Democracy Quotes
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Democracy cannot be imposed on any nation from the outside. Each society must search for its own path, and no path is perfect.
Barack Obama
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A nation can be one or the other, a democracy or an imperialist, but it can't be both. If it sticks to imperialism, it will, like the old Roman Republic, on which so much of our system was modeled, like the old Roman Republic, it will lose its democracy to a domestic dictatorship.
Chalmers Johnson
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And if you look at the experience of Turkey, for example, where the modern Islamists are in power and are doing fine - this is very good. Because democracy is not possible in the Muslim world without bringing in the Islamists or part of the Islamists who hate us now into these governments.
Yaroslav Trofimov
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There's much talk about how there can't be democracy in a region that has problems of illiteracy and poverty. But I bring a different idea to the table when I say, 'Guys, I come from India. I'm more optimistic coming from where I'm coming.'
Bobby Ghosh
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A democracy is a state in which the poor, gaining the upper hand, kill some and banish others, and then divide the offices among the remaining citizens equally, usually by lot.
Plato
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We know it because democracy alone, of all forms of government, enlists the full force of men's enlightened will.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
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No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.
Walter Lippmann
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Half of democracy is about just showing up.
Ralph Nader
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We can't have an intelligent foreign policy unless we have an intelligent public, because we're a democracy.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
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In the Civil Rights Act of 1965, we affirmed through law for every citizen in this land the most basic right of democracy-the right of a citizen to vote in an election in his country. In the five States where the Act had its greater impact, Negro voter registration has already more than doubled.
Lyndon B. Johnson
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Spain's constitution was introduced to cement democracy after Franco's dictatorship, but this government is exploiting its wording as a means to deny us our right to vote.
Carles Puigdemont
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We can conceive of various kinds of democracy. But my intention is not to treat of every kind, but of that only, 'wherein all, without exception, who owe allegiance to the laws of the country only, and are further independent and of respectable life, have the right of voting in the supreme council and of filling the offices of the dominion.'
Baruch Spinoza
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Therefore, until the day I die, I am going to do what I can, regardless of the cost to me, to try to stop this awful corruption that is destroying our beloved democracy.
John Jay Hooker
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If there were a nation of Gods, it would govern itself democratically. A government so perfect is not suited to men.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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Hatred is corrosive of a person's wisdom and conscience; the mentality of enmity can poison a nation's spirit, instigate brutal life and death struggles, destroy a society's tolerance and humanity, and block a nation's progress to freedom and democracy.
Liu Xiaobo
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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, and are right...The United States has never developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an intelligentsia really intelligent. Its history is simply a record of vacillations between two gangs of frauds.
H. L. Mencken
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The form of government is a democracy when the free, who are also poor and the majority, govern, and an oligarchy when the rich and the noble govern, they being at the same time few in number.
Aristotle
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This Constitution does not reflect the thoughts, hopes and aspirations of ordinary people. It does nothing for jobs or economic growth and widens further still the democratic deficit.
Nigel Farage
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It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.
Alexander Hamilton
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Here's to democracy. May we get the government we deserve.
Rick Mercer
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If you believe in democracy, the overreach of leaders is a good reminder that vigorous public debate and time-consuming due process are not only more fair and more just, but that over the long term they usually produce better government, too.
Chrystia Freeland
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Democracy, I think, has established itself firmly [In India] and, there is no doubt that, it is one of the irremovable things which we have achieved. But it is facing problems at every stage. I don't think that we can rest on our oars in the maintenance of democracy. Critical times are facing us. There are, there will be, crises, that we will have to face. So constant adjustments of even democracy to changing times, is necessary. But one thing is clear. The idea of democracy and institutions of democracy that we have built up, have survived the test of critical situations.
K. R. Narayanan
