Quotes About Democracy

Noam Chomsky has a book, which I read for the first time when I was in Spain, called 'Fear of Democracy'. There is your answer. Fear of democracy. In Honduras, they had a sham democracy. It was run by elites, what was called a liberal democracy, but in reality was a false democracy.

I am a Mexican. The United States lived seventy-five years with the one party system in Mexico - the PRI - without batting an eyelid, never demanding democracy of Mexico. Democracy came because Mexicans fought for democracy and made a democracy out of our history, our possibilities, our perspectives. Democracy is not something that can be exported like Coca-Cola. It has to be bred from the inside, according to the culture, the conditions of each country.

Fascism is more of a natural state than democracy. To assume blithely that we can export democracy into any country we choose can serve paradoxically to encourage more fascism at home and abroad. Democracy is a state of grace that is attained only by those countries who have a host of individuals not only ready to enjoy freedom but to undergo the heavy labor of maintaining it.

We still have a lot of work to do when it comes to democracy. We have political democracy but not economic democracy.

When people in a democracy are not educated in the art of living -- to strengthen their conscience, compassion, and ability to question and think critically -- they can be easily manipulated by fear and propaganda. A democracy is only as wise as its citizens, and a democracy of ignorant citizens can be as dangerous as a dictatorship.

Democracy is something America has never really practiced. Because the Founding Fathers hated two things: monarchy and democracy. They wanted a republic, a replica of the Roman or Venetian republics. They didn't even like the etymology of the word "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!

You can't afford to hate politics. The politics of this country is democracy. Democracy is by the people, of the people and for the people. The day people stop taking active part in the politics of this country, democracy will not survive.

Democracy needs support, and the best support for democracy comes from other democracies.

With the tools of democracy, democracy was murdered and lawlessness made "legal." Raw power ruled, and its only real goal was to destroy all other powers besides itself.

Democracy must stand or fall on a platform of possible human perfectibility. If human nature cannot be improved by institutions, democracy is at best a more than usually safe form of political organization . . . . But if it is to work better as well as merely longer, it must have some leavening effect on human nature; and the sincere democrat is obliged to assume the power of the leaven. [Progressive]

Elections are a festival of democracy. Everyone must join this festival of democracy and strengthen it.

[For business after WWII ] democracy means getting people to regard government as an alien force that's robbing them and oppressing them, not as their government. In a democracy it would be your government.

It can be argued - and rightly - that Taiwan is not just another regional issue: after all, the Chinese regard it as part of China. But Taiwan is also a regional issue for three reasons. First, the overthrow or even the neutering of democracy in Taiwan, which is what Beijing effectively demands, would be a major setback for democracy in the region as a whole. Second, if the Chinese were able to get their way by force in Taiwan, they would undoubtedly be tempted to do the same in other disputes. And third, there is no lack of such disputes to provoke a quarrel.

Full democracy requires the full participation of women. Your voices are vital. The word 'vital' means necessary for life. A democracy, to be fully alive, must include all its citizens.

This is the permanent tension that lies at the heart of a capitalist democracy and is exacerbated in times of crisis. In order to ensure the survival of the richest, it is democracy that has to be heavily regulated rather than capitalism.

It is the evil in man that makes democracy necessary, and man's belief in justice that makes democracy possible.

Steve Bannon is the biggest threat to democracy that we've faced since the Civil War, but in the Civil War the champion of democracy was in the White House. So, even then, we were probably in less danger as a country than we are right now.

It is not democracy to send in billions of dollars to push regime change overseas. It isn't democracy to send in the NGOs to re-write laws and the constitution in places like Ukraine. It is none of our business.

Now we're in a situation where democracy has been taken into the workshop and fixed, remodeled to be market-friendly. So now the United States is fighting wars to instal democracies. First it was topple them, now it's instal them, right? And this whole rise of corporate-funded NGOs in the modern world, this notion of CSR, corporate social responsibility - it's all part of a New Managed Democracy. In that sense, it's all part of the same machine.

Winning Democracy for the Negro is winning the war for Democracy

You cannot have democracy without the institutions. You cannot have a democracy that is built on the moods of self-interested people.

Communism destroys democracy. Democracy can also destroy Communism.

For Russia, there is not and there may not be another political option but democracy. However, Russian democracy is... not at all the realization of standards imposed on us from outside.

Moreover, as we live in an era of the ascendancy of democracy and human rights, we must see that Taiwan has been a vibrant democracy with a democratically elected president and legislature.

There are still two forms besides democracy and oligarchy; one of them is universally recognized and included among the four principal forms of government, which are said to be (1) monarchy, (2) oligarchy, (3) democracy, and (4) the so-called aristocracy or government of the best. But there is also a fifth, which retains the generic name of polity or constitutional government.

For good or for bad, India has rejected a more totalitarian approach to how it will deal with its social problems. We would starve but we would not give up our democracy and our love for our freedoms and to deal with these problems in an atmosphere of democracy and the rule of law without necessarily going, sort of resorting to civil disobedience or any kind of violent revolution.

There's a big difference in a representative republic and a democracy. We do not have a democracy in America.

Interactivity has the virtue of democracy, conferring upon everyone with access to a computer the right and opportunity to be heard, but it's also saddled with democracy's vice - a tendency to assume that everyone who has a right to be heard has something to say that's worth hearing.

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.

I think that my emergence as a leader is closely related to the development of Taiwan's democracy. Taiwan's democracy was a gradual development. It was done from the bottom up. Therefore a lot of the more successful political leaders come from civil society, those that are closer to the grass-roots level of the public.

The problem is that democracy is not freedom. Democracy is simply majoritarianism, which is inherently incompatible with real freedom. Our founding fathers clearly understood this.

Islamic laws this is something Americans should look into, maybe not in the near future, but I think people are definitely looking for alternatives to a capitalist democracy. The democracy that we find in the Western world is just not providing them solutions.

So yes in theory there is a kind of a formal democracy and in many ways these were achievements and an improvement over the feudal system and more advanced than anything else in the world, but nothing that we ought to call democracy.

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 can thrive only when it enlists the devotion of those whom Lincoln called the common people. Democracy can hold that devotion only when it adequately respects their dignity by so ordering society as to assure to the masses of men and women reasonable security and hope for themselves and for their children.

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

It is not enough to merely defend democracy. To defend it may be to lose it; to extend it is to strengthen it. Democracy is not property; it is an idea.

Democracy is like three oxen pulling a plough. The oxen are the independent powers, but you have to walk in the same direction; otherwise, you cannot plough and that is what was happening in Colombia. One ox was walking in one direction, the other in another direction, so the democracy was not working.

All freedoms provided by democracy are for those who believe in it. Can the rights and freedoms of millions of virtuous people who believe in democracy be safeguarded if those who seek to destroy it abuse rights and freedoms to achieve their goals?

Democracy is about non-arbitrary decisions. Democracy is about spreading decisions; it is not about destroying processes.

I do not say that democracy has been more pernicious on the whole, and in the long run, than monarchy or aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy; but while it lasts, it is more bloody than either.

Europe tends to favor stability over democracy, America democracy over stability.

Politicians, no matter who they are, shouldn't be able to manipulate the public on a single issue and then call an election at the height of support - that's a little bit of a manipulation of democracy.

Writing is tyranny ... but reading is democracy.

The test of democracy is freedom of criticism.

Revolution means democracy in today's world, not the enslavement of peoples to the corrupt and degrading horrors of totalitarianism

Democracy leads to anarchy, which is mob rule.