Quotes About Democracy

Like Alexis de Tocqueville, they feared unfettered democracy and believed totalitarianism was the natural consequence of mass democracy run amok. They

If you have a government that is elected, they need to do the hard work - because if they don't, they won't be around the next time the ballot box is open.

I think the success of democracy is not really police security it's the presence of a broad middle class. The stronger the middle class of a people is, the less you have to worry about one group coming in and exploiting the democratic process for its own ends.

We believe democracy to be the only real guarantor of stability and we have sought to create a 'Jordanian model' that might also inspire others in our region. I wish democracy and peace to be my legacy to my people and the shield of generations to come.

We respect opposition to any position or policy. But we believe that the opinion that should prevail and be respected is that of the majority.

Democracy is for the people by the people, no brothers no sisters no churches no titles!

Never re-elect anybody

In the Western mind, any undemocratic political system that deprives citizens the ability to choose or remove a leader is by definition evil.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, who alerted me to a significant difference between the democratic Indian society and communist Chinese society. He shrewdly observed that India was an open society with a closed mind, whereas China was a closed society with an open mind. The same observation may well apply to American society.

Chinese communism is not a threat to American democracy. Instead, the success and competitiveness of the Chinese economy and society is the real challenge.

The one difference between Godse and the so-called secularists in India is that Godse swore by genuinely secular and democratic principles, so that 'all Indians should enjoy equal rights and complete equality on the basis of democracy' and no special privileges on the basis of communal identity, such as weightage in parliamentary representation for the Muslims.

No Muslim leader is known to have explicitly accepted the prospect of a purely democratic polity in a united India without any special privileges for the Muslims.

No one is born a good citizen; no nation is born a democracy. Rather, both are processes that continue to evolve over a lifetime. Young people must be included from birth. A society that cuts off from its youth severs its lifeline.

If information and knowledge are central to democracy, they are conditions for development.

Education is a human right with immense power to transform. On its foundation rest the cornerstones of freedom, democracy and sustainable human development.

It is only through multilateral institutions that States can hold each other to account. And that makes it very important to organize those institutions in a fair and democratic way, giving the poor and the weak some influence over the actions of the rich and the strong.

If we have a chance of succeeding and bringing stability and democracy to Iraq, it will mean learning from our mistakes, not denying them and not ignoring them.

The expansionary dynamic of Western culture has been the root, the denominating constant, of modern history. The grandeur of Western liberalism, its material abundance, the flourishing of its arts and sciences, its painful construction of constitutional democracy -- these interconnected achievements have been financed by the sustained theft called imperialism.

Saving the world requires saving democracy. That requires well-informed citizens. Conservation, environment, poverty, community, education, family, health, economy- these combine to make one quest: liberty and justice for all. Whether one's special emphasis is global warming or child welfare, the cause is the same cause. And justice comes from the same place being human comes from: compassion.

Every actual democracy rests on the principle that not only are equals equal but unequals will not be treated equally. Democracy requires, therefore, first homogeneity and second—if the need arises elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.

If the assumptions underlying the legislative state of the parliamentary-democratic variety are no longer tenable, then closing one's eyes to the concrete constitutional situation and clinging to an absolute, 'value-neutral,' functionalist and formal concept of law, in order to save the system of legality, is not far off. The 'law,' then, is only the present decision of the momentary parliamentary majority.

It is time for us to keep in mind that it requires more to make and preserve a Republic than the mere absence of a king, and that when a Republic decays its soul is apt to die first, which its outward form may still be lasting.

Oh, dear, she thought, this is probably more democracy than an Englishman can stand.

Within a democratic system, general elections are a most effective instrument to insure the steady maintenance of fraction ? among the powerful. One has to keep in mind that according to the Second Basic Law, the fraction ? of the voting population are stupid people and elections offer to all of them at once a magnificent opportunity to harm everybody else without gaining anything from their action. They do so by contributing to the maintenance of the ? level among those in power.