Quotes About Democracy

Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

And gradually they're beginning to recognize the fact that there's nothing more secure than a democratic, accountable, and participatory form of government. But it's sunk in only theoretically, it has not yet sunk in completely in practical terms.

The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.

If you believe in democracy, are you not thereby obliged to accept, without discrimination, the fall-outs that come with a democratic choice, even if this means the termination of the democratic process itself?

Hayekian democracy serves the function of making a capitalist market society appear to be 'the people's choice' even though it has long been removed from democratic control.

The world must be made safe for democracy.

The commands of democracy are as imperative as its privileges and opportunities are wide and generous. Its compulsion is upon us.

The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.

The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.

Freedom exists only where people take care of the government.

You know how impossible it is, in short, to have a free nation if it is a military nation and under military orders

Just what is it that America stands for? If she stands for one thing more than another it is for the sovereignty of self-governing people.

If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it; what we have to determine now is whether we are big enough, whether we are men enough, whether we are free enough, to take possession again of the government which is our own.

If the colored people made a mistake in voting for me, they ought to correct it.

I'm not an American. I'm one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So, I'm not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or a flag-waver -- no, not I. I'm speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don't see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.

A ballot is like a bullet. You don't throw your ballots until you see a target, and if that target is not within your reach, keep your ballot in your pocket.

If we don't cast a ballot, it's going to end up in a situation where we're going to have to cast a bullet. It's either a ballot or a bullet.

Imagine that -- a country that's supposed to be a democracy, supposed to be for freedom and all of that kind of stuff when they want to draft you and put you in the army and send you to Saigon to fight for them -- and then you've got to turn around and all night long discuss how you're going to just get a right to register and vote without being murdered. Why, that's the most hypocritical government since the world began!

Scholars, notably Western scholars, are often more eager to gauge the extent to which...economic liberalization dismantles socialism and nurtures capitalism than analyze how socialism, a system created as an alternative to the lack of economic democracy in modern capitalism, is revitalized and, in its more decentred, de-essentialized, flexible forms, becomes an integral, constitutive part of the daily reality of Chinese economic, social, political, and cultural life.

In a democratic society there are rules -- written and un-written -- which must be followed if the free institutions of that society are to endure. They include the right to protest -- even against the freedoms which allow those protests. But they do not include the right to interfere with the rights of others without due process of law.

People are not embracing Communism as Communism, but they are discontented, insecure and unsettled and they embrace anything that looks like it might be better than what they have to endure. . . . It is very easy for anybody who has a job and is getting along all right to cry for democracy . . . but if you cannot feed your children and you do not know where the next meal is coming from, nobody knows what kind of freak you will follow."13

In Texas, thirty-six out of the 86 "winning" GOP statehouse candidates faced no general election opponent. In Tennessee, thirty-seven of the 75 winning GOP candidates "won" without opposition. Florida, thirty-four out of 85. Add it all up, and even with all that was at stake in these states in 2022, millions of Americans had no choice when it came to who represented them in their statehouse. For those millions, democracy at the legislative level was indeed canceled.