Democracy Quotes - Page 13

Do you know that one of the great problems of our age is that we are governed by people who care more about feelings than they do about thoughts and ideas.
Margaret Thatcher
I passionately love liberty, legality, respect for rights, but not democracy. That is what I find in the depth of my soul.
Alexis de Tocqueville
He didn't ask "Where will you spend eternity?" as religious the-end-is-near picketers did but rather, "With what, in this modern democracy, will you meet the demands of your soul?
Saul Bellow
How, then,' I hear you ask, 'shall I attain my end, whether it be Christian love, socialism, or American democracy?' Your Christian love and your socialism and your American democracy are what you do each day, your manner of thinking each hour, of embracing your life companion and loving your child; they are your attitude of social responsibility towards your work, and your determination not to become like the crushers of life you so hate.
Wilhelm Reich
Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
H.L. Mencken
Citizens who refuse to obey anything but their own conscience can transform countries, it is the basis of any real democracy.
Gloria Steinem
If elections could change anything, they would have already made them forbidden.
Unknown
Money is not as good as power, but power is as good as money.
Amit Kalantri
Power is not pleasure, power is pain.
Amit Kalantri
What the United States call democracy is actually a vertical model of remote governance by oligarchs—economic barons and their political representatives. The result is that citizens in the United States have little control over what the U.S. government does.
S. Brian Willson
When the evidence for and against "democracy being the finest system of government yet invented" is weighed, George W Bush is going to tip the scales very heavily against.
Andre the BFG
Two things form the bedrock of any open society — freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don’t have those things, you don’t have a free cou
Salman Rushdie
. And it especially cannot endure when powerful groups in that society seek at every turn to undermine and destroy its very being. The threats to democracy are not always from enemies abroad. They can come from those within who espouse the language of democracy and use the liberties afforded them by democratic institutions to undermine the substance of democracy. Weimar cautions us to be wary of those people as well. What comes next can be very bad, even worse than imaginable.
Eric D. Weitz
Those who are not true leaders or elders will just affirm people at their own immature level, and of course immature people will love them and elect them for being equally immature. You can fill in the names here with your own political disaster story. But just remember, there is a symbiosis between immature groups and immature leaders, I am afraid, which is why both Plato and Jefferson said democracy was not really the best form of government. It is the safest. A truly wise monarch would probably be the most effective at getting things done.
Richard Rohr
Who is fit to be elected?' asked Napoleon. 'A Caesar, an Alexander only comes along once a century, so that election must be a matter of chance.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
In a democracy, of course, you always get a choice:Do you want to be governed by the red or by the blue? It's entirely up to you.Do you want to be patronized or condescended to by liars or by crooks? You get to choose.Would you prefer your fundamental values to be insulted or ignored by con men or by charlatans?In short, do you want your influence to be zero or nil?And when would you like to be listened to, never or not at all?It's your choice. Do you want some more choice?Take it or leave it. Now there's a real choice.
Pat Condell
Americans need to continue to develop broad-based movements that reject the established political parties and rethink the social formations necessary to bring about a radical democracy. We see this in the Black Lives Matter movement as well as in a range of other movements that are resisting corporate money in politics, the widespread destruction of the environment, nuclear war and the mass incarceration state.
Henry A. Giroux
The only way to ensure democracy functions correctly is to question its governance constantly. Fail to do so and you may awake to find yourself living in a police state.
Stewart Stafford
So how do the people resist unjust authority, which, we all agree, they must and should do and have done in the past? The best solution anyone has come up with is to say that violent revolutions can be avoided (and therefore, violent mobs legitimately suppressed) if 'the people' are understood to have the right to challenge the laws through nonviolent civil disobedience.
David Graeber
The police can use violence to say, expel citizens from a public park because they are enforcing duly constituted laws. Laws gain their legitimacy from the Constitution. The Constitution gains its legitimacy from something called 'the people.' But how did 'the people' actually grant legitimacy to the Constitution? As the American and French revolutions make clear: basically, through acts of illegal violence. So what gives the police the right to use force to suppress the very thing–a popular uprising–that granted them their right to use force to begin with?
David Graeber
the real purpose of socialism is precisely to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development
Albert Einstein
It's not all about building police forces and more prisons. This is in a sense an abdication of what the rule of law is and in the same way that simply running to electoral processes has nothing to do with the true building of democracies. There's allot more to democracies then elections and there's allot more to the rule of law then law enforcement.
George Stamatis
At the federal level, this problem could be greatly alleviated by abolishing the Electoral College system. It's the winner-take-all mathematics from state to state that delivers so much power to a relative handful of voters. It's as if in politics, as in economics, we have a privileged 1 percent. And the money from the financial 1 percent underwrites the microtargeting to secure the votes of the political 1 percent. Without the Electoral College, by contrast, every vote would be worth exactly the same. That would be a step toward democracy.
Cathy O'Neil
Democracy's fatal flaw: There are more dumb people than smart people. Welcome to the new Dark Ages!
Oliver Gaspirtz
The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.
Donald J. Trump
It is not enough for a population or a section of the population to have Christian faith and be docile to the ministers of religion in order to be in a position properly to judge political matters. If this population has no political experience, no taste for seeing clearly for itself nor a tradition of initiative and critical judgment, its position with respect to politics grows more complicated, for nothing is easier for political counterfeiters than to exploit good principles for purposes of deception, and nothing is more disastrous than good principles badly applied. And moreover nothing is easier for human weakness than to merge religion with prejudices of race, family or class, collective hatreds, passions of a clan and political phantoms which compensate for the rigors of individual discipline in a pious but insufficiently purified soul. Politics deal with matters and interests of the world and they depend upon passions natural to man and upon reason. But the point I wish to make here is that without goodness, love and charity, all that is best in us—even divine faith, but passions and reason much more so—turns in our hands to an unhappy use. The point is that right political experience cannot develop in people unless passions and reason are oriented by a solid basis of collective virtues, by faith and honor and thirst for justice. The point is that, without the evangelical instinct and the spiritual potential of a living Christianity, political judgment and political experience are ill protected against the illusions of selfishness and fear; without courage, compassion for mankind and the spirit of sacrifice, the ever-thwarted advance toward an historical ideal of generosity and fraternity is not conceivable.
Jacques Maritain
Hence I think it is that democracies change into aristocracies, and these at length into monarchies,' people at last prefer tyranny to chaos. Equality of power is an unstable condition; men are by nature unequal; and 'he who seeks equality between unequals seeks an absurdity.' Democracy has still to solve the problem of enlisting the best energies of men while giving to all alike the choice of those, among the trained and fit, by whom they wish to be ruled.
Will Durant
On January 17, 1991 and for the 43 days that followed, I watched CNN’s live coverage of SCUD missiles and bombs fall over Baghdad like rain; then the 12 ½ years of unjust sanctions that killed approximately a million Iraqis, half of which were children under the age of five; then an unjust attack in 2003 that opened the borders to terrorists from all over the world and reduced the cradle of civilization to piles of rubble. The gov. asked us to support their plan or else be considered anti-American and undemocratic and they ask of us the same today, 25 years later, even though history proved they were pro-profit not pro-life.
Weam Namou
The great political problem in our modern democracy is how to induce our leaders to lead.
Edward L. Bernays
Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.
George Orwell
Chaos brings movement to whatever is stagnant in your life. Stagnation leads to apathy, numbness, illness, suffering, etc. Be grateful for the situations in your life that may seem chaotic in the present moment, and realize that, in the greater scheme of things, chaos is Spirit giving you an opportunity… or possibly pushing you to move, grow, and be in the flow.
Alaric Hutchinson
Denying the popular vote is un-American and anti-democratic.
DaShanne Stokes
Democracy is a continuous, open process of civility.A democracy can never be “done”; updating democracy can never be over.Democracy can be nothing else but a continuous process, because we use it to organize our life, and life is nothing but a continuous process.Democracy can be compared to an operating system or an anti-virus software; if it does not get perpetually updated, it becomes obsolete very fast.Trusting the updates or the “improvements” of democracy to the elected and the owned mass media is like trusting the updates of an anti-virus program to virus creators; it defeats the purpose of updates or improvements.
Haroutioun Bochnakian
Help yourself with the state! It's on democracy!
Ljupka Cvetanova
We must acknowledge and take responsibility for the conflicts we have helped to create, and act to create real change. That, after all, is the true hallmark of democracy--a commitment to justice, honest self-appraisal, and action--even when it means challenging ourselves and the political institutions we hold most dear.
DaShanne Stokes
Our democracy should aspire to be more democratic.
DaShanne Stokes
Silence is the most expensive to buy.
Ljupka Cvetanova
An independent newspaper? It is a newspaper that looks nothing like a newspaper.
Ljupka Cvetanova
Misfortune never comes singly. It's surrounded by bodyguards.
Ljupka Cvetanova
[Voltaire] theoretically prefers a republic, but he knows its flaws: it permits factions which, if they do not bring on civil war, at least destroy national unity; it is suited only to small states protected by geographic situation, and as yet unspoiled and untorn with wealth; in general "men are rarely worthy to govern themselves." Republics are transient at best; they are the first form of society, arising from the union of families; the American Indians lived in tribal republics, and Africa is full of such democracies. but differentiation of economic status puts an end to these egalitarian governments; and differentiation is the inevitable accompaniment of development.
Will Durant
The greatest lesson for democracies to learn is for the majority to give to the minority a full, free opportunity to present their side of the case, and then for the minority, having failed to win a majority to their views, gracefully to submit and to recognize the action as that of the entire organization, and cheerfully to assist in carrying it out until they can secure its repeal.
Henry Martyn Robert
With a [democratic] government anyone in principle can become a member of the ruling class or even the supreme power. The distinction between the rulers and the ruled as well as the class consciousness of the ruled become blurred. The illusion even arises that the distinction no longer exists: that with a public government no one is ruled by anyone, but everyone instead rules himself. Accordingly, public resistance against government power is systematically weakened. While exploitation and expropriation before might have appeared plainly oppressive and evil to the public, they seem much less so, mankind being what it is, once anyone may freely enter the ranks of those who are at the receiving end. Consequently, [exploitation will increase], whether openly in the form of higher taxes or discretely as increased governmental money “creation” (inflation) or legislative regulation.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
I also hold a settling of questions by the referendum to be an unsatisfactory procedure, because there are no simple political questions which can be answered merely by Yes and No. The masses are also more prone even than Parliaments to be led away by heterodox opinions, and to be swayed by vigorous ranting. It is impossible to formulate a wise internal or external policy in a popular assembly.
Theodor Herzl
Because taxpaying is seen as an emblem of civic worthiness, denying the poor the status of taxpayers has the effect of denying their political standing. Classing a large percentage of the populace as a kind of second-class citizenry is genuinely toxic for democratic norms.
Vanessa Williamson
The political parties are there to distract us from our systems of government; instead of focusing on the system, we focus on political parties to vote for.Voting is our only encouraged interaction with our systems of government.The choice between political parties fractures our nations yet further, turns our focus on each other, and away from the mechanisms of our systems of government.
Haroutioun Bochnakian
Currently the best educated and the brightest minds of any nation are not among its elected, but among its public, and in much greater numbers.But even having a great number of the best and the brightest amongst us does not make us capable of installing a working version of direct democracy right away. People who claim that it does, may be there to voluntarily or involuntarily damage the credibility of direct democracy.Direct democracy needs a yet inexistent infrastructure to support the new mechanism that will render the public capable of constituting the experience necessary to domesticate direct democracy, without destabilizing our societies with needless haste, emotions and fractures. One way of doing it may be the constitution of a nation-wide, internet reliant hence fluid, non-political organism parallel but totally hermetic to our representative democracies, with a unique objective: creating the means, platforms and protocols necessary for the public and all the specialists it contains, to communicate horizontally.The public may decide to keep for the moment our representative democracies, but in parallel create an experimental version of direct democracy until we all acquire the necessary perspective and invent new working mechanisms of self-governance. Later the public may decide to have both representative and direct democracies sharing governance for a time, and experience first-hand the advantages and disadvantages of both systems before deciding where to go from there.
Haroutioun Bochnakian
If the Nazis are Socialists simply because they call themselves Socialists, then North Korea really is a Democratic Republic.
Atom Tate
Democracy is an illusion in which we all believe.
Anthony T.Hincks
It is possible that the next economic downturn--or stock market crash--will bring on further developments. During the recession at the end of the 1980s, ex-Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke gathered strong support from disgruntled citizens in Louisiana for his gubernatorial and US Senate races. Voters did not seem to be bothered by his record, which included plenty of statements like: "The Jews have been working against our national interest. . . . I think they should be punished."Bertram Gross and Kevin Phillips had each foreseen part of a process that engendered remarkable tolerance for authoritarian political solutions. Gross correctly identified the kind of authority that the corporate world wanted to exercise over working- and middle-class Americans. Phillips was perceptive about the way ordinary Americans would participate in actually constructing a more harsh and restrictive social milieu. By the 1990s the two strands were coalescing into something we could call "Authoritarian Democracy." Today it is clear that the goals of the corporate rich can be furthered by the enthusiasms of the popular classes, especially in the realms of religion.
Steve Brouwer
Alexis de Tocqueville warned that as the economy and government of America got bigger, citizens could become smaller: less practiced in the forms of everyday power, more dependent on vast distant social machines, more isolated and atomized--and therefore more susceptible to despotism.He warned that if the "habits of the heart" fed by civic clubs and active self-government evaporated, citizens would regress to pure egoism. They would stop thinking about things greater than their immediate circle. Public life would disappear. And that would only accelerate their own disempowerment.This is painfully close to a description of the United States since Trump and Europe since Brexit. And the only way to reverse this vicious cycle of retreat and atrophy is to reverse it: to find a sense of purpose that is greater than the self, and to exercise power with others and for others in democratic life.
Eric Liu
In the transformed world political context of today, it is more essential than ever that the critique of democracy in the name of difference developed by oppositional intellectuals be formulated so carefully that these thoughts cannot be exploited for nationalist, tribalist, and xenophobic purposes. It is imperative that the politics of the 'differend' not be settled beyond and at the margins of democratic politics.
Şeyla Benhabib
Imagine if one should drag an innocent passer-by from the street to the operating room of a nearby hospital and force him at gunpoint to perform a delicate operation. The man would burst into tears. However, if one were to ask him to sound off on problems such as nuclear experiments, Vietnam, the borders of Israel, support for Indonesia, aid to Latin America, or recognition of Red China, in most cases he would start spouting opinions.
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
Rejoicing in his absolute authority, the single egoist will exploit it methodically, whereas a mêlée of egoists will bring about a ruinous disorder and a disastrous cleavage, because the contrariety of the appetites to be satisfied will prevent the satisfaction of any single one. Clearly, then, the effect of the pursuit of private ends under cover of the public good will be worse if there are many with a hand in power than if there is only one.
Bertrand De Jouvenel
Democracy is susceptible to being led astray by having scapegoats paraded in front of the electorate. Get the rich, the greedy, the criminals, the stupid leader and so on ad nauseam.
Frank Herbert
The good thing about democracy is that every vote counts. The problem with democracy is that every vote counts.
Charbel Tadros
In proportion as the mass of citizens who possess political rights increases, and the number of elected ruler’s increases, the actual power is concentrated and becomes the monopoly of a smaller and smaller group of individuals.
Paul Lafargue
From the end of the World War twenty-one years ago, this country, like many others, went through a phase of having large groups of people carried away by some emotion--some alluring, attractive, even speciously inspiring, public presentation of a nostrum, a cure-all. Many Americans lost their heads because several plausible fellows lost theirs in expounding schemes to end barbarity, to give weekly handouts to people, to give everybody a better job--or, more modestly, for example, to put a chicken or two in every pot--all by adoption of some new financial plan or some new social system. And all of them burst like bubbles.Some proponents of nostrums were honest and sincere, others--too many of them--were seekers of personal power; still others saw a chance to get rich on the dimes and quarters of the poorer people in our population. All of them, perhaps unconsciously, were capitalizing on the fact that the democratic form of Government works slowly. There always exists in a democratic society a large group which, quite naturally, champs at the bit over the slowness of democracy; and that is why it is right for us who believe in democracy to keep the democratic processes progressive--in other words, moving forward with the advances in civilization. That is why it is dangerous for democracy to stop moving forward because any period of stagnation increases the numbers of those who demand action and action now.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
A funny thing happened to the First Amendment on its way to the public forum. According to the Supreme Court, money is now speech and corporations are now people. But when real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with the political consequences of this, they’re treated as public nuisances and evicted.
Robert B. Reich
It is the purpose of government to see that not only the legitimate interests of the few are protected but that the welfare and rights of the many are conserved.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
everybody feels the evil, but no one has courage or energy enough to seek the cure
Alexis de Tocqueville

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