Quotes About Democracy

The difference between our democracy and a dictatorship is that we get to choose the person who is going to screw us.

While unconstitutional exercise of power by the executive and legislative branches of the government is subject to judicial restraint, the only check upon our own exercise of power is our own sense of self-restraint. For the removal of unwise laws from the statute books appeal lies not to the courts but to the ballot and to the processes of democratic government.

Government just cannot govern well without reliable independent reporting and criticism. No intelligence system, no bureaucracy, can offer the information provided by free competitive reporting; the cleverest agents of the secret police state are inferior to the plodding reporter of the democracy.

Governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed

There will always be a place for us somewhere, somehow, as long as we see to it that working people fight for everything they have, everything they hope to get, for dignity, equality, democracy, to oppose war and to bring to the world a better life.

Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.

Democracy is...the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.

n Italia, sotto i Borgia, per trent'anni hanno avuto guerre, terrore, assassinii, massacri: e hanno prodotto Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci e il Rinascimento. In Svizzera, hanno avuto amore fraterno, cinquecento anni di pace e democrazia, e cos'hanno prodotto? Gli orologi a cucù.

Secrecy and a free, democratic government don't mix.

Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear." [ Special Message to the Congress on the Internal Security of the United States , August 8, 1950]

we are] going to continue to fight communism. Now I am going to tell you how we are not going to fight communism. We are not going to transform our fine FBI into a Gestapo secret police. That is what some people would like to do. We are not going to try to control what our people read and say and think. We are not going to turn the United States into a right-wing totalitarian country in order to deal with a left-wing totalitarian threat.

From its founding, America has stood at the nexus of democracy and oligarchy. And as soon as the nation was established, its history of conflating class and race gave an elite the language to take over the government and undermine democracy.

Back then, before it became clear that democracy was best served by a drunken electorate, the bars in New York City were required to close on Election Day.

It is curious, too, that though the modern man in the street is a robot, and incapable of love he is capable of an endless, grinding, nihilistic hate: that is the only strong feeling he is capable of; and therein lies the danger of robot-democracy and all the men in the street, they move in a great grind of hate, slowly but inevitably.

Our Constitution does not secure the peaceful transition of power, but rather presupposes it.

Constitutional Law is merely politics made incomprehensible to the common man.

So I can only conclude that American democracy inherently does not want good leadership. We always passed over the very great men we had like Daniel Webster, John Calhoun, Henry Clay, John Fremont, and the people after the Civil War like Carl Shurz. We pass them up because we don't want first-class men in that position, we want somebody who is a stupid bum like us. We're afraid of good leadership until a time of crisis

Mas apenas eleições não fazem uma democracia. Democracia quer dizer poder para o povo, mas poder quer dizer algo mais que apenas eleições. Em nossa tradição isso também significa controle através de críticas racionais.

A defesa de idéias, a argumentação e a crítica melhoram a democracia.

We take this for granted in America today: a democracy in which the first test of credibility is not votes, or broad public support, but money.

But it is to say that a basic idea of a representative democracy—one that argues over fundamental choices of policy, through the battle between differently committed representatives—is not the reality of our democracy anymore. We've settled into what Francis Fukuyama calls a "vetocracy," where change of almost any kind, whether from the Right or the Left, is practically always stopped.

Elections are a Western jerk-off.

If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: Thou shalt not ration justice.