Quotes About Democracy

Without putting the brakes on out-of-control campaign contributions from individuals and corporations - it will be business as usual, with 1 percent of Americans pulling the strings.

One symbol of lack of democracy is to have cars parked on the sidewalk.

The cement in our whole democracy today is the worker who makes $ 15 an hour. He's the guy who will buy a house and a car and a refrigerator. He's the oil in the engine.

Democracy, it appears, is a bit chancy. But its chances also depend on what we do ourselves

Students should not only be trained to live in a democracy when they grow up; they should have the chance to live in one today.

Never before had so many citizens participated in an election.

It's not just tougher out there. It's become a situation where the contest is how much you can destroy the system, rather than how much you can make it work. It makes no difference if you have a 'D' or an 'R' after your name. There's no sense that this is about democracy, and after the election you have to work together, and knit the country together. The people in the game now just think to the first Tuesday in November, and not a day beyond it.

democracy is probably intrinsically the best form of government, not because all men are equal in wisdom and virtue, or because all men are so good and wise that they should be given as much power as possible, but because all men are so foolish and wicked that no one should be given very great power over others.

That's why I think that cultivation, 'becoming a real human being,' really is the primary leadership issue of our time, but on a scale never required before. It's a very old idea that may actually hold the key to a new age of 'global democracy.

Rather than signalling the aspiration for system of checks and balances against absolute power, democracy become a euphemism for majority rule.

supposed to be the shrine of democracy [Mount Rushmore] but really is the shrine of deceit . . . a desecration of a sacred spot, stolen from us in violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868.

The present book draws together in one work the themes that have absorbed me all my life—the pollution of land and air and water that is inevitable in the blind obliteration of the wilderness and its wild creatures and also the injustice to the poor of our own species, especially the indigenous peoples and the inheritors of slavery left behind by the cruel hypocrisy of what those in power represent as progress and democracy. E.

If our best-educated citizens have no idea how to answer these basic questions, we will struggle to build a democracy that can solve the problems we face, whether they are what to do about climate change, the world's poor, the problems of Australia's Indigenous people, or the prospect of a future in which we can genetically modify our offspring. An education in the humanities is as valuable today as it was in Plato's time.

If we reject, as we must, the doctrine that the majority is always right, to submit moral issues to the vote is to gamble that what we believe to be right will come out of the ballot with more votes behind it than what we believe to be wrong; and that is a gamble we will often lose.

If we think that democracy is a good thing, then we must believe that the public should know as much as possible about what the government it elects is doing. Snowden has said that he made the disclosures because "the public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong.

A society that decides its controversial issues by ballots does better than one that uses bullets Ã¢â'¬â€œ which, after all, is no more likely to lead to the right conclusion than voting.

In a one-party system there is always a landslide.

I didn't know you were interested in politics,' I said. 'I'm not,' he said. 'But isn't that how Hitler got elected in the first place: too many people who didn't give a shit who was running the country?

This is a deep and uncomfortable paradox, which will not have escaped you; we can only defend democracy by being undemocratic. Every secret service knows this paradox.

This is a deep and uncomfortable paradox, which will not have escaped you: we can only defend democracy by being undemocratic.

Its purpose was to defend democracy in this country, first of all. Then to defend the principles of freedom of thought and expression.

we can only defend democracy by being undemocratic

He'd tell us that in a democracy, keeping abreast of current events was a citizen's most important duty and that you could never start too early to be informed about the news of the day.

Maybe you do not care much about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.