracy develops here, if we succeed, we will win

Bill Vaughan

#42. Our ancestors wholeheartedly sacrificed their lives to fight against tyranny, and we are allowing that very same tyranny to exist! Let us open our eyes!

Yanan Melo

#43. It is an incredibly hopeful experience watching communities come together and actually reassemble democracy. The democracy's been taken away from us. But they're reinventing democracy out there in rural Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, in Pittsburgh.

Josh Fox

#44. Those of us who lived under communism for most of our lives were looking toward the Western world because of its values, emphasis on democracy, individual liberties and freedom, and economic prosperity.

Vaclav Klaus

#45. I think the advantage of democracy is that it makes us less dependent on a group of leaders.

Azim Premji

#46. To say that most of us today are purely expansive is only another way of saying that most of us continue to be more concerned with the quantity than with the quality of our democracy.

Irving Babbitt

#47. Democracy may not prove in the long run to be as efficient as other forms of government, but it has one saving grace: it allows us to know and say that it isn't.

Bill Moyers

#48. Rather than caving in to protests, let us know who is in charge by setting boundaries.

Auliq Ice

#49. This "freedom" put a proud people in chains
And turned free men into slaves
"Independence" made us weak
And slaughtered us
In the name of kindness
This is democracy by the whip
And the fear of chains
With a whirlwind at its core

Abdul Salam Zaeef

#50. The struggle between the two worlds [Fascism and Democracy] can permit no compromises. It's either Us or Them!

Benito Mussolini

#51. Democracy means that if this man,you Miss and I will be trapped on an island, we having a majority of votes will decide that you have to sleep with us. That's the Democracy. And with 2/3 votes we can even put that in the constitution.

Janusz Korwin-Mikke

#52. Constitutional democracy, you see, is no romantic notion. It's our defense against ourselves, the one foe who might defeat us.

Bill Moyers

#53. The American principles of democracy expresses the deepest values of the Sharia both structurally and in the government ... Sharia requires us Muslims anywhere to abide by the law of the land.

Feisal Abdul Rauf

#54. Forget the conspiracy theories! God gave us the right to vote, and He gave the United States, and all of its citizens, freedom through democracy.

Monica Johnson

#55. Democracy in Yemen did not stop, instead it is in a continuous development, there is no other way to follow rather than democracy, it is our national way for building up our country, it was not imposed on us by others.

Ali Abdullah Saleh

#56. Democracy or reading, democracy of space: our public library tradition, wherever we live in the wide world, was incredibly hard-won for us by the generations before us and ought to be protected, not just for ourselves but in the name of every generation after us.

Ali Smith

#57. The Emancipation Proclamation ... can remind us in 2013 of all the mistakes we never want to commit again but it can also motivate us to fulfill to an ever greater degree the definitive freedom-sustaining and life-enhancing principles of democracy in living action.

Aberjhani

#58. The Ukrainian people should not be coerced. Make no mistake: the US stands together with the Ukrainians aspiring for democracy.

John F. Kerry

#59. The atomic weapons race and the secrecy surrounding it crushed American democracy. It induced us to conduct government according to lies. It distorted justice. It undermined American morality.

Stewart Udall

#60. Recent action in Syria and Palestine also tell us that the awakening voices of democracy in those regions are occurring, and that those in that region are able to pursue it without being stifled by terrorists that are despotic.

Judd Gregg

#61. In almost every case (where the United States has fought wars) our overwhelming commitment to freedom, democracy and human rights has required us to support those regimes that would deny freedom, democracy and human rights to their own people.

Gore Vidal

#62. The Germans should be the first to sympathize with us [Egyptians]. They know how difficult it is to build a democracy following a dictatorship, and they were the first to be critical of Morsi's anti-democratic policies.

Mohamed ElBaradei

#63. In questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution.

Thomas Jefferson

#64. It seems to me that actual democracy is where all of us get to participate and it's not just a sort of a blunt little dry hump in a ballot box, but an actual penetrative process.

Russell Brand

#65. Those in power must spend a lot of their time laughing at us.

Alice Walker

#66. Democracy for us tends to be has to do with who shouts the loudest!

Peter Hook

#67. We will not fail your expectations of us as a new nation dedicated to peace, democracy, and freedom.

Shigeru Yoshida

#68. We are in a prison of our own minds holding our own chains around us. We create our oligarchs and fight for their right to oppress us.

Heather Marsh

#69. My parents told us how they felt but never imposed their beliefs on us, although I appreciate I got a healthy sense of democracy from them.

Ahmet Zappa

#70. I believe profoundly in the possibilities of democracy, but democracy needs to be emancipated from capitalism. As long as we inhabit a capitalist democracy, a future of racial equality, gender equality, economic equality will elude us.

Angela Davis

#71. Nothing - not even the US Army - more threatens the future of a democratic, pluralistic and (dare we wish, secular) Iraq than the political ascendancy of Islamic fascists like Al Sadr.

Marc Cooper

#72. Trusting each other is the beginning of a certain secular faith, a faith that allows us to live in families and communities and nations. Democracy, above all other forms of government, requires this faith ...

Sue Halpern

#73. The Founders knew that a democracy would lead to some kind of tyranny. The term democracy appears in none of our Founding documents. Their vision for us was a Republic and limited government.

Walter E. Williams

#74. 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

#75. Why live outside the US? Do you want health care or safe food products or democracy or something? They're all overrated. Stay for the excellent cable TV.

Ian McKellen

#76. 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

#77. And in Canada we, you know, it costs us three or $400 million to have an election. You know, it's always been my position that we shouldn't complain about that; that's the price of admission for a living in a great democracy.

Rick Mercer

#78. I have made a film about jazz that tries to look through jazz to see what it tells us about who we are as a people. I think that jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a kind of look into our redemptive future possibilities.

Ken Burns

#79. If voting made any difference they wouldn't let us do it.

Mark Twain

#80. The commands of democracy are as imperative as its privileges and opportunities are wide and generous. Its compulsion is upon us.

Woodrow Wilson

#81. Two hundred years ago, our Founding Fathers gave us a democracy. It was based upon the simple, yet noble, idea that government derives its validity from the consent of the governed.

Paul Tsongas

#82. And if you look at the experience of Turkey, for example, where the modern Islamists are in power and are doing fine - this is very good. Because democracy is not possible in the Muslim world without bringing in the Islamists or part of the Islamists who hate us now into these governments.

Yaroslav Trofimov

#83. A good education helps us make sense of the world and find our way in it

Mike Rose

#84. This anonymous clan of slack-jawed troglodytes has cost us the election, and yet if we were to have them killed, we would be the ones to go to jail. That's democracy for you!

Winston Churchill

#85. Those who would have us again go to war to save democracy might give a little thought to the likelihood that we would come out of any such struggle a despotism ourselves.

George H. Nash

#86. Russian democracy is the power of the Russian people with their own traditions of national self-government, and not the realisation of standards foisted on us from outside.

Vladimir Putin

#87. Law matters, because it keeps us safe, because it protects our most fundamental rights and freedoms, and because it is the foundation of our democracy.

Elena Kagan

#88. 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

#89. Democracy, freedom and liberty do not make us more than what we are; it is our commitment that matters.

M.F. Moonzajer

#90. Let us not be defeated by the tyranny of the world financial markets that threaten peace and democracy everywhere.

Stephane Hessel

#91. Politicians ... turn patriotism into shopkeeping and their own interest - men who care far more for who governs us than for how we are governed.. And what will be the end of such ways? I will tell you. We shall have a Democracy that will be the reign of those who know the least and talk the loudest.

Amelia Barr

#92. He was as absurd as an Athenian demagogue, about whom Dr Faure had that morning been characteristically rude, since they were foreign, given to unnatural vices, and favoured democracy. Being thirteen, it was the unnatural vices that interested us.

Jonathan Grimwood

#93. Find the enemy that wants to end this experiment (in American democracy) and kill every one of them until they're so sick of the killing that they leave us and our freedoms intact.

James Mattis

#94. We're just trying to figure out what being a good citizen is, what participating in a democracy is, what taking responsibility for being an American citizen in a global context means to us.

Cecily McMillan

#95. Democracy: stored up in heaven; but unhappily has not yet been communicated to us.

Bernard Crick

#96. Jail is just another micro-society. It just happens that here, the problems are far more out in the open, we don't live with the facades of lies that democracy or capitalism creates for us.

Cecily McMillan

#97. The US exports democracy, hence there being very little left for Americans

Dean Cavanagh

#98. We were told that we were attacked on 9/11 because the terrorists hate our freedoms and democracy ... not for the real reason: because the Arab Muslims who attacked us hate our Middle Eastern foreign policy.

Cindy Sheehan

#99. Inflation is bringing us true democracy. For the first time in history, luxuries and necessities are selling at the same price.

Robert Orben

#100. Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.
[The One Un-American Act, Speech to the Author's Guild Council in New York, on receiving the 1951 Lauterbach Award (December 3, 1952)]

William O. Douglas