Quotes About Democracy

PUTIN: "No civilized state can live without a legislative institution. A great deal depends on the Duma. We expect efficient, systematic work." ALEXANDER

Most meetings of democrats end with the incantation, 'Let's complain to Europe.' Europe, unfortunately, is tired of hearing how wicked Putin is. It would prefer to be fooled and to hear how good he is.

Una elección es cosa muy seria, o al menos debería serlo, y cada uno debería votar según su propia conciencia y dejar que el vecino haga lo mismo.

Democracy itself has always been loud and raucous, but when its rules are followed, it eventually creates consensus. The modern debate does not. Instead, it inspires in some people the desire to forcibly silence the rest.

We have long known that in closed societies, the arrival of democracy, with its clashing voices and differing opinions, can be "complex and frightening," as Stenner puts it, for people unaccustomed to public dissent.

Plato feared the "false and braggart words" of the demagogue, and suspected democracy might be nothing more than a staging point on the road to tyranny.

His books commingled democratically, united under the all-inclusive flag of Literature. Some were vertical, some horizontal, and some actually placed behind others. Mine were balkanized by nationality and subject matter.

It's just free speech, that's all we've got. We can say whatever we like, then the government goes and does exactly what it pleases. You call that democracy? It's like we're on a ship, headed someplace terrible, and somebody else is steering and the passengers can't jump off.

Thomas Paine, one of the principal architects of American democracy, wrote a formal denunciation of civilization in a tract called Agrarian Justice: "Whether… civilization has most promoted or most injured the general happiness of man is a question that may be strongly contested," he wrote in 1795. "[Both] the most affluent and the most miserable of the human race are to be found in the countries that are called civilized.

Being surrounded by educated people makes democracy stronger, and it benefits our entire economy.

Democracy, Ganapathi, is perhaps the most arrogant of all forms of government, because only democrats presume to represent an entire people: monarchs and oligarchs have no such pretensions. But democracies that turn authoritarian go a step beyond arrogance; they claim to represent a people subjugating themselves. India was now the laboratory of this strange political experiment. Our people would be the first in the world to vote on their own subjugation.

we cannot blame the British for saddling us with this system, though it is their 'Mother of Parliaments' our forefathers sought to emulate. First of all, the British had no intention of imparting democracy to Indians; second, Indians freely chose the parliamentary system themselves in a Constituent Assembly.

It is a bit rich for the Brits to suppress, exploit, imprison, torture and maim a people for 200 years and then celebrate the fact that they are democratic at the end of it. We weren't given democracy, we had to snatch it from your hands

An early attempt to give expression to a modern demos with access to political life occurred in the so-called Putney debates during the English civil wars

The American political system was not born a democracy, but born with a bias against democracy. It was constructed by those who were either skeptical about democracy or hostile to it. Democratic advance proved to be slow, uphill, forever incomplete.

The crucial importance of the debates was to expose the tensions between political democracy and economic power, between demotic claims on behalf of political equality and an elite defending the principle that political inequality was the natural, even logical reflection of economic inequality: between a claim that economic status should not determine political inclusion and a claim that economic status should dictate political status.

A would-be demos is drawn to democracy not because ordinary people expect to rule, but because, in theory, democracy legitimates the expression of widely felt and usually deep-seated grievances, the possibility that those who have only numbers can use them to offset the power of wealth, formal education, and managerial experience.

Freedom and democracy, far from posing a threat to "free enterprise," become its instrument and its justification. And rather than serving as the means for furthering the political project of democratization, the state helps to inter it. vi

In America republicanism had to find a place for democracy, eventually even endow it with sovereignty—if only in the abstract—while contriving obstacles to popular power that simultaneously advantaged the Few (e.g., a property qualification for voting) and defined governing in ways that corresponded to the abilities of a new class of merchants, bankers, lawyers, and manufacturers.

The two constitutions—one for expansion, the other for containment—form the two sides of inverted totalitarianism.

Thus, early on, while the people were declared "sovereign," they were precluded from governing.

In the new model the presidency bears little resemblance to the original conception of a national leader and chief executive; it owes even less to the later ideal of the president as "the tribune of the people.

In the end these efforts at postponing the issue of slavery failed. The Civil War put in doubt the capability of free politics to keep up with an expanded scale. The proof was in the failure of postwar Reconstruction: despite military occupation democracy and racial equality failed to take hold in the South.

The citizen is irrelevant. He or she is nothing more than a spectator, allowed to vote and then forgotten once the carnival of elections ends and corporations and their lobbyists get back to the business of ruling.