Quotes About Democracy

Oh, Rachel, Rachel, Leah said. Let me give you a teeny little lesson in political science. Democracy and dictatorship are political systems; they have to do with who participates in the leadership. Socialism and capitalism are economic systems. It has to do with who owns the wealth of the nations, and who gets to eat. Can you grasp that?

Thomas Jefferson presumed on the basis of colonial experience that farming and democracy are intimately connected. Cultivation of land meets the needs of the farmer, the neighbors, and the community, and and keeps people independent from domineering centralized powers. In Jefferson's time, [George] was the king. In ours, it's multinational corporations.

Cat, this is America, they let anybody vote. Crooks, wigs, even cookies like us. Dogs and cats, probably. Don't take Fido to the polls, he might cancel you out.

To the Congolese (including Anatole himself, he confessed) it seems odd that if one man gets fifty votes and the other gets forty-nine, the first one wins altogether and the second one plumb loses. That means almost half the people will be unhappy, and according to Anatole, in a village that's left halfway unhappy you haven't heard the end of it. There is sure to be trouble somewhere down the line.

Well, why were they dumb enough to vote for Leah anyway, is what I asked Nelson. If they knew it was going to get Tata Kuvudundu so riled up? Nelson said some of them that voted for her were put out with Tata Ndu, and some were put out with Father, so everybody ended up getting what they didn't want, and now had to go along with it. Nobody even cares that much one way or another about Leah, is what Nelson said. Oh, well, I told him. That is what we call Democracy.

One problem with democracy as it plays in our country is that the majority rules so hard; we seem bent on dividing all things into a contest of Win and Lose, and declaring that the Losers are losers. Nearly half of us are routinely asked to disappear while the slim majority works its will. But the playing field is the planet earth, and I for one have no place else to go.

I was just following orders. The people elected me. But who elected the people?

Each of these four coups was launched against a government that was reasonably democratic (with the arguable exception of South Vietnam), and each ultimately led to the installation of a repressive dictatorship.

because he had such an ingrained and perhaps exaggerated faith in democracy, he did nothing to repress it.

kings. Then a different paradigm was developed—government of the people, by the people, and for the people. And a constitutional democracy was born, unleashing tremendous human energy and ingenuity, and creating a standard of living, of freedom and liberty, of influence and hope unequaled

Democracy thrived on a clash of ideas, a tolerance of viewpoints, and robust debate.

Interesting how dictators required shows of greatness as a way to prove they were entitled to power. Democratically elected leaders never have such a need since the people themselves vested them with power, and no one expected perfection. In fact, failure could be another stepping-stone to greatness. Dictators never accept failure. They preferred to have their mistakes forgotten, overshadowed with spectacle.

The people who cast votes decide nothing. The people who count votes decide everything.

Perhaps he could encourage the House to impeach the idiot." She shook her head. "That only amplifies the problem. Everybody loves to scream impeachment. But that's not a tool to undo elections. The people chose Warner Fox. The fact that he may be incompetent is really not at issue. They've already decided they want him to lead them.

Americans believed in openness. Democracy thrived on a clash of ideas, a tolerance of viewpoints, and robust debate.

Democracy was expendable. Money could still be made. China needed capital from the West to fuel its modernization on the mainland.

In a typical election period that includes campaigns for the Presidency, the Senate and the House of Representatives, about one billion dollars is spent per year, which sounds like a lot of money, unless you care to measure it against something seemingly less important than Democratic elections.It is the same amount, for instance, that Americans spend every year on chewing gum.

And as excellent as our cognitive systems are, in the modern world we must know when to discount them and turn our reasoning over to instruments—the tools of logic, probability, and critical thinking that extend our powers of reason beyond what nature gave us. Because in the twenty-first century, when we think by the seat of our pants, every correction can make things worse, and can send our democracy into a graveyard spiral.

Instead of feeling any need to persuade, people who are certain they are correct can impose their beliefs by force. In theocracies and autocracies, authorities censor, imprison, exile or burn those with the wrong opinions. In democracies the force is less brutish, but people still find means to impose a belief rather than argue for it.

Some are products of the misconception that the benefits of democracy come from elections, whereas they depend more on having a government that is constrained in its powers, responsive to its citizens, and attentive to the results of its policies (chapter

democracy should be understood not as the answer to the question "Who should rule?" (namely, "The People"), but as a solution to the problem of how to dismiss bad leadership without bloodshed.

A good rule of thumb is that any country that has the word "democratic" in its official name, like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (a.k.a. North Korea) or the German Democratic Republic (a.k.a. East Germany), isn't one.

Established democracies are relatively safe places, as are established autocracies, but emerging democracies and semi-democracies (also called anocracies) are often plagued by violent crime and vulnerable to civil war, which sometimes shade into each other.

Among Western democracies, the United States leaps out of the homicide statistics. Instead of clustering with kindred peoples like Britain, the Netherlands, and Germany, it hangs out with toughs like Albania and Uruguay, close to the median rate for the entire world.