Democracy Quotes
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I'm struck by how laughter connects you with people. It's almost impossible to maintain any kind of distance or any sense of social hierarchy when you're just howling with laughter. Laughter is a force for democracy.
John Cleese
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If the American people really tire of democracy and want to make a trial of Fascism, I shall be the last person to object. But if that is their mood, then they had better proceed toward their aim by changing the Constitution and not by forgetting it.
H. L. Mencken
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A democracy, the realistic observer is forced to conclude, is likely to be idealistic in its feelings about itself, but imperialistic about its practice.
Irving Babbitt
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The United Kingdom has committed the heresy of breaking the chains of the E.U. This is a signal victory for democracy. It is a slap in the face to the European system which was increasingly based on fear, blackmail, and lies.
Marine Le Pen
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With few exceptions, democracy has not brought good government to new developing countries...What Asians value may not necessarily be what Americans or Europeans value. Westerners value the freedoms and liberties of the individual. As an Asian of Chinese cultural backround, my values are for a government which is honest, effective and efficient.
Lee Kuan Yew
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Democracy is not about making speeches. It is about making committees work.
Alan Bullock
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The transition from tyranny to democracy is very hard. The Syrian people have to handle this in a way that works in Syria. And the brutality of the Assad regime is unacceptable.
Jacob Lew
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We can enhance democracy by making it in line with its original vision. Read the dollar bill - E pluribus unum, out of many, one; novus ordo seclorum, a new order of the ages. That's democracy.
Barbara Marx Hubbard
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By helping readers understand these mechanics, I hope they will appreciate why freedom is for everyone, why it is essential for our security and why the free world plays a critically important role in advancing democracy around the globe.
Natan Sharansky
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You can't be a full participant in our democracy if you don't know our history.
David McCullough
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As even a democracy like the United States has shown, waging war can benefit a leader in several ways: it can rally citizens around the flag, it can distract them from bleak economic times, and it can enrich a country's elites.
Samantha Power
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Also, an area that interests me – and it will probably take years to state what I mean – is the period of the rise of democracy, with Tom Paine, which is around the turn of the 18th century into the 19th.
Fiona Shaw
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The cement in our whole democracy today is the worker who makes $ 15 an hour. He's the guy who will buy a house and a car and a refrigerator. He's the oil in the engine.
Lee Iacocca
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I think the Iraqi people have shown extraordinary patience and courage in the last few months. They have really put a political system on the way to success, to a real democracy here.
Paul Bremer
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But the Western countries that link their partnership with the poorest countries with respect for democracy also have to consider that they have obligations towards these countries.
Omar Bongo
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My submission to you is we're fighting the war on terror not overseas but in our own streets, and we'd be spending vast more fortunes to try to be a defensive country to protect ourselves rather than an offensive country to spread democracy wherever people yearn for it.
Johnny Isakson
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The challenge as we saw in the Nigerian project was to restructure the economy decisively in the direction of a modern free market as an appropriate environment for cultivation of freedom and democracy and the natural emergence of a new social order.
Ibrahim Babangida
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Standards of conduct appropriate to civil society or the workings of a democracy cannot be purely and simply applied to the Church.
Pope Benedict XVI
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I think that the failure of newspaper competition in a community is a very serious handicap to the dissemination of the knowledge that the citizens need to participate in a democracy.
Walter Cronkite
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A free and truly independent press - fiercely independent when necessary - is the red beating heart of freedom and democracy.
Dan Rather
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And a democracy can't exist without free speech and the right to assemble. And that's what Americans tend to forget. And they're born into a culture where they take all of their freedoms for granted.
Larry Flynt
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I think the success of democracy is not really police security; it's the presence of a broad middle class. The stronger the middle class of a people is, the less you have to worry about one group coming in and exploiting the democratic process for its own ends.
Abdullah II of Jordan
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Because of my parents' love of democracy, we came to America after being driven twice from our home in Czechoslovakia - first by Hitler and then by Stalin.
Madeleine Albright
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This is the 21st-century paradox: Even as political democracy has become the intellectual default mode for much of the world, the private sector usually trumps the public one when it comes to accommodating consumer choice.
Chrystia Freeland