Quotes About Democracy

I intend to open this country up to democracy and anyone who is against that I will jail, I will crush."—João Baptista Figueiredo, President of Brazil (1979)

To put it crudely, in cortical democracies citizens reason together; in limbic democracies they feel together.

That so many people can derive so much pleasure from such a revolting spectacle," he said to me when he returned home that night, "almost makes one doubt the very premise on which democracy is based." But he was pleased nevertheless that the masses now thought of him as a good sport, as well as "the Scholar" and "the Greek.

It sounded legitimate when one put it that way – governing through the people: what could be fairer? – but really 'the people' were the mob

Democracy can't work. Mathematicians, peasants, and animals, that's all there is-- so democracy, a theory based on the assumption that mathematicians and peasants are equal, can never work. Wisdom is not additive; its maximum is that of the wisest man in a given group.

Over many decades technological optimists have been sustained by the belief that whatever happened to be created in the sphere of material/instrumental culture would certainly be compatible with freedom, democracy, and social justice. This amounts to a conviction that all technology—whatever its size, shape, or complexion—is inherently liberating. For reasons noted in the previous chapter, that is a very peculiar faith indeed.

the representative committee

King Abdullah has died. A divisive figure in the Middle East. The sad irony is that the USA preached democracy in the face of absolute rule.

For me every ruler is alien that defies public opinion.

Science and democracy are the right and left hands of what I'll refer to as the move from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.

When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, it becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues.

Many of our ideas of democracy, so much of our literature and philosophy and science can be traced back to roots right here in Athens.

In America we can say what we think, and even if we can't think, we can say it anyhow.

It is an axiom of political science in the United States that the sole means of neutralizing the effects of newspapers is to multiply their number.

Town meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people's reach.

Very few of the common people realize that the political and legal systems have been corrupted by decades of corporate lobbying.

All it takes to get elected in twenty-first-century America is a mob of frightened sheep and a wolf with a nice smile.

The process of democracy is one of change. Our laws are not frozen into immutable form, they are constantly in the process of revision in response to the needs of a changing society.

We, in Africa, have no more need of being 'converted' to socialism than we have of being 'taught' democracy. Both are rooted in our past -- in the traditional society which produced us.

Without God, there is no virtue because there is no prompting of the conscience... without God, there is a coarsening of the society; without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure.

While free markets tend to democratize a society, unfettered capitalism leads invariably to corporate control of government.

Let each citizen remember at the moment he is offering his vote...that he is executing one of the most solemn trusts in human society for which he is accountable to God and his country.

The rights of democracy are not reserved for a select group within society, they are the rights of all the people.

Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich -- that is the democracy of capitalist society.