Quotes About Democracy

He believed in constant conversation between the president and lawmakers, for Jefferson thought that "if the members are to know nothing but what is important enough to be put into a public message Ã¢â'¬Â¦ it becomes a government of chance and not of design."24

William L. Shirer, who had covered Nazi Germany, wrote on returning home. "I had seen these poisons grow into ugly witch hunting and worse in the totalitarian lands abroad, but I was not prepared to find them taking root in our own splendid democracy.

The perfect should not be the enemy of the good...compromise is the oxygen of democracy.

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's capacity for justice makes democracy possible," the theologian and thinker Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1944, "but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary." We try; we fail; but we must try again, and again, and again, for only in trial is progress possible.

If a member of the Executive or Legislature does wrong, the day is never far distant when the people will remove him." Perhaps, Jefferson thought, outrage over the Burr verdict could be channeled into a constitutional amendment making judges more accountable to the public.

In whose delusional mind is democracy made better by letting wealthier people control more of it?

Campaigns and elections are the process in which democracy separates the willing from the able, and goes with the willing.

It is perhaps a sign of the strength of our republic that so few people feel the need to participate. That must be the reason.

Crisis is routinely identified as a core mechanism of fascism because it short-circuits debate and democratic deliberation. Hence all fascistic movements commit considerable energy to prolonging a heightened state of emergency. Across the West, this was the most glorious boon of World War I.

Capitalism is unnatural. Democracy is unnatural. Human rights are unnatural. The world we live in today is unnatural, and we stumble into it more or less by accident. The natural state of mankind is grinding poverty punctuated by horrific violence terminating with an early death. It was like this for a very very long time.

Crisis is routinely identified as a core mechanism of fascism because it short-circuits debate and democratic deliberation. Hence all fascistic movements commit considerable energy to prolonging a heightened state of emergency.

Local politicians of color said children and tomorrow. They said digital and democracy and history.

Above all, we cannot and should not try to distance ourselves from any of these inquisitions by reassuring ourselves that no abuse of "moral justice" could occur in the American democracy.

A caste society," wrote U.S. Commissioner of Education Francis Keppel 25 years ago, "violates the style of American democracy.… The nation in effect does not have a truly public school system in a large part of its communities; it has permitted what is in effect a private school system to develop under public auspices.… Equality of educational opportunity throughout the nation continues today for many to be more a myth than a reality.

Those who believe that liberal democracy and the free market can be defended by the force of law and regulation alone, without an internalised sense of duty and morality, are tragically mistaken.

He then desired to know, "What arts were practised in electing those whom I called commoners: whether a stranger, with a strong purse, might not influence the vulgar voters to choose him before their own landlord, or the most considerable gentleman in the neighbourhood?

El envejecimiento (igual que la muerte) es una de las pocas características democráticas y ecuánimes de nuestra condición humana; algo que nos unifica y define a todos más allá de nuestras diversidades y de la realidad de un mundo tan cambiante

I do not write for a select minority, which means nothing to me, nor for that adulated platonic entity known as 'The Masses'. Both abstractions, so dear to the demagogue, I disbelieve in. I write for myself and for my friends, and I write to ease the passing of time.

As a matter of practical necessity, socialist democracy may eventually turn out to be more of a sham than capitalist democracy ever was. In any case, that democracy will not mean increased personal freedom.

All men are capable of reason. That is the fundamental principle of democracy.

The democratic idea', he had pointed out, 'was not that legislative bodies shd. represent the momentary idiocy of the multitude.

the democratic idea' would not necessarily lead to the idea of 'the great protagonist' either; and further, that 'the great protagonists' in the 1930s would be, not a Jefferson or an Adams, but Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler.

the principles of Jeffersonian democracy, principles which he still steadfastly defended— The world, the flesh, the devils in hell are Against any man who now in the North American Union shall dare to join the standard of Almighty God to put down the African slave trade…