Quotes About Democracy

If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: 'Thou shalt not ration justice.'

If we are to keep democracy, there must be a commandment: Thou shalt not ration justice.

All government is a mess. Democracy is always messy. It's meant to be messy because smooth, thoughtful, precise, effective government leads to dictatorship. Don't get me wrong, dictatorship is fine - as long as I'm the dictator. But if you're not the dictator, not so good.

Access to legitimate information and thoughtful analysis is the lifeblood of a democracy, the basis of which people make decisions about who they vote for and what they believe in. And if you're only getting half the story, that certainly doesn't lead to an informed citizenry.

Vote Smart has sent out thirty thousand questionnaires to every candidate running for office.

It is precisely democracy which is destroying the American political structure, American law, and the American economy.

The equality that we are all entitled to, as citizens of this democracy, can't be avoided by some religious dogma of a President who's is supposed to believe in the notion of separation of church and state. And he frankly doesn't.

What is surprising, even deeply disturbing, is the way that many individuals who consider themselves democratic, even-handed, rational, and free of prejudice, hold on tenaciously to a standard language ideology which attempts to justify restriction of individuality and rejection of the Other

Vote. Even if they are all hopelessly inadequate, pick the least terrible one and vote. My mother fought hard to get you that vote.

Generally speaking, the historical experience has been that movements away from democracy taken in the name of emergency conditions is not reversed when those conditions change (when internal and external threats to revolution subside).

Democracy is like a raft: It won't sink, but you will always have your feet wet.

Tocqueville presciently claimed that the strength of the American government was to a large extent the result of its democratic incapacity to run the nation and the economy as coherently and effectively as a monarchical or autocratic government might run it.

The tension between enabling and constraining democracy is therefore the heart of democratic constitutionalism.

Besides, the conflict is not really between royalty and democracy. It is between both and plutocracy, which, having destroyed the royal power by frank force under democratic pretexts, has bought and swallowed democracy.

Politics is the preoccupation of the quarter-educated," George Gissing wrote near the end of the nineteenth century. To that aphorism we may add, near the end of the twentieth century, "Democracy is the preoccupation of the half-aware." What our age desperately requires is not more mediocrity, but more elevation of spirit, awareness of the eternal source of truth. That failing, order and freedom and justice fall into ruin.

The modern mind has fallen into the heresy of democracy—that is, the ruinous error vox populi vox dei, that an abstract People are divine, and that truth issues from the ballot-box.

America will be the first country to become fascist democratically—a process that has begun.

the new conspiracists return to two targets again and again; we focus on them for the same reason conspiracists themselves do—because they are foundations of democracy: first, political parties, partisans, and the norm of legitimate opposition; and second, knowledge-producing institutions like the free press, the university, and expert communities within the government.

For liberalism is a delicate thing. It encompasses so much -- constitutional government, democratic elections, freedom of worship, civil rights, free trade -- that we think of it as timeless and universal. But liberalism came into being in a real place and time, like a flame it has wavered in various eras, and it can be snuffed out.

Just because a majority of the people vote in favor of something doesn't make it morally right, it just means a majority of the people could be corrupt.

Patriotic societies seem to think that the way to educate school children in a democracy is to stage bigger and better flag-saluting.

As long as you around here wearing the white men's name bragging about this so called democracy, you will always be looked down up, by the rest of the world.

When we open our eyes today and look around America, we see America not through the eyes of someone who has enjoyed the fruits of Americanism. We see America through the eyes of someone who has been the victim of Americanism. We don't see any American dream. We've experienced only the American nightmare. We haven't benefited from America's democracy. We've only suffered from America's hypocrisy.

How can the white American government figure on selling "democracy" and "brotherhood" to non-white peoples—if they read and hear every day what's going on right here in America, and see the better-than-a-thousand-words photographs of the American white man denying "democracy" and "brotherhood" even to America's native-born non-whites?