Democracy Quotes

There are many causes for the increasing concentration of wealth in a shrinking elite, but let us throw one more into the mix: the ever more aggressive appropriations of the attentional commons that we have allowed to take place.I think we need to sharpen the conceptually murky right to privacy by supplementing it with a right not to be addressed. This would apply not, of course, to those who address me face to face as individuals, but to those who never show their faces, and treat my mind as a resource to be harvested.

~ Matthew B. Crawford

One less desirable aspect of democracy is that it seems to require serious demonization of the enemy if the nation and public opinion are to be galvanized sufficiently to pay a serious price in blood or treasure at war.

~ Graham E. Fuller

As a Republic governed through the utilization of a democratic process, elections are necessary in order to give every United States citizen a voice in the governing of this great nation.

~ Byron Goines

While the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its identity as a living thing. As long as it endures, it struggles to use surrounding energies in its own behalf. It uses light, air, moisture, and the material of soil. To say that it uses them is to say that it turns them into means of its own conservation. As long as it is growing, the energy it expends in thus turning the environment to account is more than compensated for by the return it gets: it grows.

~ John Dewey

Privacy, self-reliance, choice -- all these can and must remina core American values. Yet so too must we remember that other core American value, the value of community. And we must redefine community more broadly to include not just our street or our tract, but our town, our metropolis, our region.

~ William Fulton

I was thinking about honour. It's a thing that changes doesn't it? I mean, a hundred and fifty years ago we would have had to fight if challenged. Now we'd laugh. There must have been a time when it was rather an awkward question.Yes. Moral theologians were never able to stop dueling -- it took democracy to do that.And in the next war, when we are completely democratic, I expect that it will be quite honourable for officers to leave their men behind. It'll be laid down in King's Regulations as their duty-- to keep a cadre going to train new men to take the place of prisoners.Perhaps men wouldn't take too kindly to being trained by deserters.Don't you think that they'd respect them more for being fly? I reckon our trouble is that we're in the awkward stage -- like a man challenged to a duel a hundred years ago.

~ Evelyn Waugh

Democracy is the worst insult to any society that is increasingly secular and growing in incivility for there it is more abused than used.

~ Newton G Kibiringi

DAD (Decide-Announce-Defend) remains the order of the day, with only a few inspiring models of EDD (Engage-Deliberate-Decide) available to us to demonstrate how very different things could be.

~ Johnathon Porritt

Democracy will be a reality when people will be rightly heard and valued. When in all policy making, in all big or small works, when state and government institutions will be accountable to people by keeping people in focus all the time who represented their power and empowered them. Democracy will be a reality when people will be valued more than flags, constitution, nationalism, patriotism and other symbolism.

~ William Gomes

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.

~ Abraham Lincoln

We are not educated well enough to perform the necessary act of intelligently selecting our leaders.

~ Walter Cronkite

The right of dissent, or, if you prefer, the right to be wrong, is surely fundamental to the existence of a democratic society. That’s the right that went first in every nation that stumbled down the trail toward totalitarianism.

~ Edward R. Murrow

The democratization of education is everyone's fight, everyone's right.

~ Sharad Vivek Sagar

One has to understand that equality ends up by infiltrating the world of politics as it does everywhere else. It would be impossible to imagine men forever unequal in one respect, yet equal in others; they must, in the end, come to be equal in all.Now, I am aware of only two means of establishing equality in the world of politics: rights have to be granted to every citizen or to none.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

... you can't start with a democracy. You have to work up through stuff like tyranny and monarchy first. That way people are so relived when they get to democracy that they hang on to it.

~ John Steinbeck

Democracy requires citizens to see things from one another's point of view, but instead were more and more enclosed in our own bubbles. Democracy requires a reliance on shared facts; instead were being offered parallel but separate universes.

~ Eli Pariser

Democracy, religion, education and terrorism have all become practicable norms all over the world – thanks to globalization

~ Tony Osborg

The very principle of democracy is founded on the possibility of making alternative choices. There is no longer a need for democracy, since ideology made the idea that there is no alternative acceptable. Adherence to a meta-social principle of superior rationality allows for the elimination of the necessity and possibility of choosing. The so-called principle of the rationality of markets exactly fills this function in the ideology of obsolescent capitalism. Democratic practice is thus emptied of all content in the way is open to what I have called low-intensity democracy - that is, to electoral buffooneries where parades of majorettes take the place of programs, to the society of the spectacle. Delegitimized by these practices, politics is undone, begins to drift and loses its potential power to give meaning and coherence to alternative societal projects.

~ Samir Amin

Rather than signalling the aspiration for system of checks and balances against absolute power, democracy become a euphemism for majority rule.

~ Peter Mansfield

This is why we apply the LCD Principle or Lowest Common Democracy. In short, this is social interaction based not on the best possible good, but on the least possible offense. Without saying so, the parties involved have entered into the following arrangement: What is the least we can all agree on and still get along? Of course, you can see this means no one is pleased.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Men in western governments who were themselves are often modern men, did not understand that freedom without chaos is not a magic formula which can be implanted anywhere. Rather, being modern men, it was their view that, because human race had evolved to a certain level by some such year as 1950, democracy could be planted anywhere from the outside. They had carefully closed their eyes to the fact that freedom without chaos had come forth from a Christian base. They did not understand that freedom without chaos could not be separated from its roots. (…) Many countries where democracy has been imposed from the outside or from top downward, authoritarianism has increasingly become the rule of the day

~ Francis A. Schaeffer

When trouble arise among faraway people, we remain tempted to hide behind the principle of national sovereignty, to mind our own business when it is convenient, and to think of democracy as a suit to be worn in fine weather but felt in the closet when clouds threaten.

~ Madeleine K. Albright

Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn't trust the evidence of one's eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice.

~ Edward Said

Any government's condemnation of terrorism is only credible if it shows itself to be responsive to persistent, reasonable, closely argued, non-violent dissent. And yet, what's happening is just the opposite. The world over, non-violent resistance movements are being crushed and broken. If we do not respect and honour them, by default we privilege those who turn to violent means.

~ Arundhati Roy

Democratic ideas cannot exist without the public spheres that make them possible.

~ Henry A. Giroux

But when the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people. If any of them should happen to propose a scheme of liberty, soberly limited, and defined with proper qualifications, he will be immediately outbid by his competitors, who will produce something more splendidly popular. Suspicions will be raised of his fidelity to his cause. Moderation will be stigmatized as the virtue of cowards; and compromise as the prudence of traitors; until, in hopes of preserving the credit which may enable him to temper, and moderate, on some occasions, the popular leader is obliged to become active in propagating doctrines, and establishing powers, that will afterwards defeat any sober purpose at which he ultimately might have aimed.

~ Edmund Burke

We live in a time that demands a discourse of both critique and possibility, one that recognizes that without an informed citizenry, collective struggle, and viable social movements, democracy will slip out of our reach and we will arrive at a new stage of history marked by the birth of an authoritarianism that not only disdains all vestiges of democracy but is more than willing to relegate it to a distant memory.

~ Henry A. Giroux

The foremost, or indeed the sole condition, which is required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community, is to love equality, or to get men to believe you love it. Thus, the science of despotism, which was once so complex, is simplified, and reduced, as it were, to a single principle.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

New Englanders began the Revolution not to institute reforms and changes in the order of things, but to save the institutions and customs that already had become old and venerable with them; and were new only to a few stupid Englishmen a hundred and fifty years behind the times.

~ Edward Pearson Pressey

Now, these eager and apprehensive men of small property constitute the class which is constantly increased by the equality of conditions. Hence, in democratic communities, the majority of the people do not clearly see what they have to gain by a revolution, but they continually and in a thousand ways feel that they might lose by one.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

People keep saying someone should fix the system, the system is corrupt. What they don’t get is; they are the system. It’s just like how people hate McDonald’s and Coca Cola. People say they are evil corporations, terrorists and ruining the health of the future but then, how are these brands live and running all over the world, making billions of dollars of profit every day? People still buy it, that’s how. The majority of the world is people who know something is bad for them but keep consuming it. If it’s so bad for you, why buy it? If the system is so bad, why do they vote for it? It’s the people who need to change not the leaders.

~ Thisuri Wanniarachchi

What makes the Arabs suitable candidates for democracy is their heritage as human beings, not their specific cultural or historical antecedents.

~ Gwynne Dyer

In my opinion the main evil of the present democratic institutions of the United States does not arise, as is often asserted in Europe, from their weakness, but from their overpowering strength; and I am not so much alarmed at the excessive liberty which reigns in that country as at the very inadequate securities which exist against tyranny.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal; but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or to wretchedness.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Internal democracy in schools is as important in order to ensure the true democratization of education.

~ Sharad Vivek Sagar

The sheriff listened uneasily to a sound, very uncommon at elections, of the populace expressing an opinion contrary to that of the lord of the soil.

~ Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

We have been gradually finding out that there is more democracy in letting a committee or representative ten to details than in making everybody's business nobody's business.

~ Edward Pearson Pressey

Men being, as has been said, by nature, all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent.

~ John Locke

The more I see of the representatives of the people, the more I admire my dogs.

~ Alphonse De Lamartine

[A]s long as individuals are compelled to rent themselves on the market to those who are willing to hire them, as long as their role in production is simply that of ancillary tools, then there are striking elements of coercion and oppression that make talk of democracy very limited, if meaningful.

~ Noam Chomsky