Quotes About Democracy

In a traditional democracy, the liberal class functions as a safety valve. It makes piecemeal and incremental reform possible. It offers hope for change and proposes gradual steps toward greater equality. It endows the state and the mechanisms of power with virtue.

as Plato and his pupil Aristotle understood, the building of empire, any empire, extinguishes democracy. Empire requires a centralized bureaucracy. Its complexity mandates a permanent caste of bureaucrats and military leaders who strip the citizenry of power.

Aristotle warned that in a democracy, there always existed the potential for the poor to seize the property of the rich. Democracy, Aristotle wrote, could not coexist with huge levels of inequality. Everyone had to have a stake in society. There were other responses to Aristotle's understanding, including from Athenian tyrants and later James Madison, who urged government to reduce democracy and cripple the political power of the working class.

The attacks by this movement on the rights and beliefs of Muslims, Jews, immigrants, gays, lesbians, women, scholars, scientists, those they dismiss as nominal Christians, and those they brand with the curse of secular humanist, are an attack on all of us, on our values, our freedoms and ultimately our democracy. Tolerance is a virtue, but tolerance coupled with passivity is a vice.

They purport to honor electoral politics, freedom of speech, the right to assembly, and the Constitution. But they so corrupt and manipulate the levers of power internally that democracy is extinguished. The Constitution remains in place but has been so radically reinterpreted by the courts and by the executive and legislative branches of government, all serving corporate power, as to be essentially nullified.

The kleptocrats—and, now, those they con—have no interest in the flowery words of inclusivity, multiculturalism, and democracy that a bankrupt liberal class used with great effectiveness for three decades to swindle the public on behalf of corporations.

They rigged our political process to thwart popular rule and protect the property rights of the native aristocracy. The laboring classes were to be kept at bay. The electoral college, the original power of the states to appoint senators, and the disenfranchisement of women, Native Americans, African Americans, and men without property locked most people out of the democratic process at the beginning of the republic.

Trump is not an anomaly. He is the grotesque visage of a collapsed democracy.

A failed democracy, Plato warned, creates the conditions for tyranny based on popular support.

I want to make an extremely strong appeal to those who abstained. Vote. It takes five minutes and then it's for five years.

Holding our own government to account for the use of its power is, in my view, the highest mission of a U.S. news organization.

We make a great mistake in supposing all people are capable of self-government.

The building of America has had its fair share of mistakes, but it's a constitution that's the jewel of democracy, the envy of many, and it's the most generous nation in the world.

Mob rule is always extremely dangerous for the future of democracy.

People in so many countries look up to the United States as a model of democracy, but I doubt if that can continue. It leaves me with a great sense of loss.

No candidate dares to look for a new campaign model that could really enhance the democratic process. Instead we are left with the current one which makes our candidates look like hucksters.

I don't believe in models that say you just knock on this door, you just go to this community, and you'll get elected. I think you go everywhere, and you listen to everybody. Everybody's got ideas.

In our modern age - in the age of free information - I don't think there is any place for dictatorships.

Our federal Constitution embodies the idea of modern India: it defines not only India but also modernity.

I am rather proud of my modest contribution to bringing democracy home.

Well, when did this become a monarchy? You know, we are the people. The president works for us and, you know, we need to remember that.

I'm in favour of more democracy - let the British public decide what the future of the monarchy is and what shape it should be.

Politics is an act of faith; you have to show some kind of confidence in the intellectual and moral capacity of the public.

Democracy without morality is impossible.