Quotes About Democracy

There's not democracy in the workplace. I mean, through most of our daily lives, the idea of democracy is fairly nonexistent. And I think things work better when the people who have to work with whatever it is we're working with have a say in how it's working.

Democratic socialism means that we must reform a political system that is corrupt, that we must create an economy that works for all, not just the very wealthy.

We know what works. Freedom Works. We know what's right. Freedom is right.

Our Constitution works; our great republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here, the people rule.

No party has a monopoly on wisdom. No democracy works without compromise. But when Governor Romney and his allies in Congress tell us we can somehow lower our deficit by spending trillions more on new tax breaks for the wealthy - well, you do the math. I refuse to go along with that. And as long as I'm President, I never will.

From my time at the CIA to my time in the House, I've dedicated my career to protecting our democracy and ensuring it works for all of us.

Democracies domesticate religious groups to become political players. That's how it works.

We deserve a multiracial democracy that works for all of us.

Democracy no longer means what it was meant to. It has been taken back into the workshop. Each of its institutions has been hollowed out, and it has been returned to us as a vehicle for the free market, of the corporations. For the corporations, by the corporations.

Voting is the expression of our commitment to ourselves, one another, this country and this world.

The world will not accept dictatorship or domination.

America's support for human rights and democracy is our noblest export to the world.

The world is governed by institutions that are not democratic - the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO.

A free and democratic society is not the norm. When you look to the history books, world history was not based on great democratic societies but on imperialism, absolute rule, kings, queens, monarchs, dictators.

The bipolar world of the Cold War is history. The new world order, however, is not the One World dreamed of by Wilsonian idealists. It is a Balkanizing world where race, tribe, culture and creed matter most, and democracy is seen not as an end in itself but as a means to an end - the accretion of power by one's own kind to achieve one's own dreams.

Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness.

There is always, of course, a limit in a democracy as to what is politically possible, so you have to respect that limit. But in my experience, governments tend to be too timid.

People born in Puerto Rico are U.S. citizens - except for the teeny, tiny, mind-boggling fact that if you live in Puerto Rico, you are not allowed to cast a vote in the election for president. That tiny fact starts to get bigger when you realize that electing our own leaders is the whole reason that we have a country in the first place.

The House Rules Committee is perhaps the free world's outstanding bureaucratic abomination - a tiny, airless closet deep in the labyrinth of the Capitol where some of the very meanest people on earth spend their days cleaning democracy like a fish.

When you put a tiny and despised minority up for a popular vote, the minority usually loses.

Our nation needs protection against complete dominance of Parliament by one party, which could allow a tiny number of people to control everything.

The people I spoke to who were worried they would be killed for talking to me are now all ministers in the government. This is a major, major breakthrough. You have democracy actually working, the return of the rule of law, in an area of the world which was really tipping into the night.

I'm tired of this discussion of capitalism and socialism; we live in the 21st century, we need an economic system that has democracy as its underpinnings and an ethical code.

What about the majority? I'm so tired of protecting the rights of the minority. What about the rest of the country?