Quotes About Democracy

Speaking as a Democrat, all my life battling for what I conceived to be Democracy, and what I conceived to be right, I am yet an American above Democracy.

Democracy is alive, and like any other living thing it either flourishes and grows or withers and dies. There is no in-between. It is freedom and life or dictatorship and death.

Voting is like alchemy - taking an abstract value and breathing life into it.

We will not let terrorists change our way of life; we will not live in fear; and we will not undermine the civil liberties that characterize our Democracy.

My life had been defined by the apartheid years. Now we were going into an era of democracy... and I believed that I didn't have really a function as an artist, as a useful artist, in that anymore.

What troubles me is not that movie stars run for office, but that they find it easy to get elected. It should be difficult. It should be difficult for millionaires, too.

The leaders of many countries condemn feudalism and monarchies and boast of adopting democracy or communism. But those same leaders, whose subjects revere them and whose misdeeds are kept secret, will hold office until their last breath, or until a handpicked heir takes over. Little has changed from the old feudal systems.

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

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

The Sinclairs are athletic, tall, and handsome. We are old-money Democrats. Our smiles are wide, our chins square, and our tennis serves aggressive

Two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three.

the system which is in control in Argentina and most of the world is nothing less that the best democracy which money can buy, allied with drug trafficking and organized crime. The sad conclusion, then, is that the worst which this "democracy" has in store for us is corrupt government; the best it has to offer is government by millionaires.

Ever since that day, success in politics has meant that people who aspired to public office had to give the illusion of democracy while delivering the reality of oligarchic rule.

Had he lived some centuries ago, in the brightly coloured civilizations of the past, he would have had a definite status, his rank and his income would have corresponded. But in his day the angel of Democracy had arisen, enshadowing the classes with leathern wings, and proclaiming, "All men are equal--all men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas...

We may still contrive to raise three cheers for democracy, although at present she only deserves two.

All the big talk of Democracy and Human Rights seemed as spurious as the glib guarantees with which some manufacturers underwrite their products in the confident hope that they will never be challenged. The Briton at home takes no responsibility for the protestations and promises made in his name by British officials overseas.

At a time when 2500 American soldiers have given their lives for the cause of bringing democracy to Iraq, it is sad and frustrating to watch the Republican establishment disgrace the exercise of democracy in our own House of Representatives.

Legislators represent people, not trees or acres.

Legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests. As long as ours is a representative form of government, and our legislatures are those instruments of government elected directly by and directly representative of the people, the right to elect legislators in a free and unimpaired fashion is a bedrock of our political system.

Ben de counting began and it became clear that ErdoÄŸan would not win, the Higher Electoral Board changed the election law from 1 hour to the next, following pressure from the later himself, and egregious fake votes for ErdoÄŸan were deemed valid.

They could also have given a long lecture on the new type of right-wing crusade that reduces democracy to the ballot box, and how this subjugates political choices to fears of hunger, unemployment and, ultimately, social insecurity. And when democracy shrinks to being no more than a voting process, then the destiny of a country becomes inseparable from its single ruler's political existence.

Americans now believe that having equal rights in a political system also means that each person's opinion about anything must be accepted as equal to anyone else's.

John Dewey, the American philosopher, understood this: The very idea of democracy, the meaning of democracy, must be continually explored afresh; it has to be constantly discovered and rediscovered, remade and reorganized; while the political and economic and social institutions in which it is embodied have to be remade and reorganized to meet the changes that are going on in the development of new needs on the part of human beings and new resources for satisfying these needs.

Baldwin and King, no matter the temperamental distance between them, moved together as they struggled to make real the promise of American democracy. King was the preacher, Baldwin the poet—and, of course, the two are interchangeable.