Democracy Quotes
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When the voices of democracy are silenced, freedom becomes a hollow concept. No man or woman should be sentenced to the shadows of silence for something he or she has said or written.
Allen Neuharth
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I cannot too often repeat that Democracy is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawakened, notwithstanding the resonance and the many angry tempests out of which its syllables have come, from pen or tongue. It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten because that history has yet to be enacted.
Walt Whitman
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Reality has changed, and we changed with it. However, I never changed sides. I have always been on the side of justice, democracy and social equality.
Dilma Rousseff
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What is wanted to save parliamentary democracy is an opposition that will operate not privately and behind the closed doors of the party meeting, but openly and periodically through the electorate.
C. Rajagopalachari
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Mass democracy, mass morality and the mass media thrive independently of the individual, who joins them only at the cost of at least a partial perversion of his instincts and insights. He pays for his social ease with what used to be called his soul – his discriminations, his uniqueness, his psychic energy, his self.
Al Alvarez
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In a democracy, a government’s policies are rarely questioned until the underlying assumptions that create them are questioned.
Warren Farrell
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The Left has found the Ho Chi Minh Trail around democracy...to impose its views and values upon our society without having to win elections or persuade elected legislators.
Pat Buchanan
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Talent and worth are the only eternal grounds of distinction. To these the Almighty has affixed His everlasting patent of nobility. Knowledge and goodness,--these make degrees in heaven, and they must be the graduating scale of a true democracy.
Catharine Sedgwick
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Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.
William Blum
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Western people ask me whether it is a paradox that I am King but support democracy. I have to tell them that in Thailand, the King is the guarantor of democracy.
Bhumibol Adulyadej
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Everything has become very corporate and very careful. Before we had a real democracy going and there were a lot of freedoms and now there's this terrorism thing that everybody's focused on, which is really a boondoggle in my opinion. It's just an excuse to clamp down on people's free speech. And corporations intimidate people and everybody's gotten intimidated and that's really what it is, and they just keep going along. It's almost like - a little bit like that Charlie Chaplin movie, Modern Times, or 1984, Orwell
Don McLean
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In Tunisia, the so-called Yasmin revolution has led to the installation of a relatively moderate Islamic government. Whether or not that means democracy will, however, only be put to the test if and when the time comes for another election, which the opposition may win.
Martin Van Creveld
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I have said democracy and freedom do not work too well if you are hungry, if you are starving.
Pete Domenici
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Journalism still, in a democracy, is the essential force to get the public educated and mobilized to take action on behalf of our ancient ideals.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
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I don't run democracy. I train troops to defend democracy and I happen to be their surrogate father and mother as well as their commanding general.
Alfred M. Gray
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Democracy has no place for the kind of justice implied in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Democracy is a system for the resolution of conflict, not for vengeance. Simple black-white notions of right and wrong do not fit into democratic politics. Political controversies result from the fact that the issues are complex, and men may properly have differences of opinion about them. The most terrible of all over-simplifications is the notion that politics is a contest between good people and bad people. Democracy is based on a profound insight into human nature, the realization that all men are sinful, all are imperfect, all are prejudiced, and none knows the whole truth. That is why we need liberty and why we have an obligation to hear all men. Liberty gives us a chance to learn from other people, to become aware of our own limitations, and to correct our bias. Even when we disagree with other people we like to think that they speak from good motives, and while we realize that all men are limited, we do not let ourselves imagine that any man is bad. Democracy is a political system for people who are not sure that they are right.
Elmer Eric Schattschneider