Democracy Quotes
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It is a paradox that far too few Americans participate in the wonderful ritual of democracy that we call Election Day. (Quote by - Brad Henry)
I pray that this council, which will probably be too late to save Iraq, will do what it can, which will be immeasurably strong in what it does in trying to save our democracy. (Quote by - Ed Asner)
Television is Democracy at it's ugliest. (Quote by - Paddy Chayefsky)
I believe in Democracy because it releases the energies of every human being. (Quote by - Woodrow Wilson)
Democracy is based on the conviction that man has the moral and intellectual capacity, as well as the inalienable right, to govern himself with reason and justice. (Quote by - Harry S. Truman)
Either we are all free, or we fail; democracy must belong to all of us. (Quote by - Dennis Chavez)
So long as we have enough people in this country willing to fight for their rights, we'll be called a democracy. (Quote by - Roger Baldwin)
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. (Quote by - Winston Churchill)
Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be. (Quote by - Sydney Harris)
It has been said that Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. (Quote by - Winston Churchill)
Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions--it only guarantees equality of opportunity. (Quote by - John Dryden)
Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few. (Quote by - George Bernard Shaw)
Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale. (Quote by - Gore Vidal)
Democracy is the government of the people, by the people, for the people. (Quote by - Abraham Lincoln)
My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular. (Quote by - Adlai Stevenson)
The love of democracy is that of equality. (Quote by - Charles Montesquieu)
For poets (bear the word) Half-poets even, are still whole democrats. (Quote by - Elizabeth Barrett Browning)
A democracy, the realistic observer is forced to conclude, is likely to be idealistic in its feelings about itself, but imperialistic about its practice. (Quote by - Irving Babbitt)
America is not just a democracy, it represents a certain culture of competitive mobility and personality aspirations, politics is not merely a clash of interests, but a clash of dreams. (Quote by - David Brooks)
Thus our democracy was from an early period the most aristocratic, and our aristocracy the most democratic. (Quote by - Thomas Babington Macaulay)
At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man, walking into the little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper. . . . (Quote by - Gilbert Keith Chesterton)
The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment. (Quote by - Robert Hutchins)
The world must be made safe for democracy. (Quote by - Woodrow Wilson)
Democracy is a process by which people are free to choose the man who will get the blame. (Quote by - Laurence J. Peter)
The flood of money that gushes into politics today is a pollution of democracy. (Quote by - Theodore H White)
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. (Quote by - H. L. Mencken)
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote! (Quote by - Benjamin Franklin)
Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor (Quote by - James Russell Lowell)
Caesarism is democracy without liberty. (Quote by - Taxile Delord)
Democracy is on trial in the world, on a more colossal scale than ever before. (Quote by - Charles Fletcher Dole)
Democracy is a small hard core of common agreement, surrounded by a rich variety of individual differences. (Quote by - James Bryant Conant)
Government that "substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.". (Quote by - George Bernard Shaw)
Democracy is cumbersome, slow and inefficient, but in due time, the voice of the people will be heard and their latent wisdom will prevail. (Quote by - Anonymous)
And wrinkles, the d--d democrats, won't flatter. (Quote by - George Gordon Noel Byron)
In Israel, free men and women are every day demonstrating the power of courage and faith. Back in 1948 when Israel was founded, pundits claimed the new country could never survive. Today, no one questions that. Israel is a land of stability and democracy in a region of tryanny and unrest. (Quote by - Ronald Reagan)
As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. (Quote by - Abraham Lincoln)
Democracy ... is a system of self-determination. It's the right to make the wrong choice. (Quote by - John Patrick)
After each war there is a little less democracy to save Once Around the Sun. (Quote by - Brooks Atkinson)
Of democracy, only the shoemaker can make the shoe. Only the wearer can tell if it fits. (Quote by - David Spitz)
Democracy is the opposite of totalitarianism, communism, fascism, or mobocracy. (Quote by - Frank Lloyd Wright)
Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary. (Quote by - Reinhold Niebuhr)
Democracy is good. I say this because other systems are worse. (Quote by - Jawaharlal Nehru)
Christianity is the root of all democracy, the highest fact in the rights of men. (Quote by - Novalis)
Democracy is a form of government in which it is permitted to wonder aloud what the country could do under first-class management. (Quote by - Senator Soaper)
Today we frankly recognize that democracy can be no more than aspiration, and have rule not so much by the people as by the cleverest people; not an aristocracy of birth, not a plutocracy of wealth, but a true meritocracy of talent. (Quote by - Michael Young)
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. (Quote by - Will Rogers)
Democracy means the opportunity to be everyone's slave. (Quote by - Karl Kraus)
Communism is not the opposite of democracy. Communism and capitalism are economic systems. Democracy and totalitarianism are political systems. There are democratic communists and totalitarian capitalists. (Quote by - David Spitz)
Democracy is a festival of mediocrity. (Quote by - E. M. Cioran)
Democracy means not "I am as good as you are," but "You are as good as I am." (Quote by - Theodore Parker)
Doing politics in a democracy costs money for campaigning and getting our message across and that's what we intend to do. (Quote by - Hazel Blears)
While democracy must have its organization and controls, its vital breath is individual liberty. (Quote by - Charles Evans Hughes)
People often say that, in a democracy, decisions are made by a majority of the people. Of course, that is not true. Decisions are made by a majority of those who make themselves heard and who vote a very different thing. (Quote by - Walter H. Judd)
Too many people expect wonders from democracy, when the most wonderful thing of all is just having it. (Quote by - Walter Winchell)
Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking. (Quote by - Clement Atlee)
Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. (Quote by - Oscar Wilde)
The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself- always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity. (Quote by - Jimmy Carter)
Democracy is the most vile form of government... democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention: have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property: and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. (Quote by - James Madison)
A monoculture is not only Hollywood, but Americans trying to export democracy. (Quote by - Bernardo Bertolucci)
Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated. (Quote by - G. K. Chesterton)
The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal. (Quote by - Aristotle)
The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open. (Quote by - Gunter Grass)
If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our Founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer. (Quote by - Barack Obama)
It is the greatest good to the greatest number which is the measure of right and wrong. (Quote by - Jeremy Bent ham)
Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people. (Quote by - Harry Emerson Fosdickc)
El Salvador is a democracy so it's not surprising that there are many voices to be heard here. Yet in my conversations with Salvadorans... I have heard a single voice. (Quote by - Dan Quayle)
I sow; my successor reaps. This is the majesty of democracy. (Quote by - Gloria Macapagal Arroyo)
A democracy in the Middle East must be more than a democracy in name only - it must live out its principles. (Quote by - Kay Granger)
The greatest blessing of our democracy is freedom. But in the last analysis, our only freedom is the freedom to discipline ourselves. (Quote by - Bernard Baruch)
Democracy, I do not conceive that ever God did ordain as a fit government either for church or commonwealth. If the people be governors, who shall be governed? (Quote by - John Cotton)
Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. (Quote by - John Adams)
Chinks in America's egalitarian armor are not hard to find. Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism. (Quote by - Florence King)
A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped. (Quote by - Norman Mailer)
We intend to lead a government of purpose and direction so that we can offer the people of this nation the opportunity to move forward to independence, democracy and equality. (Quote by - Alex Salmond)
Democracy is being allowed to vote for the candidate you dislike least (Quote by - Robert Byrne)
Democracy has not failed; the intelligence of the race has failed before the problems the race has raised (Quote by - Robert Hutchins)
Democracy... while it lasts is more bloody than either [aristocracy or monarchy]. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide. (Quote by - John Adams)
A free America... means just this: individual freedom for all, rich or poor, or else this system of government we call democracy is only an expedient to enslave man to the machine and make him like it. (Quote by - Frank Lloyd Wright)
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, are right (Quote by - H. L. Mencken)
This is not the age of pamphleteers. It is the age of the engineers. The spark-gap is mightier than the pen. Democracy will not be salvaged by men who talk fluently, debate forcefully and quote aptly. (Quote by - Lancelot Hogben)
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. (Quote by - Aristotle)
A perfect democracy is therefore the most shameless thing in the world. (Quote by - Edmund Burke)
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. (Quote by - Alfred Emanuel Smith)
The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians. (Quote by - Benjamin Disraeli)
Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it. (Quote by - J A Schumpeter)
A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy. (Quote by - Aldous Huxley)
Democracy is the form of government that gives every man the right to be his own oppressor. (Quote by - James Russell Lowell)
While democracy in the long run is the most stable form of government, in the short run, it is among the most fragile. (Quote by - Madeleine Albright)
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. (Quote by - Aeschines)
It's a place where we can conduct our democracy and get very large amounts of data to very large numbers of people. (Quote by - Frank James)
Democracy is necessary to peace and to undermining the forces of terrorism. (Quote by - Benazir Bhutto)
You are a slave, no liberty, no freedom, no democracy, no human rights. (Quote by - Jose Mourinho)
The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue, but are dupes of pretended patriots. (Quote by - Elbridge Gerry)
Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable (Quote by - Shimon Peres)
Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve. (Quote by - George Bernard Shaw)
The ship of Democracy, which has weathered all storms, may sink through the mutiny of those aboard. (Quote by - Grover Cleveland)
It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting. (Quote by - Alfred Emanuel Smith)
Eloquence is an engine invented to manage and wield at will the fierce democracy, and, like medicine to the sick, is only employed in the paroxysms of a disordered state. (Quote by - Montaigne)
In free countries, every man is entitled to express his opinions and every other man is entitled not to listen. (Quote by - G. Norman Collie)
The media is absolutely essential to the functioning of a democracy. It's not our job to cosy up to power: We're supposed to be the check and balance on government. (Quote by - Amy Goodman)
Democ'acy gives every man A right to be his own oppressor. (Quote by - James Russell Lowell)
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around. (Quote by - Gilbert Keith Chesterton)
If we have a chance of succeeding and bringing stability and democracy to Iraq, it will mean learning from our mistakes, not denying them and not ignoring them. (Quote by - Carl Levin)
You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution. (Quote by - Gilbert K. Chesterton)
Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates. (Quote by - Alfred Emanuel Smith)
Democracy is the name we give the people whenever we need them. (Quote by - Marquis De Flers)
Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage. (Quote by - H. L. Meneken)
Defender and promoter of freedom and democracy. (Quote by - Silvio Berlusconi)
Democracy is essentially anti-authoritarian--that is, it not only demands the right but imposes the responsibility of thinking for ourselves. (Quote by - John Dryden)
It would be folly to argue that the people cannot make political mistakes. They can and do make grave mistakes. They know it, they pay the penalty, but compared with the mistakes which have been made by every kind of autocracy they are unimportant. (Quote by - Calvin Coolidge)
Democracy is the road to socialism. (Quote by - Karl Marx)
No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people. (Quote by - Walter Lippmann)
Everybody's for democracy in principle. It's only in practice that the thing gives rise to stiff objections. [True, which is why we never have in practice anything like true democracy] (Quote by - Meg Greenfield)
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. (Quote by - Aristotle)
To one that advised him to set up a democracy in Sparta, "Pray," said Lycurgus, "do you first set a democracy in your own house." (Quote by - Lycurgus)
One has the right to be wrong in a democracy. (Quote by - Claude Pepper)
Few businessmen are capable of being in politics, they don't understand the democratic process, they have neither the tolerance or the depth it takes. Democracy isn't a business. (Quote by - Malcolm Forbes)
In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock! (Quote by - Orson Welles)
The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not. (Quote by - Thomas Jefferson)
Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven. (Quote by - H. L. Mencken)
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. (Quote by - D H Lawrence)
The fact is that democracy brings with it a serious element of responsibility and all parties have to accept that fact to move forward. (Quote by - Daniel Greenberg)
A democracy is a volcano which conceals the fiery materials of its own destruction. These will produce an eruption and carry desolation in their way. (Quote by - Fisher Ames)
I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy - but that could change. (Quote by - Dan Quayle)
In a democracy, the opposition is not only tolerated as constitutional, but must be maintained because it is indispensable. (Quote by - Walter Lippmann)
It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive. (Quote by - Thomas Mann)
A pure democracy is a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person. (Quote by - James Madison)
Democracy is too good to share with just anybody. (Quote by - Nigel Rees)
Canadian Politician, Quotiation circa 2000 (Quote by - William Peter Randall)
All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy. (Quote by - Alfred E. Smith)
God has endowed man with inalienable rights, among which are self-government, reason, and conscience. Man is properly self-governed only when he is guided rightly and governed by his Maker, divine Truth and Love. (Quote by - John Dryden)
If you want to understand democracy, spend less time in the library with Plato, and more time in the buses with people. (Quote by - Simeon Strunsky)
What men value in the world is not rights, but privileges. (Quote by - H. L. Mencken)
Democracy is a political method, that is to say, a certain type of institutional arrangement for arriving at political - legislative and administrative - decisions and hence incapable of being an end in itself. (Quote by - J A Schumpeter)
There is no democracy in physics. We can't say that some second-rate guy has as much right to opinion as Fermi (Quote by - Luis Walter Alvarez)
A republic properly understood is a sovereignty of justice, in contradistinction to a sovereignty of will. (Quote by - Reinhold Niebuhr)
In a democracy, the individual enjoys not only the ultimate power but carries the ultimate responsibility. (Quote by - Norman Cousins)
Our democracy, our constitutional framework is really a kind of software for harnessing the creativity and political imagination for all of our people... The American democratic system was an early political version of Napster. (Quote by - Al Gore)
I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows. (Quote by - Katherine Graham)
