Quotes About Democracy

Democracy is easy; republicanism is hard. Democracy is fueled by passion; republicanism is founded on moderation. Democracy is loud, raucous, disorderly; republicanism is quiet, cool, judicious – and that we still live in its light is the Founders' most wondrous deed.

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

So what can we, in our time, learn from the past, even while we're getting knocked in the head? That the perfect should not be the enemy of the good. That compromise is the oxygen of democracy. And that we learn the most from those who came before not by gazing up at them uncritically or down on them condescendingly but by looking them in the eye and taking their true measure as human beings, not as gods.

If sufficiently developed and organized, public sentiment, as manifested in Congress, can prevail over presidential intransigence. Lincoln

An interest willing to suppress speech was an interest willing to put its own power ahead of democracy.

In these pursuits Lincoln was committed to what Theodore Parker defined as the "American Idea," which was a "composite idea…of three simple ones: 1. Each man is endowed with certain unalienable rights. 2. In respect of these rights all men are equal. 3. A government is to protect each man in the entire and actual enjoyment of all the unalienable rights….The idea demands…a democracy—a government of all, for all, and by all.

Lincoln would come to see democracy as a work in progress, a process in which reason took its chances against prejudice and passion.

In the final analysis, we are one people, one family, one house—not just the house of black and white, but the house of the South, the house of America," Lewis said. "We can move ahead, we can move forward, we can create a multiracial community, a truly democratic society. I think we're on our way there. There may be some setbacks. But we are going to get there. We have to be hopeful. Never give up, never give in, keep moving on.

To blindly and repeatedly assert one's own position, one's own righteousness, and one's own rectitude in the face of widely held opinion to the contrary was not democracy. It was an attempt at autocracy—a bid, as Lincoln said, to "rule or ruin in all events.

Sometimes I am afraid to go to sleep for fear that I will wake up and our democracy will be gone and never return.

From Plato to Kant, the substance of what is known as the Golden Rule—one common to the world's religious and moral traditions—has occupied philosophers across the ages. Lincoln's own sensibility—both moral and political—was founded on this injunction. "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master," he once wrote. "This expresses my idea of democracy.

In a democracy, the pursuit of power for power's sake, devoid of devotion to equal justice and fair play, is tempting but destructive

Passion could fray the bonds of union, divide one from another, and fatally wound the American experiment in democracy that Lincoln defined as "the capability of a people to govern themselves.

Passion could fray the bonds of union, divide one from another, and fatally wound the American experiment in democracy that Lincoln defined as "the capability of a people to govern themselves." He worried about trouble coming from the many as well as the few—or even the one, in the form of a demagogue who might try to profit from lawlessness and distrust.

Man's capacity for self-government is on trial before the world," he said, "and we must conquer or the verdict will be against democratic government and in favor of privilege and despotism everywhere. The conspirators and rebels are attempting the destruction of our democratic government, because democracy…is opposed to privilege and slavery.

It will then have been proved that, among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost.

The colonization proposals underscored a tragic reality. One could—and many white Americans did—oppose slavery while failing to engage the prospective creation of a multiracial democracy.

the people are intelligent, the people are just, and in time these characteristics must have an effect on their Representatives.

Finally, at one p.m. on Tuesday, February 17, 180161, on the thirty-sixth ballot, Jefferson prevailed. R

The form of government which prevails," Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it.

The country has to awaken every now and then to the fact that the people are responsible for the government they get," Truman wrote.

For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king, and there ought to be no other.

In his postpresidential notes, Harry Truman was candid about the tricky nature of democracy. Yes, much of the nation's fate lies in the hands of the president, but the voters have the ultimate authority. "The country has to awaken every now and then to the fact that the people are responsible for the government they get," Truman wrote. "And when they elect a man to the presidency who doesn't take care of the job, they've got nobody to blame but themselves.

Man Ã¢â'¬Â¦ feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs not merely at an election, one day in the year, but every day.