Quotes About Democracy

Civilizations are illusions, but these illusions are pervasive, dangerous, and powerful. They contribute to globalization's brutality. They allow us, for example, to say that we believe in global free markets and, in the same breath, to discount as impossible the global free movement of labor; to claim that we believe in democracy and human equality, and yet to stymie the creation of global institutions based on one-person-one-vote and equality before the law.

Confusing the academy with the world is a dumb and dangerous thing to do. In the real world, money talks, bullshit walks. In a state legislature, clout meets clout, money meets money, interest fights interest, and only the strong prevail. Which is why ordinary folks keep losing. Should this strike you as an unduly Darwinian view of what is, after all, a liberal, Western democracy, I can only commend you to Reality School. Go and study how the laws are made and then tell me if I lie.

Carl Parker observes, if you took all the fools out of the Lege, it wouldn't be a representative body anymore.

If one could enumerate all the essentials which a sound educational program consider, I would say that the techniques of communication, which make for literacy, are our first obligation, and more so in a cemocracy than in any other kind of society, because it depends on a literate electorate.

When we lack the ability to talk back to entities that are culturally and politically powerful, the very foundations of free speech and democratic society are called into question.

a new form of democratic eco-socialism, with the humility to learn from Indigenous teachings about the duties to future generations and the interconnection of all life, appears to be humanity's best shot at collective survival.

Democracy isn't the work of the market's invisible hand; it is the work of real hands.

The human beings at the helm of the new nation [USA], whatever their limitations [slave owners, anti-democracy], were truly revolutionary. The theory of liberty born in that era, the seed of the idea, was perfect. More important, the idea itself carried within it the moral power to correct the contradictions in its execution that were obvious from the very birth of the new nation.

When you are living under emergency measures, by definition you no longer have a functioning democracy. I say these days, "the coup has already taken place." What is stunning is how few people even now recognize the degree to which the country was living under dictatorial measures.

What I saw all around me that looked so lovely was no longer built on a structure belonging to or owned by the people. As they would learn in 2020–22, the puppeteer's hand could sweep the entire action away in a moment. The edifice of the beautiful drama of "European democracy" and human rights could come crashing down at any time. In fact, having for so long lived under EU governance left continental Europeans especially easy prey for the COVID tyrants.

In 2020–22, we entered a time in which the post–World War II organizing principle of human affairs, the democratic nation-state, was being intentionally diluted in power and undermined in the interest of constructing a replacement meta-structure of unaccountable loosely aligned global nonprofits, Big Tech corporations, the WEF, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

In 1973, the year of his death, Garrett railed against the constitutional right to vote, complaining how "the vote of the feeble-minded person counts as much as that of an intelligent man.

We need to understand how democratic peoples sometimes espouse what William ?James called in his own time American "stupidity and injustice," arising from what he called an ethical "blindness with which we all are afflicted in regard to the feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves."21

We honor the Greeks because in their art, literature, philosophy and civic history we discern the early stirrings of our own ideals—rationalism, humanism, democracy—which first took firm root in Athenian soil.

By itself, partyism is not the most serious threat to democratic self-government. But if it decreases government's ability to solve serious problems, then it has concrete and potentially catastrophic consequences for people's lives. I

Our history is imperfect, but it has laid the groundwork for the greatest experiment in democracy the world has ever known: America.

I'm used to being cut out of the conference meetings, but now they are cutting us out even before the bill's are written or either the House or Senate Acts.

And they understand that to be an effective member of a democracy, you have to accept responsibility.

The government must give men and women without power a real say over what happens to them, and the means of engaging in a participative, invigorated and living democracy.

I want to live in a Britain where there is a shared belief in freedom and democracy, and equal rights for men and women.

Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like 'knight.'

The Russians are clearly a big adversary, and they demonstrated it by trying to mess around in our election.

You actually need to go somewhere and vote and make sure you don't have corrupt police. But there's a faith in technology as the savior, as the new Messiah, and that's definitely not the case.

Genuine democracy is frequently messy, not stage-managed.