Quotes About Democracy

Democracy is difficult and demanding. So is history. It can crack your voice; it can stir your soul; it can break your heart.

Democracy doesn't require a whole lot of work of its citizens, but it requires some: It requires taking a good look outside once in a while, and considering the bad news and what it might mean, and making the occasional tough choice, and soberly taking stock of what your real interests are.

The last two elections were stolen. They were stolen and so we will not rest until we reclaim our democracy and this is what today is all about.

In a nine-piece-band is one guy gonna call up eight guys and have a 45-minute discussion about every decision? No. So things are a lot more democratic in Stone Sour. Plus, we're closer and it's a lot easier to communicate. In Slipknot that's the big problem - communication.

We have never done anything to stop freedom of expression or freedom of press.

The key to stopping the hard-right nationalist forces poised to pounce on Brexit isn't going to be finessing a reprieve for the status quo. It's about actively creating consent for meaningful change, and expanding democratic participation beyond a second referendum.

Without third parties, all forward movement stops. They're essential. They're not just OK. They are absolutely essential.

I'm advocating that American citizens interested in democracy should stay out of chain stores.

To be fair, money and politics never work in a directly straight line.

With Brexit, and I think the extraordinary strain it's put on our constitution and our representative democracy, I do sometimes feel like I'm in the middle of the 17th Century, when you are standing up for the rights of Parliament.

Strangely enough, the linking of computers has taken place democratically, even anarchically. Its rules and habits are emerging in the open light, rather shall behind the closed doors of security agencies or corporate operations centers.

The Holocaust also shows us how a combination of events and attitudes can erode a society's democratic values.

What was also clear, if you look at the past, is that people here, as in the rest of Ukraine, are always "for" something, because they want their future to be better than their past. In recent history too, supporters of one side or another always point to a referendum in which people have voted for something they approved of, and then ignore the ones where they have voted for something they do not want.

Whenever, in a democracy, we see our rulers obsessed with "the technical aspects" of the electoral process, whenever we see them tinkering with the size of constituencies, or machinery for counting ballots, then we know we are getting close to "the secret things of our town," the gap between respectable appearance and brutal reality.

Government should be democratic and 'carry out for them all, and only, what is needed to be done for the people as a whole. It must not interfere with what the people can do for themselves in their own centres.

He wanted to restore a 'democratic social polity, with the exaltation of the things of the mind and character... the essence of ancient Irish civilisation... must provide the keynote of the new.

Nations that had spent a thousand years under tyrants did not transform into free republics overnight because the United States wished them to do so. Elections alone did not a democracy make; they could bring strongmen to power and keep them there. Democracy, as it developed, could not be easily exported; it was not a commodity like soybeans or sneakers but an ideal that lived in the mind.

The whole thing, said the President, was a paradox … of trying to meet the threat to our values and institutions by methods which themselves endangered these institutions. Here was an existential dilemma of the cold war: using undemocratic methods to defend American democracy. But Eisenhower believed that the ends would justify the means when the issue was national survival.

The greatest lesson was this: "What they do to us we cannot do to them," said Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the president of Estonia from 2006 to 2016. "Liberal democracies with a free press and free and fair elections are at an asymmetric disadvantage.… The tools of their democratic and free speech can be used against them.

As a report released by the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee put it, the Russians sought to "blur the lines between reality and fiction, erode our trust in media entities and the information environment, in government, in each other, and in democracy itself." It took years before Americans understood this.

When it came to the war, he believed that the "consent" of the governed had been, in his phrase, "manufactured." Hence, as he wrote, "It is no longer possible…to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify.

We must look at the facts squarely, not to flounder in a bitter nostalgia of pain but to redeem a democratic promise rooted in the living ingredients of our own history.

The second-wave Klan could return to its roots of terror because it had survived the kind of scrutiny that would have killed off any other secret society in a democracy

a democratic nation can limp along even when its chief of state is widely understood to be a lazy, bumbling simpleton. Fallible leadership is the only kind of leadership any nation ever has. Since totalitarians cannot afford to admit this, their domains start and end in fantasy