Quotes About Democracy

How many black holes have we been up close and personal with? Kosta countered. All sorts of odd things happen near the event horizon, from huge tidal forces to variations in time. Personally, I'm voting on it having to do with gravity, either a polarization of the fields themselves or else something related to the time differential. I didn't know physics had become a democracy, Hanan murmered.

Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom; socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.

The great democratic danger is enslavement to public opinion

THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC WILL ENDURE UNTIL THE DAY CONGRESS DISCOVERS THAT IT CAN BRIBE THE PUBLIC WITH THE PUBLIC'S MONEY—ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE.

One of the problems with living in a free country was that anyone outside this palace/prison could think and say whatever he wished.

Money won't solve our problems. Globalization won't solve our problems. Neither will democracy. In fact, democracy comes with a built-in trapdoor: the bad guy can get elected.

It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting.

It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting.

In its pursuit corporations plop themselves down in every corner of the globe selling "democracy" as though it were a brand of toothpaste, the patent to which they alone control.

there is something the press can do in language that a society cannot do. You've done it before. Move us closer to participatory democracy; help us distinguish between a pseudo-experience and a living one, between an encounter and an engagement, between theme and life. Help us all try to figure out what it means to be human in the twenty-first century.

A democracy of permanent consensus will not long remain a democracy.

in the arena of economic policy, the citizens of today's democracies have learned altogether too much modesty. We have been advised that these are matters for experts: that economics and its policy implications are far beyond the understanding of the common man or woman—a point of view enforced by the increasingly arcane and mathematical language of the discipline.

During the long century of constitutional liberalism, from Gladstone to LBJ, Western democracies were led by a distinctly superior class of statesmen.

the 20th century morality tale of 'socialism vs. freedom' or 'communism vs. capitalism' is misleading. Capitalism is not a political system; it is a form of economic life, compatible in practice with right-wing dictatorships (Chile under Pinochet), left-wing dictatorships (contemporary China), social-democratic monarchies (Sweden) and plutocratic republics (the United States).

Why does this matter? Because—as the Greeks knew—participation in the way you are governed not only heightens a collective sense of responsibility for the things government does, it also keeps our rulers honest and holds authoritarian excess at bay.

The democratic failure transcends national boundaries. The embarrassing fiasco of the Copenhagen climate conference of December 2009 is already translating into cynicism and despair among young people:

We should by now have learned that politics remains national, even if economics does not: the history of the 20th century offers copious evidence that even in healthy democracies, bad political choices usually trump 'rational' economic calculations.

the Union's democratic deficit could easily turn from unconcern into hostility, into a sense that decisions were being taken 'there' with unfavourable consequences for us 'here' and over which 'we' had no say: a prejudice fuelled by irresponsible mainstream politicians but fanned by nationalist demagogues.

Democracies in which there are no significant political choices to be made, where economic policy is all that really matters—and where economic policy is now largely determined by nonpolitical actors (central banks, international agencies, or transnational corporations)—must either cease to be functioning democracies or accommodate once again the politics of frustration, of populist resentment.

we lose faith not just in parliamentarians and congressmen, but in Parliament and Congress themselves.

Both Fascism and Communism thrived on social despair, on the huge gulf separating rich and poor. If the democracies were to recover, the 'condition of the people' question must be addressed. In the words of Thomas Carlyle a hundred years earlier, 'if something be not done, something will do itself one day, and in a fashion that will please nobody.

In all, the United States today has five inhabited territories that contain more than 3.6 million people. Those people cannot vote for president, have no voting representatives in Congress, lack full constitutional protection, and suffer the predictable effects. All five territories are poorer, per capita, than the poorest US state.

The story is about being loyal to the truth as a nation, that citizens of a democracy are collectively responsible for what their troops do in war, good or bad.

The United States allegedly presses for democratic change in the region, and when it happens, democracy brings to power anti-US parties.