Quotes About Democracies

Munich was the final turning point for Hitler. He had met the leaders of the western democracies and made monkeys of them. He had proved that tactics of deception, threat and histrionics worked at the highest levels of European diplomacy. His will had broken the bonds of reality; everything was possible.

If avarice is the sin of the haves against the have-nots, envy is the sin of the have-nots against the haves. If we want to see what they look like on a big scale, we may say that avarice has been the sin of the Anglo-Saxon democracies, and envy the sin of Germany. Both are cruel—the one with a heavy, complacent, and bloodless cruelty; the other with a violent, calculated, and savage cruelty. But Germany only displays in accentuated form an evil of which we have plenty at home.

We have to realize that science is a double-edged sword. One edge of the sword can cut against poverty, illness, disease and give us more democracies, and democracies never war with other democracies, but the other side of the sword could give us nuclear proliferation, biogerms and even forces of darkness.

I hate war... for the dictatorships it puts in the place of democracies, and for the starvation that stalks after it.

To balance China, the democracies will need new friends - and India with its fast-growing economy, youthful population, and democratic politics seems the obvious candidate.

In this view, capitalism—the system that supports the democracies of the West and has raised the living standards of hundreds of millions of human beings to levels that only royalty enjoyed in the past—is barbarism, while the system that murdered millions and impoverished whole continents is civilization.

In a world of democracies, the most deserving basis of national differences is that the different states of the world should represent a form of moral specialisation within humanity.

As we look back over the sweep of American history, it has been the American Presidency that has best fulfilled the vision of the Founders. It has brought to our Republic a dynamism and effectiveness that other democracies have lacked.

I thought it wasn't worth it, I thought no war is worth all this, this misery and this horror. Perhaps no war is, not even that first desperate war against fascism to which the Spanish people were abandoned by the democracies and by the Soviet Union as well, so that of Spain's 24 million souls, fully half a million died directly, or from hunger and disease, or immediately afterward in Franco's hundred thousand vindictive executions.

cowardly decadent idealistic democracies, forever arguing among themselves and letting their people vote on everything!

Jealousy is a virtue of democracies which preserves them from tyrants.

Georg Bernhard spoke of a kind of 'laziness of the heart' that had taken hold of the democracies. Europe wanted to sleep quietly and rejected anything that could rouse it from its lethargy.

The Western democracies had to fear their own public opinion, and above all the right-wing press, which constantly railed against the 'warmongers' who sought to drag Europe into conflict so as to regain their lost positions.10 Anti-Communism was widespread, and the ban on émigrés' practising any political activity, in the majority of host countries, was not a signal for tolerance.

In the past week it has become clear that the vote on the final healthcare bill will be very close. I take this vote with the utmost seriousness. I am quite aware of the historic fight that has lasted the better part of the last century to bring America in line with other modern democracies in providing single payer health care.

More important still was the introduction of state-sponsored welfare schemes. The industrial democracies, alarmed by socialist strides in organizing labor and gaining seats in parliamentary elections, instituted social legislation in the form of unemployment and health insurance and other benefits that kept the working class from sinking into destitution.

both Russia and China are dictatorships, not democracies. Therefore, losing face for them would be much more catastrophic than it would be for an American president. Politically speaking, they may be unable to give up the fight. And so we, too, might have to fight on, until there is some form of a regime change, or a substantial reduction in Moscow's or Beijing's military capacity

There are all kinds of devices invented for the protection and preservation of countries: defensive barriers, forts, trenches, and the like... But prudent minds have as a natural gift one safeguard which is the common possession of all, and this applies especially to the dealings of democracies. What is this safeguard? Skepticism. This you must preserve. This you must retain. If you can keep this, you need fear no harm.

There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all, but especially to democracies against despots -- suspicion.

In the past week it has become clear that the vote on the final healthcare bill will be very close. I take this vote with the utmost seriousness. I am quite aware of the historic fight that has lasted the better part of the last century to bring America in line with other modern democracies in providing single payer health care.

The contribution of the Western democracies to the awakening of the East has been indirect and certainly unintended. They have kindled an enthusiasm of resentment against the West; and it is this anti-Western fervor which is at present rousing the Orient from its stagnation of centuries.2

war is inherently poisonous, giving rise to all sorts of problematic consequences, and that military power is something that democracies ought to treat gingerly.

I do not believe that the values which the Western democracies consider essential to civilization can survive in a world rent by the international anarchy of nationalism and the economic anarchy of competitive enterprise.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's traditionalist-nationalist rhetoric, which blames secularism, diversity and internationalism for the weakening of Western democracies, gives voice to the grievances that American hate groups have felt for so long.

Flawed as they may be, science and the secular Enlightenment values expressed in Western democracies are our best hope for survival.