Democracy Quotes
1.Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a President and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country.
2.The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control – ‘indoctrination’, we might say – exercised through the mass media.
3.Exporting this Western model of democracy in countries that don’t want it or are not ready creates disasters.
4.Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.
5.Without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure.
6.The objective I propose is quite simple to state: to foster the infrastructure of democracy – the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities – which allows a people to choose their own way to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means
7.Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.
8.The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
9.We women of America tell you that America is not a democracy. Twenty million women are denied the right to vote.
10.Democracy is an abuse of statistics.
11.America’s support for human rights and democracy is our noblest export to the world.
12.Democracy is worth dying for, because it’s the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man.
13.The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.
14.Democracy… is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder; and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike
15.Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.
16.If we desire a society of peace, then we cannot achieve such a society through violence. If we desire a society without discrimination, then we must not discriminate against anyone in the process of building this society. If we desire a society that is democratic, then democracy must become a means as well as an end.
17.If the people of Utah shall peacefully form a State Constitution tolerating polygamy, will the Democracy admit them into the Union?
18.Israel was not created in order to disappear – Israel will endure and flourish. It is the child of hope and the home of the brave. It can neither be broken by adversity nor demoralized by success. It carries the shield of democracy and it honors the sword of freedom.
19.There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
20.Democracies are indeed slow to make war, but once embarked upon a martial venture are equally slow to make peace and reluctant to make a tolerable, rather than a vindictive, peace.
21.It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.
22.Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.
23.Optimism comes less easily today, not because democracy is less vigorous, but because democracy’s enemies have refined their instruments of repression.
24.Democracy passes into despotism.
25.Tyranny naturally arises out of democracy.
26.If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in government to the utmost.
27.What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?
28.Fifty years of isolating Cuba had failed to promote democracy, setting us back in Latin America. That’s why we restored diplomatic relations, opened the door to travel and commerce, and positioned ourselves to improve the lives of the Cuban people.
29.Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
30.Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
31.Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.
32.Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.
33.On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does.
34.Our brand of democracy is hard. But I can promise that a year from now, when I no longer hold this office, I’ll be right there with you as a citizen – inspired by those voices of fairness and vision, of grit and good humor and kindness that have helped America travel so far.
35.Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
36.Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
37.For any young democracy, the most difficult but important step is burying the legacy of tyranny and establishing an economy and a government and institutions that abide by the rule of law. Every country faces challenges to the rule of law, including my own.
38.Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.
39.Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.
40.No party has a monopoly on wisdom. No democracy works without compromise. But when Governor Romney and his allies in Congress tell us we can somehow lower our deficit by spending trillions more on new tax breaks for the wealthy – well, you do the math. I refuse to go along with that. And as long as I’m President, I never will.
41.Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
42.Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.
43..I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
44.Corruption is a cancer: a cancer that eats away at a citizen’s faith in democracy, diminishes the instinct for innovation and creativity; already-tight national budgets, crowding out important national investments. It wastes the talent of entire generations. It scares away investments and jobs.
45.In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme.
46.The spirit of democracy is not a mechanical thing to be adjusted by abolition of forms. It requires change of heart.
47.Democracy don’t rule the world, You’d better get that in your head; This world is ruled by violence, But I guess that’s better left unsaid.
48.Our public life withers when only the most extreme voices get attention. Most of all, democracy breaks down when the average person feels their voice doesn’t matter; that the system is rigged in favor of the rich or the powerful or some narrow interest.
49.China has to go along with world trends. That’s democracy, liberty, individual freedom. China sooner or later has to go that way. It cannot go backward.
50.Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
51.The more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else.
52.I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.
53.Elections remind us not only of the rights but the responsibilities of citizenship in a democracy.
54.I believe the Republicans have never thought that democracy was anything but a tribal myth.
55.Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.
56.Democracy is the road to socialism.
57.When everyone agrees to a single solution and a single plan, there’s nothing more efficient in the world than an efficient democracy.
58.Democracy is not so much a form of government as a set of principles.
59.My own ideals for the university are those of a genuine democracy and serious scholarship. These two, indeed, seem to go together.
60.The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.
