Quotes About Democracy

A violência pela violência é não apenas indesejável, além de gerar pânico (e deste modo, a manipulação) também promove a organização militarista (portanto, a hierarquia). Quanto à não-violencia ela implica em uma organização mais aberta e democrática; tende a promover a serenidade e a compaixão e rompe o ciclo miserável do ódio e da vingança.

At daybreak on the first day, thousands of Cambodians are already calmly waiting outside my polling station. They squat on the ground, silent and patient. We didn't expect this at all. We thought they would fail to understand how democracy works. We thought they would be afraid of the Khmer Rouge. We thought they would passively accept their fate. We were wrong.

For the past decade, art historians Hito Steyerl and Boris Groys have written in favor of "weak images," claiming that in the digital age, a weak or cool artifact is more democratic than a strong or hot one.

I like to tell people when the final history is written on Iraq, it will look like just a comma because there is -- my point is, there's a strong will for democracy.

The United States is in sore need today of an aristocracy of intellect and service. Because such an aristocracy does not exist in the popular consciousness, we are bending the knee to the golden calf of money. The form of monarchy and its pomp offer a valuable foil to the worship of money for its own sake. A democracy must provide itself with a foil of its own and none is better or more effective than an aristocracy of intellect and service.

Persecution on racial or religious ground has absolutely no place in a nation given over to liberty and which calls itself a democracy.

Trump-voting

Here, again, as I conceive, gentlemen forget that this government is a republican one, resting exclusively in the intelligence and virtue of the People.

To live under the American Constitution is the greatest political privilege that was ever accorded to the human race.

When a man begins to feel that he is the only one who can lead in this republic, he is guilty of treason to the spirit of our institutions.

It is our theory that the people own the government, not that the government should own the people.

Democracy is not a tearing down; it is a building up. It does not denial of the divine right of kings; it asserts the divine right of all men.

every Rebel guerilla and jayhawker, every man who ran to Canada to avoid the draft, every bounty-jumper, every deserter, every cowardly sneak that ran from danger and disgraced his flag,… every villain, of whatever name or crime, who loves power more than justice, slavery more than freedom, is a Democrat.

Whatever promises offered by dictators in any negotiated settlement, no one should ever forget that the dictators may promise anything to secure submission from their democratic opponents, and then brazenly violate those same agreements.

Further, democratic negotiators, or foreign negotiation specialists accepted to assist in the negotiations, may in a single stroke provide the dictators with the domestic and international legitimacy that they had been previously denied because of their seizure of the state, human rights violations, and brutalities. Without that desperately needed legitimacy, the dictators cannot continue to rule indefinitely.

One study of twenty years of data in the United States concluded that "the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy."4

The fact is America's democracy uses a combination of capitalism (businesses and banks) and socialism (public schools, police, fire fighters and the military) and our most successful times have occurred when government, business and people work together and don't demonize each other.

Immigration is everyone's business: it is one of the most important national issues. The idea that it is too dangerous to be debated is a mockery of democracy. It is too important not to debate.

Democracy is a freak condition in the world's history: civil liberties are not common liberties even today, and most people in the world have never possessed them.

We may be facing a generation of struggle to defend liberal democracy and human rights from authoritarian nationalism. There is a danger of a contraction of world trade and even of a major war. These threats make action more urgent. The Left is better equipped to win this struggle, as long as it understands and avoids the errors of its past.

Democracy is more vindictive than Cabinets. The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.' Penetrating words, and he had no idea just how horribly true they would prove over the next fifty years.

This is why we apply the LCD Principle or Lowest Common Democracy. In short, this is social interaction based not on the best possible good, but on the least possible offense. Without saying so, the parties involved have entered into the following arrangement: What is the least we can all agree on and still get along? Of course, you can see this means no one is pleased.

The East knew and to the present day knows only that One is Free; the Greek and the Roman world, that some are free; the German World knows that All are free. The first political form therefore which we observe in History, is Despotism, the second Democracy and Aristocracy, the third, Monarchy.

The best government rests on the people, and not on the few, on persons and not on property, on the free development of public opinion and not on authority.