Quotes About Democracy

Gandhi is the other person. I believe Gandhi is the only person who knew about real democracy — not democracy as the right to go and buy what you want, but democracy as the responsibility to be accountable to everyone around you. Democracy begins with freedom from hunger, freedom from unemployment, freedom from fear, and freedom from hatred. To me, those are the real freedoms on the basis of which good human societies are based.

We think that democracy can change a lot of things, but we're being fooled, because democracy is not the election. We've been taught that democracy is having elections. And it isn't. Elections are the most horrendous aspect of democracy. It's the most mundane, trivial, disappointing, dirty aspect.

I'm for democracy, but imposing democracy is an oxymoron. People have to choose democracy, and it has to come up from below.

When we generate utopian visions and hope to make them happen soon – when we elect Barack Obama and expect all our problems to be solved, and solved quickly, by his presidency – the outcome is both predictable and tragic. That is not the way to engage social change in a democracy. And it is not the way to help democracy itself survive and thrive. Democracy is a non-stop experiment. Each generation must help sustain it, which means being in it day-by-day for the long haul.

I gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2016 and warned of Trump. America has survived for almost 250 years with its imperfect democracy, but, you know, maybe it's a better democracy than elsewhere. And I am sure American democracy will survive.

It's perfectly OK that there are certain people who do not accept Islam at all. Therefore, to announce that I am a Muslim can rub some people the wrong way. But my aim is to show that those governments that violate the rights of people by invoking the name of Islam have been misusing Islam. They violate these rights and then seek refuge behind the argument that Islam is not compatible with freedom and democracy. But this is basically to save face. In fact, I'm promoting democracy. And I'm saying that Islam is not an excuse for thwarting democracy.

I gather you yellow-skinned men, despite your triumphs in sewage, drinking water, and Olympic gold medals, still don't have democracy. Some politician on the radio was saying that that's why we Indian are going to beat you: we may not have sewage, drinking water, and Olympic gold medals, but we do have democracy. If I were making a country, I'd get the sewage pipes first, then the democracy, then I'd go about giving pamphlets and statues of Gandhi to other people, but what do I know? I am just a murderer!

Inequality also distorts our democracy. It gives an outsized voice to the few who can afford high-priced lobbyists and unlimited campaign contributions, and runs the risk of selling out our democracy to the highest bidder. And it leaves everyone else rightly suspicious that the system in Washington is rigged against them - that our elected representatives aren't looking out for the interests of most Americans.

Our Founding Fathers crafted a constitutional Republic for the first time in the history of the world because they were shaping a form of government that would not have the failures of a democracy in it, but had the representation of democracy in it.

Active people to revitalize what is really the root of democracy: citizens communicating with each other. Democracy is not just about voting, it's about citizens talking with each other about the issues which concern them. We've lost a great deal of that in the age of the mass media.

Democracy disciplined and enlightened is the finest thing in the world. A democracy prejudiced, ignorant, superstitious, will land itself in chaos and may be self-destroyed.

It is not the armed forces which can protect our democracy. It is the moral strength of democracy which alone can give any meaning to the efforts at military security.

Our democracy is the centerpiece of who we are as a nation. And it is the fondest hope of all Americans that we can help bring democracy to every corner of the world.

The Western concept of democracy is based on the idea that the loser of an election has the possibility next time round of being the winner. But in the case of an ethnically or religiously divided country, in which minorities don't live peacefully together, this necessary balance can't be properly guaranteed by democracy. When each ethnic group arms itself, it is not surprising that the army of a new state is viewed by part of the population as an ideological militia.

America is not a democracy. I think if your kids understood that - and most people don't. We are a representative republic. We're not a direct democracy.

The international community can't trust such a government. If the government of Iran wants the international community to believe in what it says, it should try to bring true, pure democracy into the country. The political solution to the energy issue or the nuclear case is democracy in Iran.

I think we can build democracy in Pakistan. But it will take time. And it will be a Pakistani democracy. Not one that's imposed by...someone else.

It’s notable that the countries that most pride themselves on their commitment to equality, human rights, and democracy (like the United States and the western European countries) are precisely those that, in the late twentieth century, invented a new status (‘illegal’) in order to deprive some of their residents of access to equality, human rights, and democracy.I am honored to lend my name to PICUM’s campaign to end the use of the term ‘illegal’ and to challenge the whole concept of illegality as a status.

I think it is extremely important that the West support this experiment [of Tunisian democracy] with investment, with aid, with symbolic support, not just flows of democracy assistance …If Tunisia can’t make it, what are the prospects for the rest of the Arab world?

We're not a democracy. It's a terrible misunderstandin g and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us that. In reality, we're a plutocracy: a government by the wealthy.

The problem with the West is that they start with political reform going towards democracy. If you want to go towards democracy, the first thing is to involve the people in decision making, not to make it.

In a modern democracy, not only can a libertarian be elitist; a libertarian has to be elitist. To be a libertarian in a modern democracy is to say that nearly 300 million Americans are wrong, and a handful of nay-sayers are right.

Democracy can't work. Mathematicians, peasants, and animals, that's all there is - so democracy, a theory based on the assumption that mathematicians and peasants are equal, can never work. Wisdom is not additive; its maximum is that of the wisest man in a given group.

In the words of Louis Brandeis, the Supreme Court justice, we have a choice between a democracy or vast concentrations of wealth. We have vast concentrations of wealth which has bought its way into our democracy with its political leaders who exemplify the merger of that economic and political elite.

People are constantly applying double standards. Take the United States, for example. Washington wants the whole world to admire the country for its democracy. Then the government sends out its army, in the name of this democracy, and leaves behind the kind of chaos we see in Iraq.

Democracy is not freedom. Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch.

Democracy is not a spectator sport, it's a participatory event. If we don't participate in it, it ceases to be a democracy.

Campaign ads are the backbone of American democracy if American democracy suffered a gigantic spinal injury.

The claim that democracy and efficiency are contradictory is nonsense. That's evident in the history of democracy itself, because it is only democrats who were and continue to be capable of learning from mistakes. A more appropriate question is to ask whether a country like China, which has been so incredibly successful economically, is actually inefficient in light of its environmental destruction and its corruption. In China's perception, however, the democratic model is doubtlessly inferior.

Any comparison between the military dictatorship and democracy can only come from those who do not value the Brazilian democracy.

The protesters have called into question whether there is a real democracy. Real democracy is more than the right to vote once every two or four years. The choices have to be meaningful. But increasingly, and especially in the US, it seems that the political system is more akin to "one dollar one vote" than to "one person one vote". Rather than correcting the market failures, the political system was reinforcing them.

There is no democracy without socialism, and no socialism without democracy.

I am against revolution and am proud of it. Democracy cannot be created through revolutions. The most important dichotomy that I make for a society is between those who support democracy and human rights, and those who oppose it. In a totalitarian state, the state views any act of an individual to be political in nature. For example, the clothing that a person wears in a modern state is a private affair whereas in the Islamic Republic all women are forced to wear the hijab (Islamic attire). When women push their headscarf back an inch or two, this is interpreted to be a political act.

We have shown that Islam can rule the world perfectly for 14 centuries, and during this time of Muslim power we did not borrow ideas like democracy from others, so why do we need to learn democracy from them now?

All forms of the state have democracy for their truth, and for that reason are false to the extent that they are not democracy

The legislator should direct his attention above all to the education of youth; for the neglect of education does harm to the constitution. The citizen should be molded to suit the form of government under which he lives. For each government has a peculiar character which originally formed and which continues to preserve it. The character of democracy creates democracy, and the character of oligarchy creates oligarchy.

They think democracy - I used to say "damn the democracy", because it's not a stable government.

If you live in a democracy and don't have freedom of information, it's not a democracy. And people have to understand that if you don't have freedom of information online, it's not going to be offline, either.

Democracy is a hegemonic tool of the West and contrary to Islam. Why do you act as though the entire world needs democracy? And when it comes to homosexuality, the issue is clearly dealt with by the Koran. It says it is forbidden and should be punished.

We see threats to liberal democracy coming from lots of directions. We have to create something new, a common response, because in so many places - the UK, France, Germany - ultranationalists and the far left threaten the free market and liberal democracy.

There is an idea of democracy produced by one-sided thinking.

The road to democracy may be winding and is like a river taking many curves, but eventually the river will reach the ocean.

Trusting each other is the beginning of a certain secular faith, a faith that allows us to live in families and communities and nations. Democracy, above all other forms of government, requires this faith.

France placed the state above society , democracy above constitutionalism, and equality above liberty. As a result, for much of the nineteenth century it was democratic, with broad suffrage and elections, but hardly liberal. it was certainly a less secure home for individual freedom than was England or America.

Democracy, like any non-coercive relationship, rests on a shared understanding of limits.

It's in the interest of the U.S. to maintain a strong democracy in Colombia.

Excessive partisanship is the problem. There has never been a democracy in the history of the world in a polity of any size where you didn't have political parties. Even sometimes over the objections of the people who started it.

Democratic societies can no longer give religious fanatics a free hand to abuse and murder non believers. Such action betrays contempt for the basic human rights which animate any democracy with meaning.