Democracy Quotes
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America's corporate and political elites now form a regime of their own and they're privatizing democracy. All the benefits - the tax cuts, policies and rewards flow in one direction: up.
Bill Moyers
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Anchor Turkey in the West and we gain a beacon of democracy and modernity - a country with a Muslim majority - which will be a shining example across the whole of its neighboring region,
Jack Straw
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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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The Spartans were a paradoxical people. They were the biggest slave owners in Greece. But at the same time, Spartan women had an unusual level of rights. It's a paradox that they were a bunch of people who in many ways were fascist, but they were the bulwark against the fall of democracy.
Frank Miller
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Presidential elections and the voter experience have long been fraught for black people. From racist poll taxes to made-up literacy tests to the egregious rollback of voting rights over the past 50 years, American democracy has, at times, felt like a weird and failed social experiment.
Patrisse Cullors
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The bedrock of our democracy is the rule of law and that means we have to have an independent judiciary, judges who can make decisions independent of the political winds that are blowing.
Caroline Kennedy
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The only way that we can win over potential jihadists to liberal democracy is by winning the battle of ideas.
Maajid Nawaz
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Slowly but surely, we are acquiring that famous culture of democracy, which is our objective.
Paul Biya
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We started our struggle from 2005, and...we organized a lot of protests, weekly protests, in a place we called the Square of Liberty...We knew and know that the freedom of speech is the door to democracy and justice.
Tawakkol Karman
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Democracy as a system of government may indeed be unprecedented in Afghanistan, but democracy as a way of life, a set of principles and values, is deeply embedded in our society.
Hamid Karzai
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Ultimately, the court is heading to a doctrine of 'separation of campaign and state.' This doctrine, like separation of church and state or separation of military and civilian authority, is not explicit in the Constitution but flows naturally from its structure and commitment to freedom and democracy.
Bradley A. Smith
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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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And one of the frustrating parts, but it's an inherent part of our democracy, is we have separation of powers.
George Pataki
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My notion of democracy is that under it the weakest shall have the same opportunities as the strongest... no country in the world today shows any but patronizing regard for the weak... Western democracy, as it functions today, is diluted fascism... true democracy cannot be worked by twenty men sitting at the center. It has to be worked from below, by the people of every village.
Mahatma Gandhi
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Those who deplore our militants, who exhort patience in the name of a false peace, are in fact supporting segregation and exploitation. They would have social peace at the expense of social and racial justice. They are more concerned with easing racial tension than enforcing racial democracy.
A. Philip Randolph
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Democracy, loudly upheld as a cure for much of the ailing world, has proved no guarantor of political wisdom, even if it remains the least bad form of government.
Pankaj Mishra
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Our system, which we call democracy, at least leaves us the right from time to time to get rid of those who wish to govern us. And, if it's nowhere near Utopia, it is probably the best of all imperfect systems. All I can do is to advise you to be very cautious of those who claim to represent you and order you about for your own good.
John Mortimer
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The strongest democracies flourish from frequent and lively debate, but they endure when people of every background and belief find a way to set aside smaller differences in service of a greater purpose.
Barack Obama
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All modes of government are failures. Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things. Oligarchies are unjust to the many, and ochlocracies are unjust to the few. High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. It has been found out. I must say that it was high time, for all authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised.
Oscar Wilde
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Either we are all free, or we fail; democracy must belong to all of us.
Dennis Chavez
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Ultimately, it's not our responsibility to turn Afghanistan into a 21st-century, vibrant, economic, liberal democracy with a little L. Our responsibility is to keep Americans safe, to make sure we don't have a failed state in a region. It's not our responsibility to reconstruct Afghanistan.
Martha McSally
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There are servers, and there are people that are served. There's something contradictory about that in a democracy, certainly.
Lee Daniels
