Democracy Quotes
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Democracy is not an end in itself, but a means to achieve the sacred promises of human dignity, justice and peace.
Alfred-Maurice de Zayas
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These, then, will be some of the features of democracy... it will be, in all likelihood, an agreeable, lawless, parti-colored commonwealth, dealing with all alike on a footing of equality, whether they be really equal or not.
Plato
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Whoever wants to reach socialism by any other path than that of political democracy will inevitably arrive at conclusions that are absurd and reactionary both in the economic and the political sense.
Vladimir Lenin
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Democracy is fine in politics. It should stay there, and we need more of it. But its political virture is no reason to practice it in the garden.
Allen Lacy
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I worry about a democracy having nuclear weapons as much as a dictatorship having nuclear weapons.
Mohamed ElBaradei
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Everything sells. Like integrity. Like democracy. Like truth. Like deeds.
Steven Weber
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Democracy means decision by those concerned.
Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker
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You can forgive your leaders for not knowing the intricacies of Islamic history. You cannot forgive them for not knowing their own. And when you look at American democracy, where did it start? It started, if you need to pick a point, at Runnymede in 1215. We have now been at this process, we and our English-speaking allies, for 800 years.
Michael Scheuer
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My objection to the death penalty is based on the idea that this is a democracy, and in a democracy the government is me, and if the government kills somebody then I'm killing somebody.
Steve Earle
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I think more so than the Republican Party, we reflect America on the Democratic side of the aisle, and that's a healthy thing. I mean, that's what democracy is all about.
Mike Ross
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Democracy, or "majority rules," is another trick of our society to force us to do things we don't want to do. Even if we actually lived in a pure democracy (and the system we do live in is not even close), where everyone got a single vote on every subject, forcing the minority to obey the majority is no different to one man, if he had the power, forcing everyone else to do what he wanted them to-simply because he could.
William J. Murray
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Democracy: a festival of mediocrity.
Emil Cioran
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We are in this business, whether it be intelligence or the government, to protect freedom, democracy and liberty, not to violate that.
John O. Brennan
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Science and policy-making thrive on challenge and questioning; they are vital to the health of inquiry and democracy.
Nicholas Herbert Stern
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Did you, too, O friend, suppose democracy was only for elections, for politics, and for a party name? I say democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruit in manners, in the highest forms of interaction between people, and their beliefs - in religion, literature, colleges and schools- democracy in all public and private life.
Walt Whitman
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A democracy is a state which recognizes the subjection of the minority to the majority, that is, an organization for the systematic use of violence by one class against the other, by one part of the population against another.
Vladimir Lenin
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People who want to understand democracy should spend less time in the library with Aristotle and more time on the buses and in the subway.
Simeon Strunsky
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Philadelphia, the foundation of freedom, liberty and democracy, I still believe in the idea of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Michael Nutter
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Whatever else the religious Right may be, it is a bonanza for its opponents... Reports of the great terror that is upon us are raising millions of dollars in fund appeals by Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization for Women, Norman Lear's People for the American Way, and others who claim to believe that the religious Right is the greatest peril to American democracy since Joe McCarthy.
Richard John Neuhaus
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Everyone knew that democracy - direct rule by all the people - required such spartan, soul-denying virtue on the part of all the people that it was likely to survive only where poverty made upright behavior necessary for the perpetuation of the race.
Bernard Bailyn
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The word "democracy" is a Western word obviously. It doesn't exist in Arabic. Democratiya is a loan word. We in the Western world make the great mistake of assuming that ours is the only form of good government; that democracy means what it means in the Anglo-American world and a few other places in the West, but not many others. Muslims have their own tradition on limited government. Now in Islam, there is a very strong political tradition. Because the different circumstances, Islam is political from the very beginning.
Bernard Lewis
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I renounce war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatred it arouses, for the dictatorships it puts in place of democracy, for the starvation that stalks after it. I renounce war, and never again, directly or indirectly, will I sanction or support another.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
