Quotes About Democracy

Evidence really is an ethical issue, the most important ethical issue in a modern democracy. If you want justice, you must work for truth. And if you want to work for truth, you must do a little more than wish for justice.

Science and democracy grew up together in Europe and North America, as twins; it is no coincidence that so many of America's Founding Fathers were science geeks.

And this man will be our president—this intelligent, well-read man, this man who speaks of restoring science to its rightful place. Restore the scientific process; restore democracy. This is what we needed—to develop a core identity as American academics, the people who would make sure a Galileo was never again put under house arrest for making challenging claims about who we really are. Make

Sycophancy toward those who hold power is a fact in every regime, and especially in a democracy, where, unlike tyranny, there is an accepted principle of legitimacy that breaks the inner will to resist.... Flattery of the people and incapacity to resist public opinion are the democratic vices, particularly among writers, artists, journalists and anyone else who is dependent on an audience.

The inflamed sensitivity induced by radicalized democratic theory finally experiences any limit as arbitrary and tyrannical. There are no absolutes; freedom is absolute. Of course the result is that, on the one hand, the argument justifying freedom disappears and, on the other, all beliefs begin to have the attenuated character that was initially supposed to be limited to religious belief.

Repugnance at the power of the people, at the fact that the popular taste should rule in all arenas of life, is very rare in a modern democracy. One of the intellectual charms of Marxism is that it explains the injustice or philistinism of the people in such a way as to exculpate the people, who are said to be manipulated by corrupt elites.

Sycophancy toward those who hold power is a fact in every regime, and especially in a democracy, where, unlike tyranny, there is an accepted principle of legitimacy that breaks the inner will to resist.

If the noble and the sacred cannot find serious expression in democracy, its choiceworthiness becomes questionable. These are the arguments, the special pleading of the reactionaries, the disinherited of the ancien rgime.

Aristocracies hate and fear demagogues most of all, while democracies in their pure form hate and fear elitists most of all, because they are unjust, i.e., they do not accept the leading principle of justice in those regimes. Hence each regime discounts those who are most likely to recognize and compensate for its political and intellectual propensities, while it admires those who encourage them.

Flattery of the people and incapacity to resist public opinion are the democratic vices, particularly among writers, artists, journalists and anyone else who is dependent on an audience.

Nothing noble, sublime, profound, delicate, tasteful or even decent can find a place in such tableaux [as Rock music]. There is room only for the intense, changing, crude and immediate, which Tocqueville warned us would be the character of democratic art.

Democratic individualism does not officially provide much of a place for leaders in a regime where everyone is supposed to be his own master. Charisma both justifies leaders and excuses followers.

First radio, then television, have assaulted and overturned the privacy of the home, the real American privacy, which permitted the development of a higher and more independent life within democratic society.

The regime established here [in the U.S.] promised untrammeled freedom to reasonnot to everything indiscriminately, but to reason, the essential freedom that justifies the other freedoms, and on the basis of which, and for the sake of which, much deviance is also tolerated. An openness that denies the special claim of reason bursts the mainspring keeping the mechanism of this regime in motion.

The de-eroticization of the world, a companion to its disenchantment seems to result from a combination of causesour democratic regime and its tendencies toward leveling and self-protection, a reductionist-materialist science that inevitably interprets eros as sex, and the atmosphere generated by the death of God and of the subordinate god, Eros.

proclaimed a predictably democratic unwillingness to be disagreed with, and used that unwillingness to pull down the entire house.

refusal to abide by the rules of democracy

they saw in democracy something more than opportunities for self-interest and self-aggrandizement,

that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. …

It is comforting to see President Donald Trump as a crazy man, a one -off, an exception- not a reflection on us or on our democracy. But in ways I never anticipated, his rise was absolutely predictable and a mirror on our soul.

Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!

un primer agotamiento que, tal vez, habría podido ser definitivo, si las instituciones de la democracia no hubieran sucumbido al monstruoso, incomprensible síndrome de Estocolmo, que aún hoy, cuando termina la primera década del siglo XXI, les impide romper formal y expresamente sus vínculos con el general que la secuestró el 18 de julio de 1936

Knowledge is the most democratic source of power.

4. Knowledge is the most democratic source of power.