Quotes About Democracy

Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking.

Television is the first truly democratic culture -- the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want.

In whichever way a democratic system might be sick, terrorism does not heal it, it kills it. Democracy is healed with democracy. —VIRGINIO ROGNONI,

Our country was thereby saved from the consequences of its distracting individualistic conception of democracy, and its merely legal conception of nationality. It was because the followers of Jackson and Douglas did fight for it, that the Union was preserved.

Democracy is like a hobby horse: It will carry you nowhere unless you use your own legs.

Wo ein Klima der Ãœberwachung und Bespitzelung herrscht, kann ein freier und offener demokratischer Prozess nicht stattfinden.

Der Staat, der nur wegen und aus der Freiheit seiner Menschen besteht, darf sich nicht gegen seine Schöpfer wenden.

Thou great democratic God!… who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne!

It is clear that not in one thing alone, but in many ways equality and freedom of speech are a good thing.

The accursed power which stands on privilege( and goes with women, champagne and bridge) Broke - and democracy resumed her reign ( which goes with bridge and women and champagne.

Freedom means the right of people to assemble, organize, and debate openly.

The worst thing that can happen in a democracy - as well as in an individual's life - is to become cynical about the future and lose hope.

We are here to advance the cause of women and to advance the cause of democracy and to make it absolutely clear that the two are inseparable. There cannot be true democracy unless women's voices are heard. There cannot be true democracy unless women are given the opportunity to take responsibility for their own lives.

In the democratic western countries so-called capitalism leads a saturnalia of "freedom," like a bastard brother of reform.

La forma è sostanza e la forma della nostra democrazia e della nostra convivenza civile, di questi tempi, lascia a desiderare. E a questo punto non c'è più niente da ridere. Il «siamo come voi» va rispedito al mittente. Non siamo affatto così e reclamiamo il diritto a rappresentanti migliori.

The real issue, in a democracy, is whether the citizens had such an opportunity. They did not. Until deregulation, and the explosion of free speech thanks to courageous talk-show hosts such as myself, "the Godzilla of Talk Radio," nobody even knew about it.

No man is good enough to govern another man, without that other's consent. I say this is the leading principle--the sheet anchor of American republicanism.

Peace does not appear so distant as it did. I hope it will come soon, and come to stay; and so come as to be worth the keeping in all future time. It will then have been proved that among freemen there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet, and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case and pay the cost.

Israelis can be proud of the vibrant democracy that they have created, and I know that many Rhode Islanders share my deep appreciation for the close friendship between our two nations.

Robert Dahl's assessment of the Court's role in the political system is from his article "Decision-Making in a Democracy: The Supreme Court as a National Policy-Maker," Journal of Public Law 6 (1957) 279–95.

But, remember, a tyrant hates to admit he is one,' Faustus said quietly. 'The worse he is, the more he claims – and even believes – that traditional religion and democracy matter to him deeply and determine all his actions.

What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority.

The modern world is reversing the old virtues of authority. They aimed deliberately to make men unworldly. They did not aim to found society on a full use of the earth's resources; they did not aim to use the whole nature of man; they did not intend him to think out the full expression of his desires. Democracy is a turning point upon those ideals in a pursuit, at first unconsciously, of the richest life that men can devise for themselves.

The newspaper is in all its literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct.