We Want Democracy Quotes

#1. 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

#2. If we, as individuals, want to keep control of our democracy - rather than have a government paid for by corporate interest checks - then we have to fight back now and make sure our system reflects the belief that people, not corporations, control our democracy.

Michael Bennet

#3. All my years campaigning have given me one clear message: Voting isn't the most we can do, but it is the least. To have a democracy, you have to want one. Still, I realize this fully only by looking back.

Gloria Steinem

#4. We're doing exactly what the Republicans don't want: getting more people involved in our democracy. Giving more Americans a voice in their future.

Jim Messina

#5. We certainly would not want to have the same kind of democracy that they have in Iraq, quite honestly.

Vladimir Putin

#6. The Commission on Presidential Debates must be replaced if we want to have a democracy in this country.

John B. Anderson

#7. I want the Iraqis to understand that we are with them and that they have to make tough decisions, and we'll help them make those tough decisions for this country, for this democracy to survive. And they've made some tough decisions.

George W. Bush

#8. If democracy is a means rather than an end, its limits must be determined in the light of the purpose we want it to serve.

Friedrich August Von Hayek

#9. Russia does not and cannot have any political choice but democracy. I want to say, and even stress, that we share those universal democratic principles taken around the whole world.

Vladimir Putin

#10. Campaign season is the only time of public debate about what we want for the future. It can change consciousness even more than who gets elected. In short, campaigns may be the closest thing we have to democracy itself.

Gloria Steinem

#11. We want to remember that America is at its best when it's struggling to live up to its stated ideals.

Lonnie Bunch

#12. 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

#13. We want the full works of citizenship with no reservations. We will accept nothing less ... This condition of freedom, equality, and democracy is not the gift of gods. It is the task of men, yes, men, brave men, honest men, determined men.

A. Philip Randolph

#14. I think it's important in a democracy such as ours that we have multiple sources to get news and information and utilize the media only if we want to get a different opinion.

Donna Brazile

#15. We want the will of the people, not the votes of the people; and to give a man a vote against his will is to make voting more important than the democracy it declares.

G.K. Chesterton

#16. America operates under the notion of equality before the law. Basic fairness is an article of faith. We may not agree on everything all of the time, but we select our leaders together. And when we don't want them anymore, we get rid of them.

Keith Ellison

#17. The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots.

Elbridge Gerry

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. Democracy is a problem and we don't want to get rid of it.

Frank Gehry

#21. We are not seeking revolution. We just want democracy!

Joshua Wong

#22. We want capitalism and market forces to be the slave of democracy rather than the opposite.

Thomas Piketty

#23. Remember one thing about democracy. We can have anything we want and at the same time, we always end up with exactly what we deserve.

Edward Albee

#24. We want to lead by our values and out interests in ways that, regardless of the trajectory over the next decade, people will know the United States was on the side of democracy, on the side of the rule of law.

Hillary Clinton

#25. Democracy, obviously, is something we don't want to give up, but it does create chaos. It means the guy next door can do what he wants, and it creates a collision of thinking. In cities, that means people build whatever they want.

Frank Gehry

#26. You know, I wish the world well. I want Iraq to have democracy and the Haitians to have democracy. I want the people of Afghanistan to thrive. Lord knows, we spend enough money there to help them. What about people at home? Isn't that our first responsibility?

Barbara Boxer

#27. 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

#28. We want to be, I think, an example for the rest of the Arab world, because there are a lot of people who say that the only democracy you can have in the Middle East is the Muslim Brotherhood.

Abdallah II Of Jordan

#29. In our so-called democracy we are accustomed to give the majority what they want rather than educate them to understand what is best for them.

Carter G. Woodson

#30. Wouldn't it be more of a free country," persisted Francie "if we could ride in them free?" "No." "Why?" "Because that would be Socialism," concluded Johnny triumphantly, "and we don't want that over here." "Why?" "Because we got democracy and that's the best thing there is," clinched Johnny.

Betty Smith

#31. If we don't have an informed electorate we don't have a democracy. So I don't care how people get the information, as long as they get it. I'm just doing it my particular way and I feel lucky I can do it the way I want to do it.

Jim Lehrer

#32. 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

#33. Politics is democracy's way of handling public business. We won't get the type of country in the kind of world we want unless people take part in the public's business.

David R. Brower

#34. I want to see my kids grow up in a world that I grew up in, which was it had imagination and it had hope. And all of a sudden, I see that being dissolved, and I see, as a country, as a people, we are a republic. We are a democracy.

Craig T. Nelson

#35. You want Change, today we'll show you Change!
Here's your democracy, your human rights, eat it, eat eat eat!

NoViolet Bulawayo

#36. Libraries are the mainstays of democracy. The first thing dictators do when taking over a country is close all the libraries, because libraries are full of ideas and differences of opinion, all the things we say we want in a free and open society. So keep 'em, fund 'em, embrace and cherish 'em.

David Baldacci

#37. Our people do not want barren theories from their democracy. Maury Maverick has expressed very quaintly, but clearly, what they really want when he says: 'We Americans want to talk, pray, think as we please and eat regular'.

Robert H. Jackson

#38. What we want to see is the development of human rights and greater democracy, not just because it is our system but because we think that's the best way that economic and political development go hand in hand.

Tony Blair

#39. According to Lenin, socialism and democracy are indivisible ... The essence of perestroika lies in the fact that it unites socialism with democracy and revives the Leninist concept of socialist construction both in theory and in practice. We want more socialism and, therefore, more democracy.

Mikhail Gorbachev

#40. 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

#41. In the EU you have half a billion people who share a common belief in democracy, in rights, in the kind of economic life we want.

Catherine Ashton

#42. Today, when we live in a what is called Western democracy here ... you're not taken seriously all the time. You can write what you want because nobody cares about it. But at that time, they cared very much about what you wrote, so that's an entirely different feeling.

Stefan Heym

#43. Voting isn't the most we can do, but the least. To have a democracy, you have to want one.

Gloria Steinem

#44. I am very worried about this concentration of power, and it's not only because of Erdogan. We have the ballot box, but we don't have the culture of democracy. The government says: You see, we have the majority, we're entitled to do anything we want. But that's not democracy, that's majoritarianism.

Elif Safak