Quotes About Democracy

Socialists like Helen Keller did not think suffrage was enough. Blind and deaf, Keller fought for change with her spirit and her pen. In 1911 she wrote, "Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? Ã¢â'¬Â¦ We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee." Black

From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country . . . something rotten at the root. The situation required not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society—cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian.

They teach us that the supreme act of citizenship is to choose among savior, by going into a voting booth every four years to choose between two white and well-off Anglo-Saxon males of inoffensive personality and orthodox opinions.

Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy. Certainly this was the experience of African-Americans in this country for two hundred years.

The problem of democracy in the post-Revolutionary society was not, however, the Constitutional limitations on voting. It lay deeper, beyond the Constitution, in the division of society into rich and poor. For, if some people had great wealth and great influence; if they had the land, the money, the newspapers, the church, the educational system -how could voting, however broad, cut into such power?

Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee….

If God had intended us to vote, he would have given us candidates

They teach us that the supreme act of citizenship is to choose among saviors, by going into a voting booth every four years to choose between two white and well-off Anglo-Saxon males of inoffensive personality and orthodox opinions.

Helen Keller, writing in 1911 to a suffragist in England: Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee….

The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage & whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy—then go back to the office & sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece.

The real power in America is held by a fast-emerging new Oligarchy of pimps and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness or even trees, except maybe the ones in their own yards, and they don't mind admitting it. They worship money and power and death. Their ideal solution to all the nation's problems would be another 100 Year War.

How many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote FOR something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?

All we have to do is get out and vote, while it's still legal, and we will wash those crooked warmongers out of the White House.

And how many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils? I

What a man! He certainly seems to have the run of this country. Just shows how one can push a democracy around, what with habeas corpus and human rights and all the rest. Glad we haven't got him on our hands in England.

Just shows how one can push a democracy around, what with habeas corpus and human rights and all the rest.

Here's the wrong part: we don't live in a capitalistic society. We work in a capitalist system. We live in a democratic society. And just to make sure, I checked what the Preamble to the Constitution had to say about capitalism, as I seemed to remember it being more of a statement of basic human rights than an economic manifesto. Here is what it says about capitalism: nothing.

The constitutionally protected free speech that entitles every American to express their opinion has devolved into the notion that all opinions carry equal weight, simply because they are deeply held, and passionately expressed. And not just by some morbidly obese high school dropout proudly holding a misspelled sign, but by our elected officials.

But the problem isn't just a few frighteningly dumb politicians. The problem is they represent a frighteningly dumb electorate. The reason Louis Gohmert is a United States Congressman is that 180,000 Gohmers and Gohmettes in Texas' First District pulled the lever to send his bald-headed goober ass to D.C. Mr. Shitkicker goes to Washington. Apparently, it takes a village full of idiots to elect a village idiot. Sadly

The Roman Empire collapsed due to war, overexpansion and rampant corruption. The British Empire dissolved due to cultural arrogance and imperialistic hubris. Sadly, as we devolve from Democracy to Idiocracy, America may become the first world power to crumble under the weight of its own stupidity.

No emergency was ever dealt with effectively by democratic process.

The litmus test of any democracy is the level of tolerance it is willing to extend towards the minorities living in it. In this respect, Israel falls far short of being a true democracy.

The geographer Oren Yiftachel from Ben-Gurion University, depicted Israel as an ethnocracy, a regime governing a mixed ethnic state with a legal and formal preference for one ethnic group over all the others. Others went further, labeling Israel an apartheid state or a settler colonial state. In short, whatever description these critical scholars offered, democracy was not among them.

It's important to address young people in the reopening of New Orleans. In rebuilding, let's revisit the potential of American democracy and American glory.