Democracies Have Quotations

Bad officials are the ones elected by good citizens who do not vote.

We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.

The ballot is stronger than the bullet.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!

Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.

Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.

Education is a human right with immense power to transform. On its foundation rest the cornerstones of freedom, democracy and sustainable human development.

To declare the Cold War over, and declare democracy has won out over totalitarianism, is a measure of arrogance and wrong-headedness.

Democracy needs support, and the best support for democracy comes from other democracies.

Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy.

With the end of the cold war, all the 'isms' of the 20th century - Fascism, Nazism, Communism and the evil of apartheid-ism - have failed. Except one. Only democracy has shown itself true the help of all mankind.

Is America truly a democracy? Has America ever been a democracy with the institution of slavery?

The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.

The word democracy has no meaning. Duty has gone. Only rights remain.

Democracy has always been in crisis: democracy is all about practicing the art of bearable dissatisfaction. In democratic societies, people often complain about their leaders and their institutions. The gap between the ideal democracy and the existing one cannot be bridged.

Democracy is necessary to peace and to undermining the forces of terrorism.

It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny.

Acts of anti-Semitism in countries throughout the world, including some of the world's strongest democracies, have increased significantly in frequency and scope over the last several years.

The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.

Democracy has many enemies, and the terrorist is only one of them.

There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship.

The idea of democracy has been stripped of it moral imperatives and come to denote hollowness and hypocrisy.

It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.

The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.

Education and democracy have the same goal: the fullest possible development of human capabilities.

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.

We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.

Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.

Let the people think they govern and they will be governed.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.

Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.

Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.

The dream of democracy has long been enshrined in the hearts of the Egyptian people. It only needed awakening.

One could always do more, faster and cleverer, but democracy has its own rhythm.

In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme.

Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.

You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued - they may be essential to survival.

The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians.

Here is the crisis of the times as I see it: We talk about problems, issues, policies, but we don't talk about what democracy means what it bestows on us the revolutionary idea that it isn't just about the means of governance but the means of dignifying people so they become fully free to claim their moral and political agency.

A well-functioning democracy has a culture of free speech, not simply legal protection of free speech. It encourages independence of mind. It imparts a willingness to challenge prevailing opinion through both words and deeds. Equally important, it encourages a certain set of attitudes in listeners, one that gives a respectful hearing to those who do not embrace the conventional wisdom. In a culture of free speech, the attitude of listeners is no less important than that of speakers.

That's what American democracy has come down to at these town hall meetings: old people and gun nuts, which is a terrible combination. I heard somebody yell 'AK-47!' and a lady yelled, 'Bingo!'

A spurious democracy has influenced both our research methods (I am sometimes tempted to define "validity" as part of the context of an experiment demanding so little in the way of esoteric gift that any number can play at it, provided they have taken a certain number of courses) and our research subjects (it would be deemed snobbish to investigate only the best people).

Democracy needs support and the best support for democracy comes from other democracies. Democratic nations should come together in an association designed to help each other and promote what is a universal value - democracy.

Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what you think it is you want to hear.

American democracy has been hacked.

There's no doubt that in the last two to three decades, American democracy has been hacked. It was based on the regular harvesting of the wisdom of crowds, but now big sources of special interest money are able to prevent the passage of almost any meaningful reform that's aimed at the public interest.

It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.

Dictatorships are one-way streets. Democracy boasts two-way traffic.

Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.

I don’t think that India is much celebrated for its democracy. Democracy has been a very neglected commodity at home and abroad.

Taiwan's democracy has grown very fast and we enjoy a certain degree of freedom, as other developed democracies like the United States.

No democracy has ever long survived the failure of its adherents to be ready to die for it. My own conviction is this, the people must either go on or go under.

Nor is the people's judgment always true: the most may err as grossly as the few.

Our democracy has been around far longer than European democracy.

Democracies have to be careful that they do not become so process-driven.

Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe because in the long run stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. ... The global wave of democracy has barely reached the Arab states. For too long, many people in that region have been victims and subjects. They deserve to be active citizens.

We in the United States are very often - since we are a democracy and we have national interests, we've often made the mistake that a democracy has to adopt America's interests, and that is a contradiction because a democracy basically is people deciding what their interests are.

Advocating democracy has, by other people, often been taken as a form of imperialism, and not without some justification. So the important thing in a democracy is that it doesn't necessarily have to agree with what America's interests are, and it doesn't necessarily have to be serving American interests.

Democracy, by its very nature, can't be imposed on people. Democracy has to be the people deciding for themselves.

As long as the differences and diversities of mankind exist, democracy must allow for compromise, for accommodation, and for the recognition of differences.

Democracy has many definitions, but what's in it for me is not an element of any of them.

In the strict sense of the term, a true democracy has never existed, and never will exist.

Majorities can be wrong, majorities can overrule rights of minorities. If majorities ruled, we could still have slavery. 80% of the population once enslaved 20% of the population. While run by majority rule that is ok. That is very flawed notion of what democracy is. Democracy has to take into account several things - proportionate requirements of people, not just needs of the majority, but also needs of the minority. Majority, especially in societies where the media manipulates public opinion, can be totally wrong and evil. People have to act according to conscience and not by majority vote.

The greatest task of democracy, its ritual and feast - is choice.

But now well democracy has shown us that what is evil are the grosses têtes, the big heads, all big heads are greedy for money and power, they are ambitious that is the reason they are big heads and so they are at the head of the government and the result is misery for the people. They talk about cutting off the heads of the grosses têtes but now we know that there will be other grosses têtes and the will be all the same.

Democracy has now become corrupted by the nature of the funders.

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

It would perhaps be as well if things were to remain quiet for a few years yet, so that all this 1848 democracy has time to rot away.

If Voting Changed Anything They'd Abolish It

The leading student of business propaganda, Australian social scientist Alex Carey, argues persuasively that “the 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.

Democracy has proved only that the best way to gain power over people is to assure the people that they are ruling themselves. Once they believe that, they make wonderfully submissive slaves.

Although Christianity has never been the guarantee of a democratic state anywhere in the world, no democracy has ever thrived successfully for any period of time outside of Christian influence.

On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy has given the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had.

In a democracy, the individual enjoys not only the ultimate power but carries the ultimate responsibility.

Everybody's for democracy in principle. It's only in practice that the thing gives rise to stiff objections.

The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority.

A total work of art is only possible in the context of the whole of society. Everyone will be a necessary co- creator of a social architecture, and, so long as anyone cannot participate, the ideal form of democracy has not beenreached.Whether peopleare artists, assemblers of machines or nurses, it is a matter of participating in the whole.

Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death.

The ultimate authority ... resides in the people alone.

Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.

It may be concluded that a pure democracy . . . can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction.

No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

Efforts to bring about democracy have hit a wall and are going backwards.

The goal of education is to enable individuals to continue their education.

The aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education ... (and) the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth. Now this idea cannot be applied to all the members of a society except where intercourse of man with man is mutual, and except where there is adequate provision for the reconstruction of social habits and institutions by means of wide stimulation arising from equitably distributed interests. And this means a democratic society.

Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.

It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority.

Liberalism and Western-style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today, these two concepts have failed. Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems... Whether we like it or not, the world is gravitating towards faith in the Almighty and justice and the will of God will prevail over all things.

Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.

When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It's a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it.

In nation after nation, democracy has taken the place of autocracy.