Quotes About Voting

The right of voting for persons charged with the execution of the laws that govern society is inherent in the word liberty, and constitutes the equality of personal rights. But even if that right (of voting) were inherent in property, which I deny, the right of suffrage would still belong to all equally, because, as I have said, all individuals have legitimate birthrights in a certain species of property. -Agrarian Justice

It is impossible to find any equivalent counterpoise for the right of suffrage, because it is alone worthy to be its own basis, and cannot thrive as a graft, or an appendage. -Agrarian Justice

But when we humans vote for candidates to take away the other guy's benefits—'but keep your fucking hands off my Medicare'—we need to lie to ourselves. It makes us special.

I like the noise of democracy.

By definition, the person who learns enough to become the nominee is almost certainly the best person for the general election.

Do not tell somebody how to vote, just go up to them and tell them what Fahrenheit 9/11 meant to you. Fahrenheit will probably not win an Academy Award, but if you put it first on your list, it will become a nominee.

I think that if the Democratic Party focuses on nominating who will make the best president, that's going to be a critical mistake. There's only one question at the end of the day, and that question is, Can the potential nominee beat Donald Trump?

I ask Hoosiers to come together and vote for Barack Obama to be our next President.

I think there is an obligation - not just a right, but an obligation - to vote.

There never was a democracy yet where the people didn't vote themselves into oblivion.

You know, people should be able to vote free of any harassment, intimidation, obstacles, et cetera.

If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side. 

If American women increase their voting turnout by ten percent, I think we would see an end to all of the budget cuts in programs benefiting women and children.

Talk to your neighbors. Make them promise to vote. Make them promise to take the country back from the torturers and thugs. The people who laughed at my friends as they lay fresh in their graves at the bottom of the harbor. Make them promise to talk to their neighbors. Most of us choose none of the above. It's not working. You have to choose — choose freedom.

After all, wasn't the system the problem? No matter who we voted for, the government always seemed to win. What was the point of living out my little fantasy of democratic change and Justice when the real action was being fought out in secrecy, with Anonymous envelopes of cash, encrypted Whispers, secret bunkers, and secret deals?

I was six years old when Congress gave women the right to vote. I've been waiting for you ever since.

We say easily, for instance, 'The ignorant ought not to vote.' We would say, 'No civilized state should have citizens too ignorant to participate in government,' and this statement is but a step to the fact: that no state is civilized which has citizens too ignorant to help rule it.

Negroes must insist continually, in season and out of season, that voting is necessary to modern manhood, that color discrimination is barbarism, and that black boys need education as well as white boys.

We argued, as we thought then rather logically, that no social class was so good, so true, and so disinterested as to be trusted wholly with the political destiny of its neighbors; that in every state the best arbiters of their own welfare are the persons directly affected; consequently that it is only by arming every hand with a ballot,—with the right to have a voice in the policy of the state,—that the greatest good to the greatest number could be attained.

Away with the black man's ballot, by force or fraud

Negro voting rights were politically necessary for Grant and his party. Before the Civil War, the Republicans were exclusively a Northern party; but afterward, they would have to win elections in the South, state and federal, lest the Southern-based Democratic Party retake control of the federal government and reverse the Union victory. And the Republicans could not do that unless Negroes, their natural—and most numerous—constituency, were free to vote.

For monarchy to work, one man must be wise. For democracy to work, a majority of the people must be wise. Which is more likely?

To the best of my knowledge he had never even voted, and then someone must have told him something about politics, some convincing lie, or he read something—it's usually one or the other—and he stopped being funny and turned mean and silent. That wasn't so bad, but then he stopped being silent.

Most people know more about their own elected officials via smear campaigns than they know about their own neighbors via conversation, and many know more about the celebrities via tabloids than they know about their own representatives via voting booklets.