Quotes About Democracy

Under the French system, you have to take into consideration that every five years, the president is directly elected by the people. He's the one that has the legitimacy.

Democratic systems based on the concept of a homogeneous nation such as England are very definitely not applicable to heterogeneous countries such as India, and this simple fact is the root cause of India's constitutional ills.

However, democracy cannot be defined as the existence of parliaments and elections alone.

If we want people to think, we must also want their thoughts to be communicated; and we must support a political constitution that confirms the public nature of thought.

Democracy is a method of finding proximate solutions for insoluble problems.

Human Beings are just good enough to make democracy possible...just bad enough to make it neccessary.

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.

We have, on the whole, more liberty and less equality than Russia has. Russia has less liberty and more equality. Whether democracy should be defined primarily in terms of liberty or equality is a source of unending debate.

The preservation of a democratic civilization requires the wisdom of the serpent and the harmlessness of the dove.

The consistent optimism of our liberal culture has prevented modern democratic societies both from gauging the perils of freedom accurately and from appreciating democracy fully as the only alternative to injustice and oppression. When this optimism is not qualified to accord with the real and complex facts of human nature and history, there is always a danger that sentimentality will give way to despair and that a too consistent optimism will alternate with a too consistent pessimism.

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.

Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.

Religion is so frequently a source of confusion in political life, and so frequently dangerous to democracy, precisely because it introduces absolutes into the realm of relative values.

Democracies are indeed slow to make war, but once embarked upon a martial venture are equally slow to make peace and reluctant to make a tolerable, rather than a vindictive, peace.

W]hat is this law of the greatest number which modern governments invoke and in which they claim to find their sole justification? It is simply the law of matter and brute force, the same law by which a mass, carried down by its weight, crushes everything that lies in its track. It is precisely here that we find the point of junction of the democratic conception and materialism...

religion and the wars against other faiths it engenders should teach us all that we have a pretty good thing going here. In fact, the separation of church and state is probably the single best idea that our two-hundred-year experiment in democracy has engendered.

The promise of anyone seeking to be on the federal bench, the Supreme Court in particular, must again be—not to serve as Chief Justice Roberts's "referee" but to do what is necessary to serve that one great overarching value of American democracy: to serve as a constraint on the otherwise overarching tyranny of the majority (and their political allies) for us and future generations.

I do not like dogs that assume you're guilty until you prove you're innocent. I like democratic dogs.

No doubt life was hard for him—born with the instincts of a Hitler or Stalin in a country where people are determined to do their own voting.

Pain was uniquely one's own, and undiminished by a democracy of suffering.

The old man smiled. "It should be perfectly obvious what you have to do. Give women the vote. That will do away with tyrants and dictators instantly. Women will always opt for sensible and compassionate over warlike and corrupt

Moving around limits tribal affiliations that are detrimental to democracy, communication, and innovation.

that the concept of a loyal opposition did not exist in China and that Chiang's system of balancing off a variety of competing opportunists would not survive the introduction of western democracy with its free-for-all popular participation, particularly when one of the competing forces would be a dynamic, proliferating, disciplined organization determined to destroy that system and seize power.

But no one who has not wrestled with Communism as a philosophy, and Communists as political opponents, can really understand the values of Western democracy. The Devil once lived in Heaven, and those who have not met him are unlikely to recognize an angel when they see one.