Quotes About Democracy

As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

Life in freedom is not easy, and democracy is not perfect.

[Hamas] thought that if you go to elections you become a democrat for the rest of your life. They think that democracy is limited to one day in four years.

Democracy is not just a question of having a vote. It consists of strengthening each citizen's possibility and capacity to participate in the deliberations involved in life in society.

Although our interests as citizens vary, each one is an artery to the heart that pumps life through the body politic, and each is important to the health of democracy.

When the United States aligns with dictatorships and totalitarian regimes, it compromises the basic democratic principles of its foundation - namely, life, liberty and justice for all.

Governance should be designed as an equalizer. Democrats are more inclined towards working families and those who are struggling for a better life.

Voting is the foundational act that breathes life into the principle of the consent of the governed.

With us it is not a question of Bolshevism or democracy, but of life or death. A decision in favor of a Soviet could not be opposed by the Young Turks.

Applause, mingled with boos and hisses, is about all that the average voter is able or willing to contribute to public life.

Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better or equal hope in the world?

The struggle for democracy and human rights in Burma is a struggle for life and dignity. It is a struggle that encompasses our political, social and economic aspirations.

Terrorism takes us back to ages we thought were long gone if we allow it a free hand to corrupt democratic societies and destroy the basic rules of international life.

More socialism means more democracy, openness and collectivism in everyday life.

If you care for the quality of life in our American democracy, then you have to be for censorship.

We grant no dukedoms to the few, We hold like rights and shall; Equal on Sunday in the pew, On Monday in the mall. For what avail the plough or sail, Or land, or life, if freedom fail?

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

The great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right," as Martin Luther King Jr. once said. The nation is often wrong. But so long as protest is possible, it can always be righted.

Is progress the progress of Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan's 1678 allegory—the journey of a Christian from sin to salvation? Is progress the extension of suffrage, the spread of democracy? Or is progress invention, the invention of new machines?

Another debate merged politics and technology. Could the nation's new democratic traditions survive in the

A corrupt monarchy is a tyranny, a corrupt aristocracy an oligarchy, and a corrupt polity a democracy.

During the Second World War, he founded a war communications research project at the Library of Congress and recommended that the United States preserve democracy from authoritarianism by way of systematic, government-run mass manipulation.

They said, some men are too ignorant, and vicious, to share in government. Possibly so, said we; and, by your system, you would always keep them ignorant, and vicious. We proposed to give all a chance; and we expected the weak to grow stronger, the ignorant, wiser; and all better, and happier together. We made the experiment; and the fruit is before us. —Abraham Lincoln, "Fragments on Government," 1854

political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people.