Democracy Quotes

The best way to protect your own freedom is to watch everybody else's back. That's the essence of community.

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.

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.

I'm tired of hearing it said that democracy doesn't work. Of course it doesn't work. We are supposed to work it.

Our Constitution is the envy of the world, as it should be for it is the grand design of the finest nation on earth.

Socialism is the completion of democracy, not the negation of it.

The function of a bourgeois democracy is to secure the consent of the masses to their own exploitation and oppression.

Once you don't vote your ideals ... that has serious undermining affects. It erodes the moral basis of our democracy.

The best defense against democracy is to distract people.

Nonviolence is not a weapon of the weak. It is a weapon of the strongest and bravest.

The great majority of women are more intelligent, better educated, and far more moral than multitudes of men whose right to vote no man questions.

Fundamentalists are not friends of democracy. And that includes your fundamentalists in the United States.

Without the truth of the people, politics degenerates into mere spectacle and democracy declines, leaving demagoguery and cynicism to fill the void.

There cannot be true democracy unless all citizens are able to participate fully in the lives of their country.

Democracy, republics: What do these words signify?

Democracy is mob rule with income taxes.

In a well-functioning democracy, citizens have the option of voting their political masters out of office. Not so in most companies.

Arbitrary rule has its basis, not in the strength of the state or the chief, but in the moral weakness of the individual, who submits almost without resistance to the domineering power.

Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy.

Democracy is when the people keep a government in check.

The separation of church and state has been a cornerstone of American democracy for over two hundred years. Getting rid of it was long overdue.

Everything is relative in this world, where change alone endures.

In a well-functioning democracy, the state constitution is considered more important than God's holy book, whichever holy book that may be, and God matters only in your private life.

Government leaders are amazing. So often it seems they are the last to know what the people want.

In a democracy, dissent is an act of faith.

Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.

Democracy is only an experiment in government, and it has the obvious disadvantage of merely counting votes instead of weighing them.

We need a revolution in development thinking and practice. Foreign aid, debt relief, family planning, democracy, education, and free markets have not succeeded.

That which we obtain too easily, we esteem too lightly.

Democracy is like a raft: It won't sink, but you will always have your feet wet.

It is probable that democracy owes more to nonconformity than to any other single movement.

Japan is not a Western democracy. The Japanese have kept their traditions, culture and heritage, but they have joined the community of free nations.

We need now to build a culture of genuine nonviolence and real democracy.

Corruption and hypocrisy ought not to be inevitable products of democracy, as they undoubtedly are today.

You can define how strong a democracy is by how its government treats ... the child of the state.

Science and democracy are the right and left hands of what I'll refer to as the move from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.

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?

One is actually the democracy here, you know, people are, people assume that this election means that there is democracy in Pakistan. There is no democracy.

All the blood is drained out of democracy - it dies - when only half the population votes.

Democracy is not just voting for your leaders; it's really premised upon ordinary citizens understanding the issues.

The worldwide, agelong struggle between fascism and democracy will not stop when the fighting ends in Germany and Japan.

The test of a democracy is not the magnificence of buildings or the speed of automobiles or the efficiency of air transportation, but rather the care given to the welfare of all the people.

Democracy cannot long survive when the people permit their lives to be dominated - economically or politically - by a powerful few.

Democracy is the opposite of totalitarianism, communism, fascism, or mobocracy.

With the tools of democracy, democracy was murdered and lawlessness made "legal." Raw power ruled, and its only real goal was to destroy all other powers besides itself.

We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

Capitalism and the market are presented as synonymous, but they are not. Capitalism is both the enemy of the market and democracy.

Democracy is a universal value

Public confidence in the integrity of the Government is indispensable to faith in democracy; and when we lose faith in the system, we have lost faith in everything we fight and spend for.

My objection to the death penalty is based on the idea that this is a democracy, and in a democracy the government is me, and if the government kills somebody then I'm killing somebody.