Western Democracy Quotes

#1. 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

#2. I don't know whether it's age or maturity, but I certainly find myself committed more and more to the looser forms of Western democracy at any price.

John Le Carre

#3. Over the course of my life, I have made many transitions - most of them taking me further away from my Somali roots and steadily toward the enlightened mentality of Western democracy.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

#4. Scandals are the fertilizer of Western democracy.

Dario Fo

#5. 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

#6. The Western democracy of today is the forerunner of Marxism which without it would not be thinkable. It provides this world plague with the culture in which its germs can spread.

Adolf Hitler

#7. Violence is hidden within democratic structures because they are not radically democratic - Western democracy is merely a domestic convenience of consumerism.

Edward Bond

#8. The best way to demonstrate the values of a western democracy is you put Osama bin Laden on trial; you challenge what he says.

Ken Livingstone

#9. In brief, Western democracy, as other political models, is not exportable to all regions of the world.

Omar Bongo

#10. Margaret Thatcher's government redistributed money from rich to poor. And that's the nature of a modern western democracy.

George Osborne

#11. The present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis in journalism.

Walter Lippmann

#12. 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

#13. The financial system in its current condition poses an existential threat to Western democracy far exceeding any terrorist threat.

John Lanchester

#14. What's happened recently in Pakistan, India and Kuwait only goes to show that it's futile to imitate Western democracy. They've ended up exactly where they started.

Mohammed Reza Pahlavi

#15. ISIS has brought down a Russian airliner. ISIS has now attacked a western democracy in - in France. And we do have a role in this. Not solely ours, but we must work collaboratively with other nations.

Martin O'Malley

#16. I like to think I have the guts to stand up anonymously in a western democracy and call for things no-one else believes in - like peace and justice and freedom.

Banksy

#17. Japan is not a Western democracy. The Japanese have kept their traditions, culture and heritage, but they have joined the community of free nations.

Natan Sharansky

#18. A Western-style democracy in Afghanistan is a dream. I don't see that as a reality anytime soon. But I think some form of representative political process is not that far-fetched.

Khaled Hosseini

#19. Welcome, my dear, to the Western world, land of democracy, freedom, and bigotry.

J. Nozipo Maraire

#20. We have to be realistic about what we can achieve in Afghanistan. The notion that the United States can build a Western-style democracy there is a myth

Barbara Boxer

#21. The U.S.-led western alliance, while acting as an advocate of democracy, rule of law and human rights, is acting from the opposite position, rejecting the democratic principle of the sovereign right of states enshrined in the U.N. Charter and trying to decide for others what is good and what is bad.

Sergei Lavrov

#22. The perception of the West as mostly a "knight of democracy" has been replaced with the disappointed belief that pragmatism, often cynical and selfish, lies at the core of Western policies. For many Russians it was a grave disillusion, a crushing of ideals.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#23. our confidence is not in the solidity of Western culture or the basic goodness of modern democracy. Our confidence is in Jesus and him alone.

N. T. Wright

#24. Perhaps the best known, and certainly the most vaunted, "discovery" of modern public opinion research is the indifference and ignorance of a majority of the electorate in western democracies.

Moses Finley

#25. I think clearly the United States, as well as other western nations, should stand by their commitments to human rights and democracy and should try to influence other countries to move in that direction.

Samuel P. Huntington

#26. Western-style multi-party democracy is possible but not suitable for Africa.

George Ayittey

#27. Morocco has a lot to do in terms of democracy. The daily practice of democracy evolves in time. Trying to apply a Western democratic system to a country of the Maghreb, the Middle East, or the Gulf would be a mistake. We are not Germany, Sweden or Spain.

Mohammed VI Of Morocco

#28. The western mindset erroneously equates a political system of multi-party democracy with high-quality institutions ... the two are not synonymous.

Dambisa Moyo

#29. Despite what many Americans think, most Soviets do not yearn for capitalism or Western-style democracy.

Dan Rather

#30. It's true that the war in Iraq opened a distance in relations between part of Europe and the U.S. government, but our basic ties are stronger than that. We share democracy, free markets and a commitment to Western security. We differ on how to guarantee that security.

Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero

#31. I think Russian people are learning that democracy is not an alien thing; it's not a western invention.

Garry Kasparov

#32. Western enthusiasm for democracy stops when those opposed to its policies are elected to office.

Tariq Ali

#33. Corporation: a miniature totalitarian state governed by a hierarchy of unelected officials who take a dim view of individualism, free speech, equality and eggheads. The backbone of all Western democracies.

Rick Bayan

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

Jean Baudrillard

#35. If the great Western experiment fails and we end up living in totalitarian war-on-terrorism states, one day someone's going to say, 'Well democracy doesn't work because they had to give it up'.

Martin Firrell

#36. 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

#37. Many do not understand how precarious Western civilization is and what a joy it is. From it, we get real democracy. From it, we get the sort of intellectual tolerance that allows me to propound something that may be completely alien to you.

John Rhys-Davies

#38. But the Western countries that link their partnership with the poorest countries with respect for democracy also have to consider that they have obligations towards these countries.

Omar Bongo

#39. The years between 1800 and 1825 were distinguished, so far as our domestic development was concerned, by the growth of the Western pioneer Democracy in power and self-consciousness.

Herbert Croly

#40. 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

#41. The Western world, the free world, loses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we've seen for a couple of hundred years in this grand experiment that we call democracy.

Tommy Franks

#42. According to this view, democracy is a product of western culture, and it cannot be applied to the Middle East which has a different cultural, religious, sociological and historical background.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan

#43. We should not be surprised that democracy is imperfect even in Western countries.

Richard Holbrooke

#44. President Bush said it's now time for a change in Iraq and he wants them to have a Western-style democracy like ours. So right now in Iraq, the economy is collapsing, businessmen are corrupt, and Hussein wants his son to take over as president. Sounds like mission accomplished.

Jay Leno