Top 59 We Need Democracy Quotes
#1. We need democracy and meritocracy, not mockracy and hypocrisy.
TheKeyAuthor
#2. Functional societies need algorithms which reward us for being of service to those who need it most. Instead we have algorithms which reward us for being of service to those who need it least
Heather Marsh
#3. The history of America is to expand civil liberties in a responsible and civil manner. We need to remember that our wonderful Democracy with its freedoms has been working.
James McGreevey
#4. But the disposition to disagree, to reject and to dissent - however irritating it may be when taken to extremes - is the very lifeblood of an open society. We need people who make a virtue of opposing mainstream opinion. A democracy of permanent consensus will not long remain a democracy.
Tony Judt
#5. Thank God we in Iran have neither the desire nor the need to suffer from democracy.
Mohammed Reza Pahlavi
#6. We need not fear any isms if our democracy is achieving the ends for which it was established ...
Eleanor Roosevelt
#7. How do we get democracy at the international level? That's our problem. and it's essentially the same problem people faced in the 18th Century when they tried to get democracy nationally. Now we need it internationally.
Susan George
#8. We, in Africa, have no more need of being 'converted' to socialism than we have of being 'taught' democracy. Both are rooted in our past
in the traditional society which produced us.
Julius Nyerere
#9. I believe our country has to do whatever we can do to protect ourselves-we're king of the hill. We need to protect democracy and the lives of those who live in the free world.
Rick Yune
#10. We need a revolution in development thinking and practice. Foreign aid, debt relief, family planning, democracy, education, and free markets have not succeeded.
William Easterly
#11. We need the value and the beauty of democracy, and the beauty of pluralism is there's a free exchange of ideas. Nobody is right all the time. I'm not right all the time. I don't agree with anybody all the time, and I don't even agree with myself all the time.
Rick Warren
#12. We need to remind our core supporters that we have not forgotten their concern with the way our democracy is being replaced by European bureaucracy in so many areas.
John Redwood
#13. The need to help spread democracy and the ability to do that will be much greater if we break this addiction to oil, which gives the oil princes and sultans the power in the Mideast.
Jay Inslee
#14. 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
#15. We have shown that Islam can rule the world perfectly for 14 centuries, and during this time of Muslim power we did not borrow ideas like democracy from others, so why do we need to learn democracy from them now?
Abu Bakar Bashir
#16. Man's inclination to justice makes democracy possible; but man's capacity for injustice makes it necessary.' The optimism we need to prevent ourselves from destroying our own democratic freedoms and, indeed, our own human habitat must be based on reasoned pessimism.
Bernard Crick
#17. But at the same time, I think we recognize we can't impose democracy from without, particularly American-style democracy. We need to work with those elements in the region that are moving towards a reformed process and there are a number of them.
Frank Carlucci
#18. We need a very progressive and strong agenda to bring people into the political process because I worry very much about the future of the American democracy where so many people are giving up.
Bernie Sanders
#19. We're learning lessons from Africa. And the lesson that we need to learn is, how do we straighten our backs up in the face of these oligarchs and plutocrats who are trying to snatch the best of our democracy away?
Cornel West
#20. What we need in politics today is not more democracy but less.
Fareed Zakaria
#21. All countries in my part of the world, we want democracy to prevail. I told the people, 'If you want American policies to stop, we need to take action.' We need to make the U.S. understand that its meddling is inappropriate.
Hassan Rouhani
#22. We need now to build a culture of geniune nonviolence and real democracy.
Mairead Corrigan
#23. I think we need to just be very clear about what we're trying to do in Afghanistan. Frankly, we're not trying to create the perfect democracy. We're never going to create some ideal society. We are simply there for our own national security.
David Cameron
#24. We need to give the Iraqis a chance to build their own future. It should be in their hands. It must be in their hands. That is what democracy is all about. We can teach it, we can explain it, but they must want it enough to make it work for them.
Barbara Boxer
#25. What free-market economists are not telling us is that the politics they want to get rid of are none other than those of democracy itself. When they say we need to insulate economic policies from politics, they are in effect advocating the castration of democracy.
Ha-Joon Chang
#26. Terrorism seems to be the ugly twin of democracy. We need to learn to live with it because we are vulnerable to it.
Jonathan Powell
#27. It's hard to believe that in the greatest democracy in the world, we need legislation to prevent the government from writing and paying for the news.
John F. Kerry
#29. If you took the profit out of war, there would be no war. What the hell do you think war is? You think we go to another country to bring democracy? We go there 'cause there's oil, resources or something we need.
Jacque Fresco
#30. We need to get beyond the politics of the moment, the deficit of the hour, the military count of the day, the numbers that rarely shape events. Our long-term interests must be in people and in the values of democracy and individual liberty.
Bill Bradley
#31. I think it is important that you have people from all different vanguards, from all different walks of society and different viewpoints to be focused on the struggle for equality and democracy. We need as many champions for the cause and as many events as possible to help keep this in focus.
Lupe Fiasco
#32. Democracy is fine in politics. It should stay there, and we need more of it. But its political virture is no reason to practice it in the garden.
Allen Lacy
#33. So I think that if we want to have a Congress, if we want to have government that looks like America, if we want to have government that is truly a representative Democracy, then we need to clearly address how we get our campaign laws out of the way of Democracy.
Carol Moseley Braun
#34. In order to build basic democracy here we'll need lives of two generations - at least forty years.
Aleksandr Lebed
#36. We need a government which, yes, guarantees basic standards in public services, but which also steps in to protect people's wellbeing as they take part in our consumer democracy - particularly online.
David Blunkett
#37. 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
#38. There's a real danger when people get distracted by peripheral issues. They get distracted by democracy building. They get distracted about military conflicts. We need to focus on defeating jihadism.
Ted Cruz
#39. To tackle the underlying roots of violence and conflict, we need a massive international effort to reduce poverty and injustice, and to promote development, democracy and human rights.
Clare Short
#40. The values and voices of democracy are silent. Either we have lost touch with those values or, no better, believe they need not or cannot be taught.
Elizabeth Coleman
#41. One of the things we're going to have to discuss and debate is how are we striking this balance between the need to keep the American people safe and our concerns about privacy. Because there are some trade-offs involved. I welcome this debate, and I think it's healthy for our democracy.
Barack Obama
#42. We need religion as a guide. We need it because we are imperfect. Our government needs the church, because only those humble enough to admit they are sinners can bring to democracy the tolerance it requires in order to survive.
Jeff Miller
#43. We need to return to the cosmopolitanism of Alexandria of yore, and marry that with the tolerance and democracy of Europe today
Ismail Serageldin
#44. To win the cause we all believe in, the spread of true democracy all over the world, we need to win by example, not just with speeches but by example; not just with military might but by gaining the respect of the world.
Barbara Boxer
#45. Where we find young democracies, we need to help them. Where we find the enemy, we need to fight them. And that's exactly the Bush policy.
George W. Bush
#47. What we need, we are told every day, is more and better leadership. But what this demand involves is a closer and closer approximation to fascism. The fascists alone have evolved an efficient form of leadership: efficient leadership is fascism.
Herbert Read
#48. Young people need to re-engage with politics. The life of democracy depends on it. We've left it to the stuff shirts, and obviously they haven't been minding the store.
Emilio Estevez
#49. What we need in Africa is balanced development. Economic success cannot be a replacement for human rights or participation or democracy ... it doesn't work.
Mo Ibrahim
#50. And in a democracy, when we say we're mad at what's going on, what we need to be saying is we're mad at ourselves.
Mike Lowry
#51. In a democracy, dynasty politics is wrong. We need to free the state and nation from it.
Narendra Modi
#52. But I think we need to remember that democracy everywhere is by its nature incomplete, a work in progress.
Daisaku Ikeda
#53. In order to solve the climate crisis, we need to solve the democracy crisis.
Al Gore
#54. Speak up! We live in a democracy. We all need to make sure our voices are heard and our opinions are known.
Bill Lipinski
#55. We need to stay in Iraq until the job is done. The President understands this and I'm glad that he is getting more countries to participate. We must change the chant of millions of young Muslims from 'Jihad Against the World' to 'Freedom and Democracy.'
George Voinovich
#56. The Iraqi prime minister is an anti-Semite. We don't need to spend $200 and $300 and $500 billion dollars bringing democracy to Iraq to turn it over to people who believe that Israel doesn't have a right to defend itself and who refuse to condemn Hezbollah.
Howard Dean
#57. We can't have democracy if we're having to protect you and our users from the government over stuff we've never had a conversation about. We need to know what the parameters are, what kind of surveillance the government is going to do, and how and why.
Larry Page
#58. Democracy and markets are both fundamental building blocks for a decent society. But they clash at a fundamental level. We need to balance them.
Ha-Joon Chang
#59. I think we need more young people; we need to elect young people to government. We need to give them a chance, in the media, in politics, in democracy.
Mikhail Gorbachev
