Quotes About Democracy

This was not a war of nation versus nation, this was brother against brother in the most civilized cities on earth. To read Thucydides is to see our own world in microcosm. It's the study of how democracies destroy themselves by breaking down into warring factions, the Few versus the Many.

It is not just that it is profoundly offensive to the leaders and people of a democratic Germany to paint Hitler on the wall (or on the remnants of the Wall). It is also consummately counterproductive. Such sauce does not make the meat of substantive criticism more interesting. It means that the whole dish is pushed away. It does not mean that Britain's voice is listened to more attentively in the councils of Europe. It means that it is listened to even less.

In a democracy it is ultimately for us, the citizens, to judge where to place the balance between security and privacy, safety and liberty. It's our lives and liberties that are threatened, not only by terrorism but also by massive depredations of our privacy in the name of counter-terrorism. If those companies from which governments actually take most of our intimate details want to show that they are still on the side of the angels, they had better join this struggle for transparency too.

Well, that's the way democracy works. We have to build this Europe with the material we have at our disposal. And this material is national democracy.

Robert Bork used the same example to make just this argument. In a democracy, he argued, the majority has a boundless power to outlaw whatever conduct it finds objectionable, including conduct that takes place in private, harms nobody, and is not witnessed or overheard by anyone else.

I love this idea of the states being this laboratory of democracy where we try things out in one state, and if it works, we take it someplace else…But if you're going to do that, you actually have to take what those successful states did. Not just a piece of it. All the hard parts. (from The Economist article "The reading wars" 6/12/2021)

Russians who voted in 1990 did not think that this would be the last free and fair election in their country's history, which (thus far) it has been.

In the end, though, freedom depends upon citizens who are able to make a distinction between what is true and what they want to hear. Authoritarianism arrives not because people say that they want it, but because they lose the ability to distinguish between facts and desires.

We allowed ourselves to accept the politics of inevitability, the sense that history could move in only one direction: toward liberal democracy...We imbibed the myth of an "end of history". In doing so, we lowered our defences, constrained our imagination, and opened the way for precisely the kinds of regimes we told ourselves could never return.

the less popular of the two parties controls every lever of power at the federal level, as well as the majority of statehouses. The party that exercises such control proposes few policies that are popular with the society at large, and several that are generally unpopular—and thus must either fear democracy or weaken it.

The Russian oligarchy established after the 1990 elections continues to function, and promotes a foreign policy designed to destroy democracy elsewhere.

the democracies that arose after the First World War (and the Second) often collapsed when a single party seized power in some combination of an election and a coup d'état. A

The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.

Much needs to be done to fix the gerrymandered system so that each citizen has one equal vote, and so that each vote can be simply counted by a fellow citizen. We need paper ballots, because they cannot be tampered with remotely and can always be recounted.

We might be tempted to think that our democratic heritage automatically protects us from such threats. This is a misguided reflex. Our own tradition demands that we examine history to understand the deep sources of tyranny, and to consider the proper responses to it. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so.

So support the multi-party system and defend the rules of democratic elections. Vote in local and state elections while you can. Consider running for office.

Democracy failed in Europe in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, and it is failing not only in much of Europe but in many parts of the world today. It is that history and experience that reveals to us the dark range of our possible futures. A nationalist will say that "it can't happen here," which is the first step toward disaster. A patriot says that it could happen here, but that we will stop it.

Any election can be the last, or at least the last in the lifetime of the person casting the vote. The

Does the history of tyranny apply to the United States? Certainly the early Americans who spoke of "eternal vigilance" would have thought so. The

James Madison nicely made the point that tyranny arises "on some favorable emergency.

The odd American idea that giving money to political campaigns is free speech means that the very rich have far more speech, and so in effect far more voting power, than other citizens. We

that human nature is such that American democracy must be defended from Americans who would exploit its freedoms to bring about its end.

history has seen three major democratic moments: after the First World War in 1918, after the Second World War in 1945, and after the end of communism in 1989.

We believe that we have checks and balances, but have rarely faced a situation like the present: when the less popular of the two parties controls every lever of power at the federal level, as well as the majority of statehouses.