Quotes About Democracy

In a pluto-democracy, politics is the art of outwitting the voters, so the Honorable Ham would never say that he hated the labor unions and proposed to keep them down. What he said was that the Reds were plotting to seize America. Some fifteen years ago he had got himself appointed chairman of a committee to investigate the Communists. His definition of this word was rather vague, and included everybody who proposed any sort of change calculated to reduce the gulf between the rich and the poor.

The polls were still open, and Lanny stopped across the street and watched for a few minutes. There was an American flag on a staff before the old white frame town hall, the polling place, and a few people waiting in line—but no loitering, and no electioneering within a specified distance of the sacred spot. He had seen people fighting one another on so many parts of the earth's surface, and how he longed to teach them this dignified and orderly way of settling their problems.

I am under orders, as much so as any private in the army. The American people are my boss, and I have the job of finding out what they want, and doing it.

Suddenly the events of the time took shape in his imagination as a duel of wills between these two: one the champion of democracy, of government by popular consent, of the rights of the individual to think his own thoughts, to speak his own mind, to live his own life so long as he did not interfere with the equal rights of his fellows; the other the champion of those ancient dark forces of tyranny and oppression which had ruled the world before the concept of freedom had been born.

All our efforts will be vain unless we can show that our democratic system works, and that its end product is justice and opportunity for the common man.

In countries where the people have the ballot you have to promise them something desirable, otherwise the opposition will outbid you.

Everybody knew who had murdered Castillo—except those heads of the government who believed in democracy and peace, in civil liberties and freedom of speech, so ardently that they couldn't make any move against the sworn enemies of these blessings.

defect in education for democracy, that the people knew so much about the politicians and so little about the men who made the politicians and paid their fares on the bandwagon.

No, but I can't help wishing that political and economic problems might be settled by free discussion and majority consent. At least I feel bound to advocate that method for my own country, and for all others which have established the democratic process.

In the second decade of this century of enlightenment and progress, in our free American democracy, whose constitution proclaims religious toleration, and forbids the establishment by the state of any form of worship, I was made to serve a sentence of eighteen hours in the state prison of Delaware for playing a game of tennis on the Sabbath. I

Semper eadem, always the same, was the motto of their Holy Mother Church, and within the last century her Popes have solemnly repudiated all that charter of liberties upon which the democratic world is being built—freedom of speech, press and worship.

The common people of that land of hope and glory adored their war leader, but they didn't want him as a peace leader—a distinction that was clear to them but must have been confusing to Winnie. The Labour party obtained a majority of almost two to one; they got it upon the basis of a definite program calling for the nationalization of the five most important of the nation's industries: coal, steel, transportation, communications, and finance.

some devil was engaged in making a caricature of the democratic process, reducing it to a farce, to prove that the people were incapable of thinking and must really have a master

Free speech doesn't overthrow governments," answered the other. "It's the lack of free speech.

What chance does the democratic tradition stand when its enemies control ninety per cent of the press and the radio and the money—plus all of the weapons? I tell you, the fellows who run the National Association of Manufacturers could take over the government of this country in twenty-four hours if ever they get mad enough to try it. And believe me, they're going to get madder every hour in the economic crisis that will come after this war.

Very soon there would be nobody to challenge the New Order, and France would settle down to life without labor unions, riots, strikes, and all the other appurtenances of democracy.

The United States, being a strong and wealthy society, and with unrivaled global influence, invites envy. The success of its restless culture of freedom, constitutional democracy, self-critique, secular rationalism, and open markets provokes the resentment of both weaker and less-secure theocracy and autocracy alike.

One of the ancient and modern critiques of democracy is that radicals destroy norms for short-term political gain, norms that they themselves often later seek as refuge.

In the global media community, "intolerance" does not denote so much China's mass incarceration of Muslim Uighurs in reeducation camps, or destruction of Tibetan culture, or strangulation of Hong Kong's democracy, or systemic racism shown African students and resident workers in China. Instead, America's purported sin is occasional consideration of recalibrating its open-borders policies and requiring legality before entering the country.

He was Antinous, wild. You would have said, seeing the thoughtful reflection of his eye, that he had already, in some preceding existence, been through the revolutionary apocalypse. He knew its tradition like an eyewitness. He knew every little detail of that great thing. A pontifical and warrior nature, strange in a youth. He was officiating and militant; from the immediate point of view, a soldier of democracy; above the movement of the time, a priest of the ideal.

All civilisation begins with a theocracy and ends with a democracy. This law of liberty succeeding unity is written in architecture.

In democratic states, the only governments founded on justice, it sometimes happens that a faction usurps power; then the whole rises up, and the necessary vindication of its right may go so far as armed conflict.

Modern electronic mass media had been a defining piece of the twentieth-century experience that served an important democratic function—presenting Americans with a shared set of facts. Now those news organs, on TV and radio, were enabling a reversion to the narrower, factional, partisan discourse that had been normal in America's earlier centuries. The new and newly unregulated technologies allowed us, in a sense, to travel backward in time.

If omnipotent sadists had set out to take an extremely good, well-functioning piece of our political economy and social structure and make it undemocratic and oppressive, this is what their scheme would've looked like.