Quotes About Democracy

We have trodden underfoot the principles of Democracy for the sake of the loftier principles of Social Revolution," Trotsky said. "We are against oppression, but we will not yield our power without a ruthless struggle.

To Wilson, however, it would be worth the sacrifice. By entering the war, America was also transforming the conflict from a competition for empire and national interests into a crusade to make the world safe for democracy and to secure mankind's hopes for future peace.

Yet we should remember that the Covenanters were inspired less by their love of democracy than by their hatred of Satan.

Having seen how the democratic sausage was made, Plato was in no mood to sit at the feast.

life."6 In short, a democracy like Athens or a republic like Florence was a cooperative partnership, in which men agree to be the best they can be in both their public and their private lives, instead of (as in Plato's Republic) having those rules imposed from above.

In short, a democracy like Athens or a republic like Florence was a cooperative partnership, in which men agree to be the best they can be in both their public and their private lives, instead of (as in Plato's Republic) having those rules imposed from above. Only under liberty could men realize their true nature as human beings both as free individuals and as part of a greater whole.

For example, Socrates explains that the dissolute freedom of democracies like that of Athens, "which treats all men as equals whether they are equal or not," must lead inevitably to moral corruption, civic disorder, and mob rule.

America, the totem of modern democratic culture, was actually "latently" fascist. The absence of a "genuine" fascist movement in America, like the absence of any "genuine" anti-Semitism, was in fact a sign of how far the corruption had spread. As Herbert Marcuse put it somewhat later, "The fact that we cannot point to an SS or SA here, simply means that they are not necessary in this country."48

It is Cicero who made public speaking one of the essential tools of Western self-government and democracy.

Hobbes puts the blame squarely on Aristotle, who he said led men to connect liberty with democracy and goaded them into "loving tumults" and disorder, believing those were the way to secure liberty when they did just the opposite. Instead, Hobbes argued, nothing was safe unless we obey the sovereign;

Reid once defined common sense as "that degree of judgment which is common to men with whom we can converse and transact business." Where no one was clearly in charge, common sense would have to reign. It was the moral of modern democracy, as the exponents of the Scottish school had conceived it, and as Scots in America, at least, had brought it into being.

Wilson's mission now was not saving Russian democracy; it was defeating Germany, the outlaw nation, and pressing the war forward to the conclusion he desired, a great peace conference at which the sources of all the world's conflicts and wars would finally be resolved.

For Lenin, "self-determination" was a clarion call not for democracy and freedom but for revolt and bloodshed that would rock the capitalist imperialist order down to its foundations.

Democracy makes a stable civic life impossible. As Nietzsche's Zarathustra says, "I turned my back on those who rule when I saw what they call ruling: higgling and haggling for power with the rabble.

The answer to the runaway Presidency is not the messenger-boy Presidency. The American democracy must discover a middle ground between making the President a czar and making him a puppet.

enamoré de la democracia, ¿qué le parece?… Pero es una mujer que paga mal.

confiar a trece millones de indios analfabetos la elección de un presidente es como pedir a una clase de escolares que elijan a su profesor.

Me enamoré de la democracia, ¿qué le parece?… Pero es una mujer que paga mal.

un Estado social y democrático de derecho, una democracia plena y avanzada.

Si fuéramos a reducir la definición de la democracia a la sublime sencillez que le dio Lincoln: «el gobierno del pueblo, por el pueblo y para el pueblo», no hay duda de que pocos regímenes podrían llenar todos los requisitos necesarios para merecer esa calificación.

The struggle for democracy and human rights in Burma is a struggle for life and dignity. It is a struggle that encompasses our political, social and economic aspirations.

Among the basic freedoms to which men aspire that their lives might be full and uncramped, freedom from fear stands out as both a means and an end. A people who would build a nation in which strong, democratic institutions are firmly established as a guarantee against state-induced power must first learn to liberate their own minds from apathy and fear.

Democracy, like liberty, justice and other social and political rights, is not "given", it is earned through courage, resolution and sacrifice.

I think it's time for the Army to understand that power should be enshrined in the people if we are to be a genuine democracy and not in any particular institution or organisation.