Quotes About Democracy

Tocqueville delivered his dispassionate and penetrating judgment of the American experiment in his great work Democracy in America. No one, before or since, has written about the United States with such insight.

There's maybe ten places in the country where free speech still works, but this isn't one of them.

America was always a religious country, and it remains the most religious of industrialized Western democracies. America derived its strength from religion, not secularism.

Identity without democracy is totalitarian; democracy without identity is weak and self-betraying.

The short memories of the American voters is what keeps our politicians in office.

The miracle was the result of the negotiated settlement. There would have been no negotiated settlement and so no new democratic South Africa had the negotiators on one side insisted that all perpetrators be brought to trial. While the Allies could pack up and go home after Nuremberg, we in South Africa had to live with one another.

I remembered seeing the lines of people who had waited for hours and hours to vote in the first democratic election in South Africa in 1994. The lines snaked on for miles. I remember wondering at the time, as U.S. voter turnout was hovering under forty percent, how long that sense of joy and appreciation for the right to vote would last and whether there was any way to revive it in America among those who have never been denied the right to vote.

They have neither the skills nor the interest to become arbiters of truth and decency for society as a whole. How could they be expected to solve the problem that even the organs of democracy couldn't?

The assumption that everyone in government is a bad actor imperils our democracy.

I can't just sit back and write about the club when our democracy is under attack. I have to be a more positive force.

I'm attorney general of the United States. I will not stand for - I will not allow people to take away that which people gave their lives to give, and that is the ability for the American people to vote.

We do not believe in authoritarian rule.

Donald Trump, you already know. We can't have that guy in office.

The Citizens United decision dramatically intensified the political gridlock in our country.

I think we are dying in America, I think our democracy is over.

Democracy is something that you must learn each generation. It has to be taught.

It's less about Trump and more about the people... If the American people are willing to elect someone like that president, then that's more of a problem.

Look, the people will elect the government they think best.

If you elect a religious party into power, you no longer have a democracy.

It's up to American citizens to decide who they elect as president.

We deserve to elect our own government.

You know, we're taught that in a democracy power comes from being elected.

There aren't a whole lot of people out of 300 million who could elected to the Congress.

We can and must support our MPs in doing the job they will be elected to do: to hold the government to account in order to do what's best for Britain.