Quotes About Democracy

We have advanced far enough to say that democracy is a way of life. We have yet to realize that it is a way of personal life and one which provides a moral standard for personal conduct.

Democracy, like life, is hard to learn and doesn't have a teacher.

For I firmly believe that Jewish life, indeed any communal life, can only be organized according to democratic principles.

They are voting whether to keep a governor two years or four. I think a good, honest governor should get four years, and the others life.

I have never voted in my life.

I note that [Benazir] Bhutto demonstrates her own deep commitment to democracy by giving herself the title chairperson for life of the Pakistan Peoples Party.

I think we need a life-loving Palestine living by a Jewish democratic Israel.

Lyndon Johnson believed the poor deserved a better life than the economy was providing them. He thought private power and greed had to be checked by a vibrant democracy.

I'd like to think that in a generation or two we'll have politicians whose life experience reflects that of the people who are voting for them.

It is the life of democracy to favor equality.

You see few people here in America who really care very much about living a Christian life in a democratic world.

The principles of a free constitution are irrevocably lost, when the legislative power is nominated by the executive.

Corruption, the most infallible symptom of constitutional liberty.

But science is not a democracy. Science is a brutal arena where ideas are picked apart, attacked, and tested to see if they hold up. Those that do hold up live to fight another day. Those that don't are dragged off and discarded. To survive, a theory must be supported by vibrant, meaningful, replicable research.

If you don't like the President, it costs you 90 bucks to fly to Washington to picket. If you don't like the Governor, it costs you 60 bucks to fly to Albany to picket. If you don't like me, 90 cents.

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.

The public is not cognizant of the real value of education, and does not realize that education as a social force is not receiving the kind of attention it has the right to expect in a democracy.

It is the purpose of this book to explain the structure of the mechanism which controls the public mind, and to tell how it is manipulated by the special pleader who seeks to create public acceptance for a particular idea or commodity. It will attempt at the same time to find the due place in the modern democratic scheme for this new propaganda and to suggest its gradually evolving code of ethics and practice.

The great Allied campaign to celebrate (or sell) Democracy, etc., was a venture so successful, and, it seemed, so noble, that it suddenly legitimized such propagandists, who, once the war had ended, went right to work massaging or exciting various publics on behalf of entities like General Motors, Procter & Gamble, John D. Rockefeller, General Electric.

The great political problem in our modern democracy is how to induce our leaders to lead.

Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought.

Just as the West's support for the Afghan jihad against the Soviets in the 1980s laid the ground for the rise of Islamist terrorism, so America's Faustian post-9/11 pacts with autocratic regimes helped sow the seeds for the world's current democratic recession.

We cannot simultaneously pursue democracy, national determination and economic globalisation.

If the democratically backed will of the world's largest trading bloc can be undone by a group of unelected trade judges, imagine the odds for anyone else.