Democracy Quotes
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We benefit, intellectually and personally, from the interplay between different selves, from the balance between long-term contemplation and short-term impulse. We should be wary about tipping the scales too far. The community of selves shouldn't be a democracy, but it shouldn't be a dictatorship, either.
Paul Bloom
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The Senate floor is and always has been the great arena of our democracy. I spent eight years in my younger life as a boxer, and sometimes when I enter the chamber, I think, 'This is the ring. The American people can see us here and listen to our arguments. This is where the fights matter.'
Jim Webb
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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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Every one of the aristocratic conspirators and would-be murderers claims to be an arch-patriot; every one of them insists that the war is being waged to make the world safe for democracy. What humbug! What rot! What false pretense! These... tyrants, these red-handed robbers and murderers, the "patriots," while the men who have the courage to stand face to face with them, speak the truth, and fight for their exploited victims - they are [called] the disloyalists and traitors. If this be true, I want to take my place side by side with the traitors in this fight.
Eugene V. Debs
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Iraq can emerge as a beacon of hope and democracy in the Middle East, and the world, with our help.
Chris Chocola
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On this significant occasion, all Koreans pay tribute to the heroes fallen in defense of freedom and democracy. I firmly believe that future generations in both countries will further advance the strong Republic of Korea-U.S. alliance into one befitting the spirit of the new age.
Lee Myung-bak
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I may be wrong in that, but not I think in putting the questions. In our modern democracy the government needs not a unanimous but a general support for war before it orders our forces to fight.
Douglas Hurd
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We started with pure parliamentary democracy at the Centre and in the States. Now this has been extended to the grassroots, though not in the Gandhian way, but according to the dream of Gandhiji, along that line. We have extended democracy to the grassroots, in the panchayati raj experiment and I think that has given solid support to our parliamentary system. Our parliamentary system could not have survived, without this basic grassroot support. But all these can function only in an atmosphere of social and economic progress and greater equality.
K. R. Narayanan
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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
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If you care for the quality of life in our American democracy, then you have to be for censorship.
Irving Kristol
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The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information.
Aldous Huxley
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Democracy appears to be safer and less liable to revolution than oligarchy. For in oligarchies there is the double danger of the oligarchs falling out among themselves and also with the people; but in democracies there is only the danger of a quarrel with the oligarchs. No dissension worth mentioning arises among the people themselves. And we may further remark that a government which is composed of the middle class more nearly approximates to democracy than to oligarchy, and is the safest of the imperfect forms of government.
Aristotle
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I always assume that democracy is the only good form of government, quite frankly, and democracy is always to be preferred.
Jeane Kirkpatrick
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When a political advocacy network hires a former CIA analyst and starts tailing save-our-parks activists, you know there's something terribly dangerous happening to our democracy.
David Brock
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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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Not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries. Each man is for ever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x × y is less than y.
H. L. Mencken
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Democracy is not tolerance. Democracy is a prescribed way of life erected on the premise that all men are created equal.
Chester Himes
