Democracy famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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I take a grave view of the press. It is the weak slat under the bed of democracy
-- A. J. Liebling -
Campaign may invite a certain skepticism about democracy, but it will surely restore your faith in cinema verite.
-- A. O. Scott -
Those who deplore our militants, who exhort patience in the name of a false peace, are in fact supporting segregation and exploitation. They would have social peace at the expense of social and racial justice. They are more concerned with easing racial tension than enforcing racial democracy.
-- A. Philip Randolph -
We want the full works of citizenship with no reservations. We will accept nothing less . . . This condition of freedom, equality, and democracy is not the gift of gods. It is the task of men, yes, men, brave men, honest men, determined men.
-- A. Philip Randolph -
Winning Democracy for the Negro is winning the war for Democracy
-- A. Philip Randolph -
You measure a democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists.
-- Abbie Hoffman -
Democracy is not something you believe in or a place to hang your hat, but it's something you do. You participate. If you stop doing it, democracy crumbles.
-- Abbie Hoffman -
My critique of democracy begins and ends with this point. Kids must be educated to disrespect authority or else democracy is a farce.
-- Abbie Hoffman -
Democracy is constructed like an edifice, freedom by freedom, right by right, until it reaches its snapping point.
-- Abdoulaye Wade -
Democracy can be sustained and developed only by people who understand its essence.
-- Abdurrahman Wahid -
I told the students that we can exert pressure without resorting to violence, and that we can move towards democracy without violence; that way, God will allow it.
-- Abdurrahman Wahid -
growth requires purposeful division. Responsible dissent is the essence of democracy.
-- Abigail McCarthy -
Democracy is "government of, by and for the people".
-- Abraham Lincoln -
The goal of a great democracy should be fulfillment, not ease. It should be adequacy, not serenity.
-- Abram L. Sachar -
We have shown that Islam can rule the world perfectly for 14 centuries, and during this time of Muslim power we did not borrow ideas like democracy from others, so why do we need to learn democracy from them now?
-- Abu Bakar Bashir -
We have declared a bitter war against the principle of democracy and all those who seek to enact it.
-- Abu Musab al-Zarqawi -
As a rule, dictatorships guarantee safe streets and terror of the doorbell. In democracy the streets may be unsafe after dark, but the most likely visitor in the early hours will be the milkman.
-- Adam Michnik -
We will not let terrorists change our way of life; we will not live in fear; and we will not undermine the civil liberties that characterize our Democracy.
-- Adam Schiff -
As citizens of this democracy, you are the rulers and the ruled, the law-givers and the law-abiding, the beginning and the end.
-- Adlai E. Stevenson -
Democracy, the deceitful theory that the Jew would insinuate - namely, that theory that all men are created equal.
-- Adolf Hitler -
By rejecting the authority of the individual and replacing it by the numbers of some momentary mob, the parliamentary principle of majority rule sins against the basic aristocratic principle of Nature...
-- Adolf Hitler -
It is acknowledged, namely, that there are in the world three forms of government, autocracy, oligarchy, and democracy: autocracies and oligarchies are administered according to the tempers of their lords, but democratic states according to established laws.
-- Aeschines -
Be assured, fellow citizens, that in a democracy it is the laws that guard the person of the citizen and the constitution of the state, whereas the despot and the oligarch find their protection in suspicion and in armed guards.
-- Aeschines -
We cannot make the world safe for democracy unless we also make the world safe for diversity
-- Aga Khan IV -
We have forgotten that democracy must live as it thinks and think as it lives.
-- Agnes Meyer Driscoll -
Democracy, material wealth, and universal education are the soil upon which modernism exists.
-- Ai Weiwei -
You cannot bring democracy to a country by attacking it.
-- Akbar Ganji -
The modern infrastructures that exists in the world all contribute to the advancement of human rights and democracy.
-- Akbar Ganji -
In our political system, money is power. And that means a few can have a lot more power than the rest. That's bad news for everyone else - and for our democracy itself.
-- Al Franken -
Take it from me - every vote counts. In our Democracy, every vote has power. And never forget - that power is yours. Don't let anyone take it away or talk you into throwing it away. And let's make sure that this time every vote is counted.
-- Al Gore -
All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.
-- Al Smith -
In order to improve democracy, then, it's necessary to change the people, as Brecht ironically proposed.
-- Alain Badiou -
The highest measure of democracy is neither the 'extent of freedom' nor the 'extent of equality', but rather the highest measure of participation.
-- Alain de Benoist -
Public opinion is presumptively an input to policy formation in a democracy because politicians respond to it or at least are believed to respond [to it].
-- Alan Blinder -
Democracy is not about making speeches. It is about making committees work.
-- Alan Bullock -
Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what you think it is you want to hear.
-- Alan Coren -
Most liberal democracies don't try to figure out what the truth is.
-- Alan Dershowitz -
Laws are important precisely because in a democracy they reflect the attitudes and aspirations of those they govern.
-- Alan Dershowitz -
Democracy is not the law of the majority but the protection of the minority.
-- Albert Camus -
Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.
-- Albert Camus -
The thinking it took to get us into this mess is not the same thinking that is going to get us out of it.
-- Albert Einstein -
What we are doing in fact is recovering and progressing and sustaining the recovery of our democracy.
-- Alberto Fujimori -
Dictatorships are one-way streets. Democracy boasts two-way traffic.
-- Alberto Moravia -
Generalized intelligence and mental alertness are the most powerful enemies of dictatorship and at the same time the basic conditions of effective democracy.
-- Aldous Huxley -
Democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralization of power.
-- Aldous Huxley -
I knew my affection for the Philippines was equally as telling: a democracy on paper, apparently well ordered, regularly subverted by irrational chaos. A place where I'd felt instantly at home.
-- Alex Garland -
Democracy is an experimental system. I like it when states try out new ideas. I think we ought to expand, not contract, our federalist system.
-- Alex Tabarrok -
Democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largesse out of the public treasure. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefit from the public treasury, with the result that democracy always collapses over a loose fiscal policy, always to be followed by a dictatorship, and then a monarchy.
-- Alexander Fraser Tytler -
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury.
-- Alexander Fraser Tytler -
To declare the Cold War over, and declare democracy has won out over totalitarianism, is a measure of arrogance and wrong-headedness.
-- Alexander Haig -
If we incline too much to democracy, we shall soon shoot into a monarchy.
-- Alexander Hamilton -
The practice of arbitrary imprisonments have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.
-- Alexander Hamilton -
I don't believe in democracy by bayonet.
-- Alexander Lebedev -
Anybody who cares about the functioning of democracy should be concerned about the blurring of lines between public and private interests.
-- Alexander Stille -
I'm tired of hearing it said that democracy doesn't work. Of course it doesn't work. We are supposed to work it.
-- Alexander Woollcott -
The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colours breaking through.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville -
Austerity is not part of the European treaties; democracy and the principle of popular sovereignty are.
-- Alexis Tsipras -
The experience of previous years leads to one conclusion: there is one morality in politics and another for economy. In the years since 1989, the morality of the economy has fully prevailed over the ethics of politics and democracy.
-- Alexis Tsipras -
Greece gave democracy to the rest of the world.
-- Alexis Tsipras -
Students should not only be trained to live in a democracy when they grow up; they should have the chance to live in one today.
-- Alfie Kohn -
I think it is something that is so important, to be very aware of the direction in which the 21st century is going with all this blind faith in democracy. And by the way, I am not against democracy - I am against the blind faith that is being put in democracy.
-- Alfonso Cuaron -
Representative democracy frequently manifests a disconnect between parliamentarians and the people, so that parliamentarians have agendas that do not correspond with the wishes of the electorate. This has led in many countries to apathy, cynicism and large-scale absenteeism in elections. What is needed is not only parliaments, but parliamentarians who genuinely represent the wishes of the electorate.
-- Alfred-Maurice de Zayas -
Democracy is not the end product, but the means to the end, which is the enjoyment of human rights by all.
-- Alfred-Maurice de Zayas -
We women of America tell you that America is not a democracy. Twenty million women are denied the right to vote.
-- Alice Paul -
How much ... did the volume of disease in a nation account for its spirit? If so, the eradication of sickness, as far as it was possible, was a responsibility a democracy must assume for its people.
-- Alice Tisdale Hobart -
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.
-- Allan Bloom -
Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!
-- Allen Ginsberg -
Investigative reporting is the bone structure without which the journalistic body collapses. The Center for Public Integrity's constant and consistently enterprising investigative work is an invaluable contribution not only to journalism, but to society and to a healthy democracy
-- Alma Guillermoprieto -
No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.
-- Amartya Sen -
A lot of young poets today, from what I've heard and experienced, can't get their heads past George W. Bush, and I've heard so many poems about this democracy and this era of politics that I'm kind of bored by it
-- Amber Tamblyn -
Democracy is four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
-- Ambrose Bierce -
Revolution, n. In politics, an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.
-- Ambrose Bierce -
The only distinction that democracies reward is a high degree of conformity.
-- Ambrose Bierce -
The reality is that we are hated not because of our democracy, freedoms, and generous social security system; rather, we are hated because of our involvement in foreign conflicts and quarrels that were never our concern.
-- Amir Butler -
In every well-governed state wealth is a sacred thing; in democracies it is the only sacred thing.
-- Anatole France -
Communism destroys democracy. Democracy can also destroy Communism.
-- Andre Malraux -
There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.
-- Andrew Carnegie -
The Republic may not give wealth or happiness, she has not promised these. It is the freedom to pursue these, not their realization, we can claim.
-- Andrew Carnegie -
Who would have guessed that the monster of fraud was a democracy?
-- Andrew Davidson -
The life of a republic lies certainly in the energy, virtue, and intelligence of its citizens.
-- Andrew Johnson -
What modernity requires is not that you cease living according to your faith, but that you accept that others may differ and that therefore politics requires a form of discourse that is reasonable and accessible to believer and non-believer alike. This religious restraint in politics is critical to the maintenance of liberal democracy.
-- Andrew Sullivan -
Journalism is what maintains democracy. It's the force for progressive social change.
-- Andrew Vachss -
Some kind of affirmative action is important in a democracy and for economic competitiveness and national security. The Army was the first to realize that you had to have desegregation of a military to have it working properly.
-- Andrew Young -
The key of the success of Studio 54 is that it’s a dictatorship at the door and a democracy on the dance floor.
-- Andy Warhol -
To all the revolutionaries fighting to throw off the yoke of tyranny around the world: look at British democracy. Is that what you want?
-- Andy Zaltzman -
In Germany democracy died by the headman's axe. In Britain it can be by pernicious anaemia.
-- Aneurin Bevan -
The worst thing I can say about democracy is that it has tolerated the Right Honorable Gentleman for four and a half years.
-- Aneurin Bevan -
I believe profoundly in the possibilities of democracy, but democracy needs to be emancipated from capitalism. As long as we inhabit a capitalist democracy, a future of racial equality, gender equality, economic equality will elude us.
-- Angela Davis -
When Bush says democracy, I often wonder what he's referring to.
-- Angela Davis -
We still have a lot of work to do when it comes to democracy. We have political democracy but not economic democracy.
-- Anker Jørgensen -
Global markets must be balanced by global values such as respect for human rights and international law, democracy, security and sustainable economic and environmental development.
-- Anna Lindh -
democracy is dying. We are ruled by faceless bureaucrats and lecherous puritans. ... You think about it. 'All right for me but not for you' is their philosophy.
-- Anne Stevenson -
Taiwan's democracy has grown very fast and we enjoy a certain degree of freedom, as other developed democracies like the United States.
-- Annette Lu -
In 2005, I founded the Democratic Pacific Union, an international organization of 28 democratic countries to promote democracy, peace and prosperity in the Pacific region.
-- Annette Lu -
Taiwan matters because of its vital role in spreading democracy in East Asia. Taiwan matters because of its strategic importance to promote peace in the Pacific region.
-- Annette Lu -
Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.
-- Anthony Burgess -
Having gathered all power to itself, [the State] has become the sole focus of all conflict, and it must construct totalitarian defences to match its total exposure.
-- Anthony de Jasay
