Best Quotes About Democracy (Top 100)
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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.’
Isaac Asimov
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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 in the holy name of liberty or democracy?
Mahatma Gandhi
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Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
James Bovard
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We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.
Abraham Lincoln
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The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
Winston Churchill
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If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.
Howard Zinn
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I swear to the Lord, I still can't see, why Democracy means, everybody but me.
Langston Hughes
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Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy.
Benito Mussolini
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Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.
John Adams
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Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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Education is a human right with immense power to transform. On its foundation rest the cornerstones of freedom, democracy and sustainable human development.
Kofi Annan
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Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!
Allen Ginsberg
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Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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He who allows oppression shares the crime.
Desiderius Erasmus
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We women of America tell you that America is not a democracy. Twenty million women are denied the right to vote.
Alice Paul
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When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.
Thomas Piketty
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As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.
Abraham Lincoln
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Through money, democracy becomes its own destroyer, after money has destroyed intellect.
Oswald Spengler
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The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.
Frederic Bastiat
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A man is no less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years.
Lysander Spooner
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The ballot is stronger than the bullet.
Abraham Lincoln
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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.
Bob Dylan
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LIBERTY! FREEDOM! DEMOCRACY!True anyhow no matter how manyLiars use those words.
Langston Hughes
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Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking.
Clement Attlee
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One of the necessary accompaniments of capitalism in a democracy is political corruption.
Upton Sinclair
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The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
Niels Bohr
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There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult - to begin a war and to end it.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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I lived in countries that had no democracy... so I don't find myself in the same luxury as you do. You grew up in freedom, and you can spit on freedom because you don't know what it is not to have freedom.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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It is a paradox that every dictator has climbed to power on the ladder of free speech. Immediately on attaining power each dictator has suppressed all free speech except his own.
Herbert Hoover
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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.
Fisher Ames
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I don't believe in democracy. In the second place, neither did our white forefathers. I believe, as they did, in a republican authoritarian republic with a limited electorate — just like the one the writers of our Constitution meant this country to be. When these white Christian patriots sat down to write the Declaration of Independence, there were no black citizens for them to worry about.
George Lincoln Rockwell
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In a democracy, the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority.
Edmund Burke
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I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy-but that could change.
Dan Quayle
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Sometimes democracy must be bathed in blood.
Augusto Pinochet
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Don't interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties.
Abraham Lincoln
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The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting.
Charles Bukowski
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The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits.
Plutarch
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The people made the Constitution, and the people can unmake it. It is the creature of their will, and lives only by their will.
John Marshall
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I believe that during these times, we should not forget that many sacrificed to regain our democracy. We cannot just keep quiet because that is what happened during martial law. Our dictator then believed that he can do anything to keep himself in power.
Corazon Aquino
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It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.
Tom Stoppard
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Democracy is worth dying for, because it's the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man.
Ronald Reagan
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Democracy and socialism are means to an end, not the end itself.
Jawaharlal Nehru
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The Constitution of the United States was made not merely for the generation that then existed, but for posterity- unlimited, undefined, endless, perpetual posterity.
Henry Clay
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Islam is not a race...Islam is simply a set of beliefs, and it is not 'Islamophobic' to say Islam is incompatible with liberal democracy.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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Corruption is uniquely reprehensible in a democracy because it violates the system's first principle, which we all learned back in the sunshiny days of elementary school: that the government exist to serve the public, not particular companies or individuals or even elected officials.
Thomas Frank
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There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship.
Ralph Nader
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I am not an icon of democracy. You are all, collectively, the icon of democracy.
Corazon Aquino
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The known propensity of a democracy is to licentiousness which the ambitious call, and ignorant believe to be liberty.
Fisher Ames
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The road to democracy may be winding and is like a river taking many curves, but eventually the river will reach the ocean.
Chen Shui-bian
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In a democracy everybody has a right to be represented, including the jerks.
Chris Patten
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Democracy arose from men's thinking that if they are equal in any respect, they are equal absolutely
Aristotle
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[D]emocracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man's life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few.
John Adams
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In whose delusional mind is democracy made 'better' by allowing wealthy people to control more of it?
Jon Stewart
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No man is good enough to govern another man without the other's consent.
Abraham Lincoln
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Monarchy degenerates into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into savage violence and chaos.
Polybius
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Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable - a most sacred right - a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.
Abraham Lincoln
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It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.
Corazon Aquino
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A democracy is ... accounted the meanest and worst of all forms of government.
John Winthrop
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A community is democratic only when the humblest and weakest person can enjoy the highest civil, economic, and social rights that the biggest and most powerful possess.
A. Philip Randolph
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Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what you think it is you want to hear.
Alan Coren
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I believe that during these times, we should not forget that many sacrificed to regain our democracy.
Corazon Aquino
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If we are to keep democracy, there must be a commandment: Thou shalt not ration justice.
Learned Hand
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We're not perfect, but we do have democracy.
Hugo Chavez
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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
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If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side.
Orson Scott Card
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When a just cause reaches its flood-tide...whatever stands in its way must fall before its overwhelming force.
Carrie Chapman Catt
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It is dangerous for a national candidate to say things that people might remember.
Eugene McCarthy
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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.
Adlai E. Stevenson
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Democracy is not about making speeches. It is about making committees work.
Alan Bullock
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The Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and again that they have the management skills of celery.
Dave Barry
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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
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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
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Only a knowledgeable, empowered and vocal citizenry can perform well in democracy.
David Brin
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A monoculture is not only Hollywood, but Americans trying to export democracy.
Bernardo Bertolucci
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Democracy is an experiment, and the right of the majority to rule is no more inherent than the right of the minority to rule; and unless the majority represents sane, righteous, unselfish public sentiment, it has no inherent right.
William Allen White
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Nobody should be allowed to tinker with democracy. We will not discontinue the good works of the past government.
Manmohan Singh
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Remember one thing about democracy. We can have anything we want and at the same time, we always end up with exactly what we deserve.
Edward Albee
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Democracy means not "I am as good as you are" but "You are as good as I am.".
Theodore Parker
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Let me reassure that the Kingdom of Cambodia a country with independence, neutrality, peace, freedom, democracy and human rights as you all have seen, shall be existing with no end.
Hun Sen
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Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
George Bernard Shaw
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Increase in the wealth per capita fosters democracy; but the latter, at least according to what we have been able to observe up to now, entails great destruction of wealth and even eventually dries up the sources of it. Hence it is its own grave-digger, it destroys what gave it birth.
Vilfredo Pareto
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The difference between Democrats and Republicans is: Democrats have accepted some ideas of Socialism cheerfully, while Republicans have accepted them reluctantly
Norman Thomas
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Democracies, unlike dictatorships, are forgiving and generous, but they cannot survive unless they fight.
Jalal Talabani
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American poetry has been part of a culture in conflict....We are a people tending toward democracy at the level of hope; at another level, the economy of the nation, the empire of business within the republic, both include in their basic premise the idea of perpetual warfare
Muriel Rukeyser
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You don't spread democracy with a barrel of a gun.
Helen Thomas
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Democracy is the only system capable of reflecting the humanist premise of equilibrium or balance. The key to its secret is the involvement of the citizen.
John Ralston Saul
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I don't have any formula for ousting a dictator or building democracy. All I can suggest is to forget about yourself and just think of your people. It's always the people who make things happen.
Corazon Aquino
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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.
Aristotle
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While democracy must have its organizations and controls, its vital breath is individual liberty.
Charles Evans Hughes
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My door will always be open to those who genuinely renounce violence and seek peaceful accommodation into our nascent democracy.
Jalal Talabani
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I think if people value democracy, they had damn well better get out and exercise their right to vote while their vote still means something.
Bob Weir
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Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
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Protection of private property is a fundamental right protected in a strong democracy.
Jim Ryun
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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
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To make democracy work, we must be a notion of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.
Louis L'Amour
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Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.
James Russell Lowell
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I like the noise of democracy.
James Buchanan
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Now the first step has to be taken, the step towards democracy. This step is full of risks, and requires trust on all sides. We don't know where it will lead. But if we just stand still, we will have no chance of escaping the violence.
Daniel Barenboim
Even More Democracy Quotes
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Now the first step has to be taken, the step towards democracy. This step is full of risks, and requires trust on all sides. We don't know where it will lead. But if we just stand still, we will have no chance of escaping the violence.
Daniel Barenboim
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Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.
Aristotle
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Because of our Congressional committee system, our government is closer to a gerontocracy than a democracy.
Charles Frankel
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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
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Democracy is a small hard core of common agreement, surrounded by a rich variety of individual differences.
James Bryant Conant
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All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.
Thomas Jefferson
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In a constitutional democracy the moral content of law must be given by the morality of the framer or legislator, never by the morality of the judge.
Robert Bork
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No America without democracy, no democracy without politics no politics without parties, no parties without compromise and moderation.
Clinton Rossiter
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However, I must say that I am very happy to see that we have such a positive result for our first referendum in our history and that gives me more confidence in Taiwan's democracy.
Chen Shui-bian
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I regard freedom of expression as the primary right without which one can not have a proper functioning democracy.
Lord Hailsham
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The citizen can bring our political and governmental institutions back to life, make them responsive and accountable, and keep them honest. No one else can.
John Gardner
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I do not believe that the values which the Western democracies consider essential to civilization can survive in a world rent by the international anarchy of nationalism and the economic anarchy of competitive enterprise.
Arthur Henderson
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But democracy isn't a state of perfection. It has to be improved, and that means constant vigilance.
Antonio Tabucchi
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Chinks in America's egalitarian armor are not hard to find. Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.
Florence King
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Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.
Sydney J. Harris
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The view that we hold in Iraq now is this - that democracy is associated with elections. I believe that elections are possible.
Ahmed Chalabi
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A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
Thomas Jefferson
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Democracy is being allowed to vote for the candidate you dislike least.
Robert Byrne
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How many black holes have we been up close and personal with?" Kosta countered. "All sorts of odd things happen near the event horizon, from huge tidal forces to variations in time. Personally, I'm voting on it having to do with gravity, either a polarization of the fields themselves or else something related to the time differential." I didn't know physics had become a democracy," Hanan murmered.
Timothy Zahn
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Too many people expect wonders from democracy, when the most wonderful thing of all is just having it.
Walter Winchell
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Democracy is 51% of the people taking away the rights of the other 49%.
Thomas Jefferson
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Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing. What is necessary now is one thing and one thing only that democracy become again democracy in action, not democracy accomplished and piled up in goods and gold.
Archibald MacLeish
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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
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Journalism is what maintains democracy. It's the force for progressive social change.
Andrew Vachss
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Democracy is the art of thinking independently together.
Alexander Meiklejohn
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We can no longer allow multinationals to parade as agents of progress and democracy in the newspapers, even as they subvert it at the workplace.
John Sweeney
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We're busy exporting Democracy abroad to Afghanistan and Iraq, which is fine, but what we really need to do is a better job at making our Democracy work right here at home
Senator John Kerry
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The U.S. Constitution is the basic framework for the greatest democracy on Earth. Some of my colleagues find it easy to amend it. I don't.
Byron Dorgan
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Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.
Oscar Wilde
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Don't ever dare to take your college as a matter of course - because, like democracy and freedom, many people you'll never know have broken their hearts to get it for you.
Alice Miller
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Who would have guessed that the monster of fraud was a democracy?
Andrew Davidson
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In its current form, globalization cannot be sustained. Democratic societies will not support it. Authoritarian leaders will fear to impose it.
John J. Sweeney
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Democracy is also a single ideology, and, like all such templates, it has its limits. what works in a legislature might not work in a corporation.
Fareed Zakaria
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Americans cannot teach democracy to the world until they restore their own.
William Greider
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After each war there is a little less democracy to save.
Brooks Atkinson
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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.
Aristotle
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Democracy is hypocrisy without limitation.
Iskander Mirza
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In a democracy, dissent is an act of faith.
J. William Fulbright
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Democracy, like any non-coercive relationship, rests on a shared understanding of limits.
Elizabeth Drew
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It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.
Winston Churchill
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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.
David Brooks
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We need to guarantee equal rights and civil rights and say that, here in America, workers have the right to organize - women have the right to choose - and justice belongs to everyone regardless of race or gender or sexual orientation
Senator John Kerry
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America has never seen itself as a national state like all others, but rather as an experiment in human freedom and democracy.
Brent Scowcroft
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The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.
Aristotle
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Democracy is essentially anti-authoritarian—that is, it not only demands the right but imposes the responsibility of thinking for ourselves.
John Dryden
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Democracy has proved only that the best way to gain power over people is to assure the people that they are ruling themselves. Once they believe that, they make wonderfully submissive slaves.
Joseph Sobran
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Democracy is good. I say this because other systems are worse.
Jawaharlal Nehru
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The United Nations is an uplifting experiment, dedicated to raising the standards of living in Africa , the consciences of democracies, and the price of prostitutes in New York
Frank Dane
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Democracy is an abuse of statistics.
Jorge Luis Borges
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The accursed power which stands on privilege( and goes with women, champagne and bridge)
Broke - and democracy resumed her reign ( which goes with bridge and women and champagne.
Hilaire Belloc
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Democracy is the government of the people, by the people, for the people.
Abraham Lincoln
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There is no greater breach of the public trust than knowingly misleading the country into war. In a democracy, we simply cannot tolerate the abuse of this trust by the government
Senator John Kerry
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The primal principle of democracy is the worth and dignity of the individual.
Edward Bellamy
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We in universities are not in the democracy business. What we do, when we're doing it, is teach and learn.
Stanley Fish
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Inflation is bringing us true democracy. For the first time in history, luxuries and necessities are selling at the same price.
Robert Orben
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One has the right to be wrong in a democracy.
Claude Pepper
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Democracy without morality is impossible.
Jack Kemp
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The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democrac
Alex Carey
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Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.
Benjamin Franklin
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It is easy to take liberty for granted when you have never had it taken from you.
M. Grundler
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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."
John Adams
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Democracy is the road to socialism.
Karl Marx
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Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.
G K Chesterton
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Puritanism, believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy.
James Russell Lowell
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It’s hard to believe that in the greatest democracy in the world, we need legislation to prevent the government from writing and paying for the news.
Senator John Kerry
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Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those others that have been tried from time to time.
Winston Churchill
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Democracy is the form of government that gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.
James Russell Lowell
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The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians.
Benjamin Disraeli
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In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country, capitalism triumphed over democracy.
Fran Lebowitz
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The greatest blessing of our democracy is freedom. But in the last analysis, our only freedom is the freedom to discipline ourselves.
Bernard Baruch
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There is no more important struggle for American democracy than ensuring a diverse, independent and free media. Free Press is at the heart of that struggle.
Bill Moyers
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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.
Walt Whitman
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The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the party that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.
Lord Acton
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In a democracy, the individual enjoys not only the ultimate power but carries the ultimate responsibility.
Norman Cousins
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A democracy is a government in the hands of men of low birth, no property, and vulgar employments.
Aristotle
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Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
E. B. White
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Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.
Aristotle
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Where some people are very wealthy and others have nothing, the result will be either extreme democracy or absolute oligarchy, or despotism will come from either of those excesses.
Aristotle
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The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.
Thomas Jefferson
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Without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure.
Ronald Reagan
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Democracy in Iraq will be an example that the Arab population will look to with great interest. And some Arab governments are concerned about democracy in Iraq, not because Iraq will be an aggressive state against them, but rather by the example that will be set by a successful federal democratic state in Iraq.
Ahmed Chalabi
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The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open
Gunter Grass
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Democracy shows not only its power in reforming governments, but in regenerating a race of men and this is the greatest blessing of free governments.
Andrew Jackson
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So long as we have enough people in this country willing to fight for their rights, we'll be called a democracy.
Roger Baldwin
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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
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The office of president is a bastardized thing, half royalty and half democracy that nobody knows whether to genuflect or spit.
Jimmy Breslin
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A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy but won't cross the street to vote in a national election
Bill Vaughn
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Democracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements.
Agnes Repplier
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No one is born a good citizen; no nation is born a democracy. Rather, both are processes that continue to evolve over a lifetime. Young people must be included from birth. A society that cuts off from its youth severs its lifeline.
Kofi Annan
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What Democratic congressmen do to their women staffers, Republican congressmen do to the country.
Bill Maher
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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.
Jimmy Carter
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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