Quotes About Democracy

The message of the free world to any potential Palestinian leadership should be a simple one: Embrace democratic reform and we will embrace you.

The three main sources of scepticism are first, that not every people desires freedom second, that democracy in certain parts of the world would be dangerous and third, that there is little the world's democracies can do to advance freedom outside their countries.

Can someone within that society walk into the town square and say what they want without fear of being punished for his or her views? If so, then that society is a free society. If not, it is a fear society.

When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the Republic. —Benjamin Franklin

The current total of countries in the world with First Amendments is one. You have guaranteed freedom of speech. Other countries don't have that.

Rather than always holding up American traditions of democracy and freedom as the example, the U.S. should spend more time focused on what local traditions might be emphasized to help speed change. "You have to make the discussion indigenous, talk about justice and dignity... Democracy is discredited because it is too compromised and too identified with the West. You need something more rooted locally, so people know they have a stake in defining and constructing that.

In the American Technopoly, public opinion is a yes or no answer to an unexamined question.

Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent.

Without intellectual privacy, then, we risk a world in which new political ideas are hard to come by, and in which we and our fellow citizens are less able to come to terms with what we believe. Without intellectual privacy, meaningful democratic self-government itself is at risk.

Without democracy there cannot be peace.

I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and achieve. But, if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination," he told the court. "I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal for which I hope to live for and to see realized. But my lord, if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

Democracy meant all men were to be heard, and a decision was taken together as a people. Majority rule was a foreign notion. A minority was not to be crushed by a majority.

Friends, comrades and fellow South Africans. I greet you all in the name of peace, democracy and freedom for all! I stand here before you not as a prophet but as a humble servant of you, the people. Your tireless and heroic sacrifices have made it possible for me to be here today. I therefore place the remaining years of my life in your hands.

So much of liberalism in its classical sense is taken for granted in the west today and even disrespected. We take freedom for granted, and because of this we don't understand how incredibly vulnerable it is.

Was there something distinctive about American civil society that gave democracy a better chance than in France, as Tocqueville argued? Was the already centralized French state more likely to produce a Napoleon than the decentralized United States? We cannot be sure. But it is not unreasonable to ask how long the US constitution would have lasted if the United States had suffered the same military and economic strains that swept away the French constitution of 1791

He who establishes a tyranny and does not kill Brutus, and he who establishes a democratic regime and does not kill the sons of Brutus, will not last long.

Pointing to a trend in Western democracies, Agamben posits that the declaration of an emergency state of exception itself has gradually been replaced by a "generalization of the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government" (2003/2005, 14), that is, the state of exception or emergency has become integrated in the normal functioning of the state.

At the most basic level of protecting a writer's personal safety, democratic countries offer a further advantage. If you steal hundreds of thousands of documents from the Russian state and put them online, the FSB will try to kill you. Steal American secrets, and the CIA will not.

Western radicals fall for an equally inane error. Because it is easier to expose abuses of power in democracies, and because Western radicals are most concerned about abuses of power in their own countries, they assume that democratic abuses are the major or only abuses of power worth protesting about.

It is not only in academia and on the remnants of the Left that you encounter the argument that to prefer democracy to tyranny in other cultures, or the rights of women to the demands of misogynist clerics, is to announce yourself as insensitive brute or interfering imperialist.

Every time you go into your workplace, you leave a democracy and enter a dictatorship.