Quotes About Democracy

But the people didn't elect buffoons to Washington. Well—hardly ever.

Our society is illuminated by the spiritual insights of the Hebrew prophets. America and Israel have a common love of human freedom, and they have a common faith in a democratic way of life.

We love your adherence to democratic principles and to democratic processes.

Hong Kong is not just a global financial center. It's also a place with a lot of teens and youth who love freedom, democracy, and human rights.

Democracy means that anyone can grow up to be president, and anyone who doesn't grow up can be vice president.

Liberty, freedom and democracy are very fuzzy words, but human rights is very specific.

The internet is also a democracy of fools, where everybody's opinion is aired as though of equal merit: a cyberspace where the lunatic and the malicious weigh in at the same weight as the rational, concerned citizen.

Or, as Jackson would have said: The people, sir-the people will set things right.

So, is there hope for a truly democratic Africa? Long answer: Only if continent-wide improvements in education, human rights and public health are coupled with an aggressive and far-sighted debt-relief program that breaks the cycle of subsistence farming and urban squalor. Short answer: No.

To fret about political, social, or economic inequality in a free society is to fret about the problem of freedom itself, for in the presence of freedom there will always be inequality of some kind.

The American Revolution was a successful revolution precisely because it was grounded in both realism and idealism. Written deep into the structure of our Constitution is a profound comfort with contradiction. It sets faction against faction, pits each branch of government against the other, dilutes the excesses of democracy, and holds the executive accountable to the people. By being so grounded in realism, it can hold the weight of our ideals.

whenever liberalism goes off the tracks and turns into something bad or despotic, it's because real liberals have abandoned the project. The

24/7 has produced an atrophy of the individual patience and deference that are essential to any form of direct democracy: the patience to listen to others, to wait one's turn to speak.

According to Robert Pape, who has created a database of every suicide terrorist attack in the last hundred years, suicide bombing is a nationalist response to military occupation by a culturally alien democratic power.62 It's a response to boots and tanks on the ground—never to bombs dropped from the air. It's a response to contamination of the sacred homeland.

This principle—the need for democracies to protect the rights of minorities—was one of the reasons that the U.S. Constitution's first ten amendments (the Bill of Rights) were added so quickly. (You don't need a Bill of Rights to protect the rights of the majority in a democracy, because the vote already does that.)

I believe it is dangerous for the ethic of divinity to supersede the ethic of autonomy in the governance of a diverse modern democracy. However, I also believe that life in a society that entirely ignored the ethic of divinity would be ugly and unsatisfying.

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.

The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness. —NIELS BOHR

In the midst of the declining governing capacity of the American democratic order, we ought to focus less on 'participation' as the magical solution and more on the real dynamics of how to facilitate the organization of effective political power.

As Lincoln hoped, by using their hearts and their heads, Americans have kept their experiment alive long past the age when most democracies die.

For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.

If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.

If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.

Boris Nicolaïevitch, la démocratie, c'est bien, mais sans élections, c'est plus sûr »