Quotes About Democracy

When words lose their meaning and their capacity to bind those who use them, neither democracy nor the rule of law can long survive.

Yes, our country has its shortcomings, but there's no moral equivalency between democracy and totalitarianism…There's no moral equivalency between propaganda and the truth.

People are always teaching us democracy but the people who teach us democracy don't want to learn it themselves.

In our so-called democracy we are accustomed to give the majority what they want rather than educate them to understand what is best for them.

The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots.

I'm ready to be insulted as being insufficiently democratic, but I want to be serious ... I am for secret, dark debates.

So in Asia I want to make - I want to succeed to make a model of what success, practicing democracy, and market economy. Then that will give a good influence over Asian countries.

Remember one thing about democracy. We can have anything we want and at the same time, we always end up with exactly what we deserve.

I disagree with what the majority of the American people want.

At Spotify, we really want you to democratically win as a musician. We want you to win because your music is the best music.

Politics is not only about personal choice. That one also needs to take into consideration what the people want because in the end, they are the ones who decide.

From my standpoint, I want to work with homeland security, justice to make sure that U.S. citizens' vote is not diluted.

Whoever wants to reach socialism by any other path than that of political democracy will inevitably arrive at conclusions that are absurd and reactionary both in the economic and the political sense.

No. What would I look like fighting for equality with the white man? I don't want to go down that low. I want the true democracy that'll raise me and that white man up raise America up.

Human rights commissions, as they are evolving, are an attack on our fundamental freedoms and the basic existence of a democratic society... It is in fact totalitarianism. I find this is very scary stuff.

Expansion presented the United States with a dilemma that has confronted many colonial powers. If it allowed democracy to flower in the countries it controlled, those nations would begin acting in accordance with their own interests rather than the interests of the United States, and American influence over them would diminish.

Americans had to choose between permitting them to become democracies or maintaining power over them. It was an easy choice.

Nationalists reflexively rebel against governments they perceive as lackeys of foreign power. In the twentieth century, many of these rebels were men and women inspired by American history, American principles, and the rhetoric of American democracy. They were critical of the United States, however, and wished to reduce or eliminate the power it wielded over their countries. Their defiance made them anathema to American leaders, who crushed them time after time.

Nor would he condemn democracy outright, allowing that it might be appropriate for some countries. Still, he argued that democracy would bring disintegration to Russia, which needed "firm authority.

So the question remains: why should we regard majority rule as morally special? Why should a part of the people – even the larger part – decide for the whole?

American democracy is at risk. The risk comes not from some external threat but from disturbing internal trends: an erosion of the activities and capacities of citizenship. Americans have turned away from politics and the public sphere in large numbers, leaving our civic life impoverished. Citizens participate in public affairs less frequently, with less knowledge and enthusiasm, in fewer venues, and less equally than is healthy for a vibrant democratic polity.

The federal system no longer represents the will of the American people.

At a Trump rally after the election, a reporter spotted a pair of Republicans wearing shirts that read, I'D RATHER BE A RUSSIAN THAN A DEMOCRAT. Centuries before, George Washington, riding out of thriving Philadelphia toward the lush hills of Mount Vernon, recognized what the failure of American democracy would look like. It looks like them.

He was a democrat in practice as well as theory, was opposed to the slave trade, tried to keep it out of the Territories beyond the Ohio river and was in favor of freeing the slaves in Virginia.