Quotes About Democracy

Unlike in autocracy, people are more responsible than the leaders in democratic system of governance as leaders reflect their voters' thoughts and actions.

Voting system can be the beginning of democracy, but quality and reliability of the service delivery system shows final face of the democracy.

The institutional requirements of community pose fundamental issues that neither corporate capitalism nor state socialism ever took seriously. The critical point of departure is the question: Can you have Democracy with a big D in any system if you don't have democracy with a small d in the actual experience and everyday community life of ordinary everyday citizens?

We are not "merely" talking about nurturing democratic community practice; we are talking about community practice as the basis of fundamental experiences of critical importance to the nation as a whole and of democracy in general. The answer to the question "Can you have genuine Democracy with a big D in a continental nation if its citizens have little genuine experience of democracy with a small d in their own lives?" is simple: No.

All this was built on the firm foundation of primate bonding patterns. If the pattern broke down at the bottom, it gave a rabble. Loss of scale at the top led to dictators, who always fell in the long run. Democracy emerged and worked because it let people form groups they could actually manage and like. The

The people's right to alter or abolish their form of government was, to the American revolutionaries, supposedly absolute. Yet, strangely, neither the people nor the states may even begin the process of amending the Constitution until Congress permits. That body "whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary," may propose an amendment or amendments and send them to the states for ratification.

I think Russian people are learning that democracy is not an alien thing it's not a western invention.

Accountability is the essence of democracy. If people do not know what their government is doing, they cannot be truly self-governing. The national security state assumes the government secrets are too important to be shared, that only those in the know can see classified information, that only the president has all the facts, that we must simply trust that our rulers of acting in our interest.

If a jerk burns the flag, America is not threatened, democracy is not under siege, freedom is not at risk.

I don't vote for the guy I trust. I vote for the guy who trusts me the most.

a reminder of the nineteenth-century dream of democratic socialism—a fully democratized society in which the people control the economy and government, no group dominates any other, and every citizen is free, equal, and included.

the greatest democratic socialist achievements occur through organizations that begin with the everyday praxis of unions and social movements; dismantle structures of racial, gender, sex, class, and imperial domination; welcome religious allies; renew the struggles for freedom, equality, and cooperative community; and care for the planet's ecological health.

Christian socialists were not even democrats, although they learned to say that socialism had to be democratic. They said socialism was a modern name for the unifying and cooperative divine order that already exists.

I believe that the best candidate for an essential "something" in democratic socialism is the ethical passion for social justice and radical democratic community. This ethical impulse retains the original socialist idea in multiple forms, playing out in struggles for freedom, equality, recognition, and democratic commonwealth, conceiving democracy in terms of the character of relationships in a society, not mere voting rights.

The Civil War, therefore, presented three issues: (1) however flawed the circumstances, human freedom was at stake; (2) the territorial and political integrity of the United States was at stake; and (3) the survival of the democratic process—republican government of, by, and for the people—was at stake.

however, part of what it means for a democratic polity to accord equal respect and concern to all its members, is to accord to each person an equal opportunity (via communication) to shape the moral, political, and cultural environment in which they live, something that can happen only by embracing a wide, almost untrammelled right to freedom of speech and communication.

Court ended up deciding who won the election. Can you imagine that shit happening in the US? Judges deciding who gets to be president?

Israel is the only truly democratic, secular country in the Middle East, right in the middle of all of them.

Advertising is of the very essence of democracy. An election goes on every minute of the business day across the counters of hundreds of thousands of stores and shops where the customers state their preferences and determine which manufacturer and which product shall be the leader today, and which shall lead tomorrow.

Advertising is the very essence of democracy.

Democracies are not lucky. They do not attract civic-minded leaders by chance. Rather, they attract survival-oriented leaders who understand that, given their dependence on many essentials, they can only come to and stay in power if they figure out the right basket of public goods to provide.

After all, our experience tends to confirm that on one end of the political spectrum we have autocrats and tyrants—horrible, selfish thugs who occasionally stray into psychopathology. On the other end, we have democrats—elected representatives, presidents, and prime ministers who are the benevolent guardians of freedom. Leaders from these two worlds, we assure ourselves, must be worlds apart! It's a convenient fiction, but a fiction nonetheless.

Nobody was ready for it, and nobody could quite understand it now that it was happening. But somehow it was being determined that democracy henceforth, perhaps for some centuries to come, would operate through a new instrument. Sovereignty of the states was dying, North as well as South, and going with it was the ancient belief that the government which governs least is the government which governs best.

The conflict now on the eve of decision in the United States is neither more nor less than one of the manifold phases of the struggle between aristocracy and democracy