Democracy quotes
Democracy (from Greek δημοκρατία (dēmokratía) dēmos ‘people’ and kratos ‘rule’) is a form of government in which the people have the authority to deliberate and decide legislation (“direct democracy”), or to choose governing officials to do so (“representative democracy”). Who is considered part of “the people” and how authority is shared among or delegated by the people has changed over time and at different rates in different countries, but over time more and more of a democratic country’s inhabitants have generally been included. Cornerstones of democracy include freedom of assembly, association, property rights, freedom of religion and speech, inclusiveness and equality, citizenship, consent of the governed, voting rights, freedom from unwarranted governmental deprivation of the right to life and liberty, and minority rights.
Why democracy?
The idea of democracy derives its moral strength – and popular appeal – from two key principles:
1. Individual autonomy: The idea that no-one should be subject to rules which have been imposed by others. People should be able to control their own lives (within reason).
2. Equality: The idea that everyone should have the same opportunity to influence the decisions that affect people in society.
We have brought together the most beautiful democracy quotes that will translate your feelings for you as basla.org . You can share your favorites from the following messages on social media accounts.
A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won’t cross the street to vote in a national election. – Bill Vaughan, 1915-1977, American journalist
A constitution that is made for all nations is made for none. – Joseph de Maistre
A democracy is a state which recognizes the subjection of the minority to the majority. – Vladimir Lenin.
A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. – John Dewey
A democracy must remain at home in all matters which affect the nature of her institutions. – William Borah
A democratic form of government, a democratic way of life, presupposes free public education over the long period; it presupposes also an education for personal responsibility that too often is neglected. – Eleanor Roosevelt
A good citizen is an earner, because independence is the indelibly necessary quality of genuine, democratic citizenship. – Judith N. Shklar
A government of laws, and not of men. – John Adams
A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree or certainty which the evidence warrants, would, if it became general, cure most of the ills from which the world suffers. – Bertrand Russell
A healthy democracy requires a decent society; it requires that we are honorable, generous, tolerant and respectful. – Charles W. Pickering
A judge … is a public servant who must follow his conscience, whether or not he counters the manifest wishes of those he serves; whether or not his decision seems a surrender to prevalent demands. – Hiller B. Zobel
A low voter turnout is an indication of fewer people going to the polls – George W. Bush, 1946-, American President
A man is judged by the company he keeps, and a company is judged by the men it keeps, and the people of Democratic nations are judged by the type and caliber of officers they elect. – William J.H. Boetcker
A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped. – Norman Mailer
A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to farce or tragedy or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives. – James Madison, 1788
A republic cannot succeed, till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour. – Charles Darwin, 1809-1882, British scientist
A right is not what someone gives you; it’s what no one can take from you. – Ramsey Clark
A state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another: there being nothing more evident, than that creatures of the same species and rank promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same facilities, should also be equal one amongst another without subordination and subjection, unless the Lord and master of them all, should by any manifest declaration of his will set one above another, and confer on him by an evident and clear appointment an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty. – John Locke
A state is nothing more than a reflection of its citizens; the more decent the citizens, the more decent the state. – George Mason
A state that denies its citizens their basic rights becomes a danger to its neighbors as well: internal arbitrary rule will be reflected in arbitrary external relations. The suppression of public opinion, the abolition of public competition for power and its public exercise opens the way for the state power to arm itself in any way it sees fit. … A state that does not hesitate to lie to its own people will not hesitate to lie to other states. – Václav Havel
A union of government and religion tends to destroy government and degrade religion. The history of governmentally established religion, both in England and in this country, showed that whenever government had allied itself with one particular form of religion, the inevitable result had been that it had incurred the hatred, disrespect and even contempt of those who held contrary beliefs. That same history showed that many people had lost their respect for any religion that had relied upon the support of government to spread its faith. – Hugo L. Black
A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned – this is the sum of good government. – Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, 1801
Act as if the whole election depended on your single vote, and as if the whole Parliament (and therein the whole nation) on the single person whom you now chose to be a member of it. – John Wesley
Active citizens … are public meeting-goers and joiners of voluntary organizations who discuss and deliberate with others about the policies that will affect them all, and who serve their country not only as taxpayers and occasional soldiers, but by having a considered notion of the public good that they genuinely take to heart. The good citizen is a patriot. – Judith N. Shklar, 1991
After all, it is my principle that the will of the majority should always prevail. If they approve the proposed Convention in all its parts, I shall concur in it cheerfully, in hopes that they will amend it whenever they shall find it work wrong. … Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to; convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty. – Jefferson to Madison, 1787
After each war there is a little less democracy to save. – Brooks Atkinson
Agitation and mutability are inherent in the nature of democratic republics, just as stagnation and sleepiness are the law of absolute monarchies. – Alexis de Tocqueville
All real democracy is an attempt like that of a jolly hostess to bring the shy people out. – G.K. Chesterton
All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy. – Al Smith
All these financiers, all the little gnomes of Zurich. – Harold Wilson
Although the job of a Congressman involves several different roles, the main ones are as representative and legislator. As a representative, a member serves as an agent for his constituents, ensuring that their views are heard in Congress and that they are treated fairly by federal bureaucrats and other public officials. As a legislator, a member participates in the lawmaking process by drafting bills and amendments, engaging in debate, and attempting to build a consensus necessary to address our nation’s problems. Fulfilling these roles may sound easy, but can be enormously difficult. – Lee Hamilton
America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. … Our fate is to become one and yet many. – Ralph Ellison, 1952
America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves. – Abraham Lincoln
American time has stretched around the world. It has become the dominant tempo of modern history, especially of the history of Europe. – Harold Rosenberg
Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of dispositions are forever forming associations … at the head of any new undertaking. Where in France you would find the government or in England some territorial magnate, in the United States you are sure to find as an association. – Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835
Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist. – Edmund Burke
An essential element in the meaning of the common good among the members of a group is what the members would choose if they possessed the fullest attainable understanding of the experience that would result from their choice and its most relevant alternatives. Because enlightened understanding is required, I would propose to incorporate opportunities to acquire enlightened understanding as essential also to the meaning of the common good. Still further, the rights and opportunities of the democratic process are elements of the common good. Even more broadly, because the institutions of polyarchy are necessary in order to employ the democratic process on a large scale, in a unit as large as a country all of the institutions of polyarchy should also be counted as elements of the common good. – Robert Dahl, 1989
An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics. – Plutarch, 47-120 AD, Ancient Greek historian
An informed people is one of the best guarantees of a continuing democracy. – Harry F. Banks
Anything that keeps a politician humble is healthy for democracy. – Irish blessing
Aristocracy is the spirit of the Old Testament, democracy of the New. – Napoleon, 1769-1821, French Emperor
As citizens of this democracy, you are the rulers and the ruled, the lawgivers and the law-abiding, the beginning and the end. – Adlai Stevenson, 1956
As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. – Abraham Lincoln
As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy. – Abraham Lincoln, 1858
As long as there are dictatorships, I won’t have the heart to criticize a democracy. – Jean Rostand, 1894-1977, French scientist & philosopher
At the establishment of our constitutions, the judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government. Experience, however, soon showed in what way they were to become the most dangerous; that the insufficiency of the means provided for their removal gave them a freehold and irresponsibility in office; that their decisions, seeming to concern individual suitors only, pass silent and unheeded by the public at large; that these decisions, nevertheless, become law by precedent, sapping, by little and little, the foundations of the constitution, and working its change by construction, before any one has perceived that that invisible and helpless worm has been busily employed in consuming its substance. In truth, man is not made to be trusted for life, if secured against all liability to account. – Thomas Jefferson, letter to Monsieur A. Coray, 1823
Autocracies may survive for intermittent periods with populations of yes men but democracies need a perennially renewed supply of know men. – Dr. Robert Gordon Sproul
Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote. – George Jean Nathan
Bestowing representation on the basis of equal representation rather than population contradicts the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority must prevail. – Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 22
Better use has been made of association and this powerful instrument of action has been applied for more varied aims in America than anywhere else in the world. – Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835
Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it. – Joseph Schumpeter.
By a faction, understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community. – James Madison
Christianity neither is, nor ever was, a part of the common law. – Thomas Jefferson, 1814
Civil authority, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all. – Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1776
Civility costs nothing and buys everything. – Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 1756
Civility is not a tactic or a sentiment. It is the determined choice of trust over cynicism, of community over chaos. – George W. Bush, 2001 Inaugural Address
Compared with the political systems of other advanced democratic countries, ours is among the most opaque, complex, confusing, and difficult to understand. – Robert Dahl, How Democratic is the American Constitution?, 2003
Consensus is what many people say in chorus but do not believe as individuals. – Abba Eban
Constitutions are checks upon the hasty action of the majority. They are the self-imposed restraints of a whole people upon a majority of them to secure sober action and a respect for the rights of the minority. – William Howard Taft, 1900
Corruption is a cancer: a cancer that eats away at a citizen’s faith in democracy, diminishes the instinct for innovation and creativity; already-tight national budgets, crowding out important national investments. It wastes the talent of entire generations. It scares away investments and jobs. – Joe Biden
Corruption, the most infallible symptom of constitutional liberty. – Edward Gibbon, 1737-1794, English historian
Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. – Louis Brandeis
Deliberation and debate is the way you stir the soul of our democracy. – Jesse Jackson.
Democracy and religion stand or fall together. Where democracy has been destroyed, religion has been doomed. Where religion has been trampled down, democracy has ceased to exist…. Tyrants have come and have had their day and then have passed while religion has survived them all. – Herbert H. Lehman
Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude. – Alexis de Tocqueville
Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal. – Aristotle, ‘Politics’.
Democracy arose from men’s thinking that if they are equal in any respect they are equal absolutely. – Aristotle, ‘Politics’.
Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. – Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education. – Franklin Roosevelt, 1882-1945, American President 1936-1945
Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they’ve told you what you think it is you want to hear. – Alan Coren
Democracy divides people into workers and loafers. It makes no provision for those who have no time to work. – Karl Kraus, 1874-1936, Austrian writer
Democracy does not contain any force which will check the constant tendency to put more and more on the public payroll. The state is like a hive of bees in which the drones display, multiply and starve the workers so the idlers will consume the food and the workers will perish. – Plato
Democracy does not give the people the most skillful government, but it produces what the ablest governments are frequently unable to create: namely, an all-pervading and restless activity, a superabundant force, and an energy which is inseparable from it and which may, however unfavorable circumstances may be, produce wonders. – Alexis de Tocqueville
Democracy don’t rule the world, You’d better get that in your head; This world is ruled by violence, But I guess that’s better left unsaid. – Bob Dylan
Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. – Alexis de Tocqueville.
Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich – that is the democracy of capitalist society. – Vladimir Lenin, 1870-1924, Soviet revolutionary & leader
Democracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements. – Agnes Repplier
Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor. – James Russell Lowell
Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife. – John Dewey, ‘The Middle Works’.
Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve. – George Bernard Shaw
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. – H.L. Mencken, 1880-1956, American columnist & cultural critic
Democracy is a political method, that is to say, a certain type of institutional arrangement for arriving at political – legislative and administrative – decisions and hence incapable of being an end in itself. – Joseph A. Schumpeter
Democracy is a slow process of stumbling to the right decision instead of going straight forward to the wrong one. – Anonymous
Democracy is a small, hard core of common agreement, surrounded by a rich variety of individual differences. – James B. Conant
Democracy is a way of life. Democracy is sincerity, friendliness, courage and tolerance. If your life and mine do not exemplify these characteristics, we do not have the right to call ourselves full-fledged citizens of the world’s greatest democracy. – Melvin J. Evans
Democracy is an unfinished experiment. – Walt Whitman.
Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people. – Harry Emerson Fosdick
Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy. – Benito Mussolini
Democracy is being allowed to vote for the candidate you dislike least. -Robert Byrne
Democracy is better than tyranny. / Δημοκρατία κρείττον τυραννίδος. – Periander of Corinth, 668-584 BC, tyrant of Corinth
Democracy is eternal and human. It dignifies the human being; it respects humanity. – Thomas Mann
Democracy is ever eager for rapid progress, and the only progress which can be rapid is progress down hill. – Sir James Jeans
Democracy is four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. – Ambrose Bierce, 1842–1914, American writer
Democracy is four wolves and a sheep voting on dinner. – Robert A. Heinlein.
Democracy is indispensable to socialism. – Vladimir Lenin.
Democracy is like a streetcar. When you come to your stop, you get off. – Recep Tayyip Erdogan
Democracy is like blowing your nose. You may not do it well, but it’s something you ought to do yourself. – G.K. Chesterton
Democracy is measured not by its leaders doing extraordinary things, but by its citizens doing things extraordinarily well. – John Gardner
Democracy is messy, and it’s hard. It’s never easy. – Robert Kennedy, Jr.
Democracy is necessary to peace and to undermining the forces of terrorism. – Benazir Bhutto
Democracy is never a final achievement. It is a call to an untiring effort. – John F. Kennedy
Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing. – Archibald MacLeish.
Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing. What is necessary now is one thing and one thing only … that democracy become again democracy in action, not democracy accomplished and piled up in goods and gold. – Archibald MacLeish
Democracy is not a fragile flower; still it needs cultivating. – Ronald Reagan
Democracy is not a spectator sport, it’s a participatory event. If we don’t participate in it, it ceases to be a democracy. – Michael Moore
Democracy is not a static thing. It does not stand still. – Vincent Harding.
Democracy is not a tearing down; it is a building up. It does not denial of the divine right of kings; it asserts the divine right of all men. – Calvin Coolidge, 1872-1933, American President 1923-1929
Democracy is not an easy form of government, because it is never final; it is a living, changing organism, with a continuous shifting and adjusting of balance between individual freedom and general order. – Ilka Chase
Democracy is not just a question of having a vote. It consists of strengthening each citizen’s possibility and capacity to participate in the deliberations involved in life in society. – Fernando Cardoso.
Democracy is not so much a form of government as a set of principles. – Woodrow Wilson.
Democracy is not the law of the majority but protection of the minority. – Albert Camus.
Democracy is only an experiment in government, and it has the obvious disadvantage of merely counting votes instead of weighing them. – William R. Inge
Democracy is something we must always be working at. It is a process never finished, never ending. And each new height gained opens broader vistas for the future. Thus it has been as one looks back over the sweep of history. – Edmund de S. Brunner
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage. – H.L. Mencken
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey-cage. – H.L. Mencken, 1880-1956, American columnist & cultural critic
Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage. – H.L. Mencken
Democracy is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles. – E.B. White
Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust. – Jean Baudrillard, 1929-2007, French intellectual
Democracy is the process by which people choose the man who’ll get the blame. – Bertrand Russell
Democracy is the process by which people choose the man who’ll get the blame. – Bertrand Russell, 1872-1970, British philosopher
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. – E.B. White
Democracy is the road to socialism. – Karl Marx
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. – H. L. Mencken
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. – H.L. Mencken, 1880-1956, American columnist & cultural critic
Democracy is the worship of jackals by jackasses. – H.L. Mencken, 1880-1956, American columnist & cultural critic
Democracy is the worst form of government except all others. – Winston Churchill
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. – Winston Churchill, 1874-1965, British Prime Minister, Nobel 1953
Democracy is threatened by the inertia of good people, by the selfishness of most people, and by the evil designs of a few people. – Stanley King
Democracy is when the doorbell rings at six in the morning and it’s the milkman! – Henri Jeanson, 1900-1970, French critic & columnist
Democracy is when the people keep a government in check. – Aung San Suu Kyi
Democracy is worth dying for, because it’s the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man. – Ronald Reagan
Democracy may not be perfect, but at least I don’t have to build a wall to keep my people in. – John Kennedy, 1917-1963, American President 1961-1963
Democracy means not ‘I’m as good as you are,’ but ‘You’re as good as I am.’ – Theodore Parker
Democracy must be built through open societies that share information. When there is information, there is enlightenment. When there is debate, there are solutions. When there is no sharing of power, no rule of law, no accountability, there is abuse, corruption, subjugation and indignation. – Atifete Jahjaga
Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few. – George Bernard Shaw, 1856-1950, Irish writer, Nobel 1925
Democracy will prevail when men believe the vote of Judas as good as that of Jesus Christ. – Thomas Carlyle, 1795-1881, English writer
Democracy! Bah! When I hear that word I reach for my feather boa! – Allen Ginsberg
Democracy, as I understand it, requires me to sacrifice myself for the masses, not to them. Who knows not that if you would save the people, you must often oppose them? – John C. Calhoun
Democracy, good governance and modernity cannot be imported or imposed from outside a country. – Emile Lahoud
Democracy, which is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike. – Plato, ‘The Republic’.
Democracy: stored up in heaven; but unhappily has not yet been communicated to us. – Bernard Crick.
Democracy’s ceremonial, its feast, its great function, is the election. – H.G. Wells
Democracy’s worst fault is that its leaders are likely to reflect the faults and virtues of their constituents. – Robert A. Heinlein, ‘Stranger In A Strange Land’.
Democratic contrivances are quarantine measures against that ancient plague, the lust for power: as such, they are very necessary and very boring. – Friedrich Nietzsche
Democratic living is not a station at which people arrive; it is a method of traveling. – Clyde Campbell
Democratic nations care but little for what has been, but they are haunted by visions of what will be; in this direction their unbounded imagination grows and dilates beyond all measure. Democracy, which shuts the past against the poet, opens the future before him. – Alexis de Tocqueville
Democratic theory is concerned with processes by which ordinary citizens exert a relatively high degree of control over leaders. – Robert A. Dahl, ‘A Preface To Democratic Theory’.
Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty. – Plato
Dictatorships are one-way streets. Democracy boasts two-way traffic. – Alberto Moravia, 1907-1990, Italian writer
Each generation must win democracy for itself. Many young persons wish they might have lived in the historic and courageous time of George Washington, for example, when there were victories to be made and real history written. – Frank Thayer
Education … like democracy, is always in the making, forever incomplete, founded in possibilities. – Maxine Greene
Education is a human right with immense power to transform. On its foundation rest the cornerstones of freedom, democracy and sustainable human development. – Kofi Annan
Education is a human right with immense power to transform. On its foundation rest the cornerstones of freedom, democracy. – Kofi Annan.
Elections belong to the people. – Abraham Lincoln.
Equal rights for all, special privileges for none. – Thomas Jefferson, 1780
Equality and justice, the two great distinguishing characteristics of democracy, follow inevitably from the conception of men, all men, as rational and spiritual beings. – Robert M. Hutchins
Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed in institutions and manners, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings. – Simone Weil
Essentially the fault lies in the fact that the democratic political process is at best regulated rivalry. – John Rawls.
Every democratic system evolves its own conventions. It is not only the water but the banks which make the river. – Indira Gandhi
Every friend of republican government ought to raise his voice against the sweeping denunciation of majority governments as the most tyrannical and intolerable of all governments. … The general question must be between a republican government in which the majority rule the minority, and a government in which a lesser number or the least number rule the majority. … Those who denounce majority government altogether … denounce at the time all republican government and must maintain that minority governments would feel less of the bias of interest or the seductions of powers. – James Madison
Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us. – P.J. O’ Rourke, 1947-2022, American columnist & writer
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, in a final sense, is a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. – Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953
Every man to count for one and no one to count for more than one … appears, more than any other formula, to constitute the irreducible minimum of the ideal of equality. – Isaiah Berlin
Everybody has their manifesto; let them talk their language, come to the people, and the people will decide. In a democracy, no party or candidate wins or loses. If you, the people, chose a wrong man, you lose; if you chose the right one, you win. – Prakash Raj
Evil acts of the past are never rectified by evil acts of the present. – Lyndon B. Johnson, July 21, 1964
For democracy to survive, every person must realize that mere insistence on his rights alone will be of little avail, that a recognition of one’s obligations is imperative-and that one of the most important obligations is that of respecting the rights of others. – I. David Satlow
For forms of government let fools contest; Whate’er is best administered is best. – Alexander Pope
For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing government. The nation looked to government but the government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that government is best which is most indifferent. For nearly four years you have had an administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace – business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob. – Franklin D. Roosevelt
For, if liberty and equality, as some persons suppose, are chiefly to be found in a democracy, it must be so by every department of government being alike open to all; but as the people are in the majority, and what they vote is law, it follows that such a state is a democracy. – Aristotle
For, if liberty and equality, as some persons suppose, are chiefly to be found in a democracy, they will be attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost. – Aristotle
Freedom comes in individual packages. – Shirley Boone
Freedom is an indivisible word. If we want to enjoy it, we must be prepared to extend it to everyone, whether they are rich or poor, whether they agree with us or not, no matter what their race or the color of their skin. – Wendell Willkie
Freedom must be distinguished from democracy, with which it is often confused. – Thomas Sowell, 1930 -, American political thinker
Government is a trust and the officers of the government are trustees, and both the trust and the trustees are created for the benefit of the people. – Henry Clay
Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. This being the end of government, that alone is a just government which impartially secures to every man whatever is his own. – James Madison, Essay on Property, 1792
He enumerated the objections against an equality of votes in the second branch, notwithstanding the proportional representation in the first. The minority could negative the will of the majority of the people. They could extort measures by making them a condition of their assent to other necessary measures. They could obtrude measures on the majority by virtue of the peculiar powers which would be vested in the Senate. The evil instead of being cured by time, would increase with every new State that should be admitted, as they must all be admitted on the principle of equality. The perpetuity it would give to the preponderance of the Northern against the Southern Scale was a serious consideration. – James Madison
He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must either be a beast or a god. – Aristotle
He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world’s believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions. – Thomas Jefferson, 1785
Here in America we are descended from revolutionists and rebels – men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, we may never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion. – Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1954
History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid. – Dwight D. Eisenhower
History does not provide us with any instance of a society that repressed the economic liberties of the individual while being solicitous of his other liberties. – Irving Kristol
However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group’s greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, class, religion or all four. – Gloria Steinem
Human beings are naturally hierarchical beasts. Democracy is not their native religion. – Erica Jong, 1942-, American writer
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. – H.G. Wells
Human rights stand upon a common basis; and by all reason that they are supported, maintained, and defended for all the human family. The essential characteristics of humanity are everywhere the same. – Frederick Douglass, 1854
I am a compromiser and maneuverer. I try to get something. That’s the way our system works. – Lyndon B. Johnson
I am a democrat only on principle, not by instinct – nobody is that. Doubtless some people say they are, but this world is grievously given to lying. – Mark Twain
I am an Indian, and I know what India is. I know Indian culture. I know Indian constitution and democracy. – Mammootty
I am not ashamed to confess that twenty-five years ago I was a hired laborer; hauling rails, at work on a flatboat – just what might happen to any poor man’s son. I want every man to have a chance. – Abraham Lincoln, 1860
I am only one; but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; I will not refuse to do the something I can do. – Helen Keller, 1950
I am sure that there was not man born marked by God above another; for none comes into this world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him. – Hannibal Rumbold
I am sure there was no man born marked of God above another, for none comes into the world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him. – Richard Rumbold
I believe each individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruit of his labor, so far as it in no wise interferes with any other man’s rights. – Abraham Lincoln, 1858
I believe that America, the world’s strongest democracy, ought not to be afraid of democracy, but we are. – Lee Hamilton
I believe the Republicans have never thought that democracy was anything but a tribal myth. – Hunter S. Thompson
I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. – James Madison
I cannot repeat too often that democracy is a word, the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawaken’d, notwithstanding the resonance and many angry tempests out of which its syllables have come. … It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten because that history has yet to be enacted. – Walt Whitman
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. – Walt Whitman
I consider anybody a twerp who hasn’t read ‘Democracy in America’ by Alexis de Tocqueville. There can never be a better book than that one on the strengths and vulnerabilities inherent in our form of government. – Kurt Vonnegut
I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die. – Nelson Mandela
I have great faith in the people; as for their wisdom – well, Coca-Cola still outsells champagne. – Adlai Stevenson
I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but inform their discretion. – Thomas Jefferson, 1820
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain. – John Adams
I often think it’s comical / How Nature always does contrive / That every boy and every gal, / That’s born into the world alive, / Is either a little Liberal, / Or else a little Conservative! – W.S. Gilbert
I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. – Abraham Lincoln, in a letter to Col. William F. Elkins, November 21, 1864
I think it may be admitted as a general and constant rule that among civilized nations the warlike passions will become more rare and less intense in proportion as social conditions are more equal. – Alexis de Tocqueville
I think sometimes our young people believe either that government is not a good thing to be involved in … or that if they did get involved, what they did wouldn’t make a difference. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are around here as a nation after more than 224 years because more than half the time, more than half the people turned out to be right on the really big issues. There is no place in the world that is a better example of what free people can do when they work together… I frankly think that a lot of this fashionable cynicism is a kind of self-indulgent arrogance that has no place in America. – Bill Clinton, 2000
I’ve never known a country to be starved into democracy. – Senator George D. Aiken
If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. – John F. Kennedy
If all power is in the people, if there is no higher law than their will, and if by counting their votes, their will may be ascertained – then the people may entrust all their power to anyone, and the power of the pretender and the usurper is then legitimate. It is not to be challenged since it came originally from the sovereign people. – Walter Lippmann
If fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy. – Theodore Adorno, 1903-1969, German philosopher
If liberty and equality are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in government to the utmost. – Aristotle
If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost. – Aristotle.
If majority governments … be the worst of governments, those who think and say so cannot be within the pale of the republican faith. They must either join the avowed disciples of aristocracy, oligarchy or monarchy, or look for a utopia exhibiting a perfect homogeneousness of interests, opinions and feelings nowhere yet to be found in civilized communities. – James Madison
If men were wise, the most arbitrary princes could not hurt them. If they are not wise, the freest government is compelled to be a tyranny. – William Blake
If nothing is expected of a people, that people will find it difficult to contradict that expectation. – Frederick Douglass
If one man offers you democracy and another offers you a bag of grain, at what stage of starvation do you prefer the grain to the vote? – Bertrand Russell, 1872-1970, British philosopher
If the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy. – Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End Of History And Last Men’.
If the meanest man in the republic is deprived of his rights then every man in the republic is deprived of his rights. – Jane Addams, 1903
If there have been those who doubted whether a confederated representative democracy were a government competent to the wise and orderly management of the common concerns of a mighty nation, those doubts have been dispelled. – John Quincy Adams
If there were a nation of Gods, it would govern itself democratically. A government so perfect is not suited to men. – Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
If voting could actually change anything, it would be illegal. – Noam Chomsky, 1928-, American linguist, philosopher, social activist
If voting made any difference they wouldn’t let us do it. – Mark Twain, 1835-1910, American writer
If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: ‘Thou shalt not ration justice.’ – Sophocles / Learned Hand
If we desire a society of peace, then we cannot achieve such a society through violence. If we desire a society without discrimination, then we must not discriminate against anyone in the process of building this society. If we desire a society that is democratic, then democracy must become a means as well as an end. – Bayard Rustin
If we enquire wherein lies precisely the greatest good of all, which ought to be the good of every system of law, we shall find that it comes down to two main objects, freedom and equality. – Jean Jacques Rousseau
If you have a plan, we want to hear it. Tell your community leaders, your local officials, your governor, and your team in Washington. Believe me, your ideas count. An individual can make a difference. – George H.W. Bush
If you want to raise a crop for one year, plant corn. If you want to raise a crop for decades, plant trees. If you want to raise a crop for centuries, raise men. If you want to plant a crop for eternities, raise democracies. – Carl A. Schenk
If, in short, you are of the opinion that the principal object of government is not to confer the greatest possible glory upon the body of the nation, but to ensure the greatest enjoyment and to avoid the most misery to each of the individuals who compose it – if such be your desire, then equalize the conditions of men and establish democratic institutions. – Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. 1, 1945
In a democracy the people choose a leader in whom they trust. Then the chosen leader says, ‘Now shut up and obey me.’ People and party are then no longer free to interfere in his business. – Max Weber.
In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme. – Aristotle.
In a democracy, dissent is an act of faith. – J. William Fulbright
In a democracy, every little wrong idea may grow up to become national policy. – Ashleigh Brilliant, 1933-, British cartoonist & epigrammatist
In a democracy, someone who fails to get elected to office can always console himself with the thought that there was something not quite fair about it. – Thucydides, 460-394 BC, Ancient Greek historian
In a democracy, the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority. – Edmund Burke
In a democracy, the opposition is not only tolerated as constitutional, but must be maintained because it is indispensable. – Walter Lippmann
In a democracy, the well-being, individuality and happiness of every citizen is important for the overall prosperity, peace and happiness of the nation. – A. P. J. Abdul Kalam
In a really equal democracy, every section would be represented proportionately. – John Stuart Mill.
In contrast to totalitarianism, a democracy can face and live with the truth about itself. – Sidney Hook
In every human breast, God has implanted a principle, which we call love of freedom; it is impatient of oppression and pants for deliverance. – Phillis Wheatley
In Germany, the Nazis first came for the communists, and I did not speak up, because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak up, because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak up, because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I did not speak up, because I was not a Catholic. Then they came for me … and by that time, there was no one to speak up for anyone. – Martin Niemöller
In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. – Orson Welles
In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. – Graham Greene
In our democracy we must have a partnership of labor, of business and of government. – Charles H. Percy
In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates. Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been, and ever will be, pursued, until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit. A coalition of a majority of the whole society could seldom take place upon any other principles, than those of justice and the general good. – James Madison from notes on the Constitutional Convention
In republics, the people give their favor, never their trust. – Antoine Rivarol, 1753-1801, French author of maxims
In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock! – Graham Greene, 1904-1991, British writer
In Switzerland, they had brotherly love. And in 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. – from the film The Third Man (1949)
In the democratic vision, the freedom achieved by a democratic order is above all the freedom of self-determination in making collective and binding decisions: the self-determination of citizens entitled to participate as political equals in the making of the rules and laws under which they will live together as citizens. – Robert Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics, 1989
In the field of world policy; I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor. – Franklin D. Roosevelt, March 4, 1933
In the strict sense of the term, a true democracy has never existed, and never will exist. – Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
In the strict sense of the term, a true democracy has never existed, and never will exist. It is against natural order that the great number should govern and that the few should be governed. – Jean Jacques Rousseau, 1712-1778, Swiss-French philosopher
In the United States, the government is intended to be a government of men. A corporation is not a citizen with a right to vote or take a hand otherwise in politics. It is an artificial creation, brought into existence by favor of the State solely to perform the functions allowed by its charter. Interference by it with the state and attempts by it to exercise rights of citizens are fundamentally a perversion of its power. Its stockholders, no matter how wise or how rich, should be forced to exercise their political influence as individuals on an equality with other men. That is the basic principle of democracy. – The Tribune, 1904
In this and like communities public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed; consequently he who moulds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes and decisions. – Abraham Lincoln
In view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. – John Marshall Harlan, 1896
Indeed, the ideal for a well-functioning democratic state is like the ideal for a gentleman’s well-cut suit – it is not noticed. – Arthur Koestler, 1905-1983, Hungarian-British writer
Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation. – Benjamin Disraeli
Inside the polling booth, every American man and woman stands as the equal of every other American man and woman. There they have no superiors. There they have no masters save their own minds and consciences. – Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1936
Is it your object to refine the habits, embellish the manners, and cultivate the arts, to promote the love of poetry, beauty, and glory? Would you constitute a people fitted to act powerfully upon all other nations, and prepared for those high enterprises which, whatever be their results, will leave a name forever famous in history? If you believe such to be the principal object of society, avoid the government of the democracy. – Alexis de Tocqueville
It cannot be repeated too often that nothing is more fertile in prodigies than the art of being free; but there is nothing more arduous than the apprenticeship of liberty. – Alexis de Tocqueville
It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. – Winston Churchill
It has long, however, been my opinion, and I have never shrunk from its expression … that the germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal judiciary; … working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped. – Thomas Jefferson, letter to Charles Hammond, August 18, 1821
It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive. – Thomas Mann
It is always easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them. – Alfred Adler
It is extremely difficult in democratic times to draw nations into hostilities; but … it is almost impossible that any two of them should go to war without embroiling the rest. The interests of all are so interlaced, their opinions and their wants so much alike, that none can remain quiet when the others stir. Wars therefore become more rare, but when they break out, they spread over a larger field. – Alexis de Tocqueville
It is lamentable to think how a great proportion of all efforts and talents in the world are employed in merely neutralizing one another. … It is the proper end of government to reduce this wretched waste to the smallest possible amount, by taking such measures as shall cause the energies now spent by mankind in injuring one another, or in protecting themselves from injury, to be turned to the legitimate employment of the human faculties. – John Stuart Mill, 1848
It is my belief that there are ‘absolutes’ in our Bill of Rights, and that they were put there on purpose by men who knew what words meant, and meant their prohibitions to be ‘absolute.’ – Hugo L. Black
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. – Hubert H. Humphrey
It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error. – Robert H. Jackson
It is of great importance in a republic, not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. – James Madison
It is procedure that spells much of the difference between rule of law and rule by whim or caprice. – William O. Douglas
It would seem that man was born a slave, and that slavery is his natural condition. At the same time nothing on earth can stop man from feeling himself born for liberty. Never, whatever may happen, can he accept servitude; for he is a thinking creature. – Simone Weil
It’s not healthy for a society if the people hate their own government. – Garry Wills
It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting. – Tom Stoppard
It’s a relief to hear the rain. It’s the sound of billions of drops, all equal, all equally committed to falling, like a sudden outbreak of democracy. Water, when it hits the ground, instantly becomes a puddle or rivulet or flood. – Alice Oswald
It’s not the hand that signs the laws that holds the destiny of America. It’s the hand that casts the ballot. – Harry Truman, 1884-1972, American President 1945-1953
Jesus Christ was the greatest republican. – Napoleon, 1769-1821, French Emperor
Journalism is what maintains democracy. It’s the force for progressive social change. – Andrew Vachss
Journalism is what we need to make democracy work. – Walter Cronkite
Judges ought to remember that their office is jus dicere and not jus dare; to interpret law and not to make or give law. – Francis Bacon
Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice. – Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Knowledge – Zzzzzp! Money – Zzzzzp! – Power! That’s the cycle democracy is built on! – Tennessee Williams
Laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty, there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population. – Albert Einstein
Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other. – John F. Kennedy, 1962
Let the people think they govern and they will be governed. – William Penn
Let us at all times remember that all American citizens are brothers of a common country, and should dwell together in the bonds of fraternal feeling. – Abraham Lincoln, 1860
Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. – Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Let us never forget that our constitutions of government are solemn instruments, addressed to the common sense of the people and designed to fix and perpetuate their rights and their liberties. – Joseph Story
Liberal constitutional democracy is supposed to ensure that each citizen is free and equal and protected by basic rights and liberties. – John Rawls.
Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right … and a desire to know. – John Adams, 1765
Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it. – Woodrow Wilson
Lincoln’s reference to government of the people, by the people, for the people is a generally satisfactory definition of democracy. I say generally because when it comes to fair and workable details, democracy fails to completely meet the criteria enunciated by Lincoln by a rather wide margin. – Senator George D. Aiken
Loyalty must arise spontaneously from the hearts of people who love their country and respect their government. – Hugo L. Black
Making peace is harder than making war. – Adlai Stevenson
Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary. – Reinhold Niebuhr
Many Americans cannot define democracy; like the schoolboy when asked to define an elephant confessed he was unable to do so, but insisted he would recognize an elephant when he saw one. – Adlai Stevenson
Many forms of government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. – Winston Churchill
Men are more often bribed by their loyalties and ambitions than by money. – Robert H. Jackson
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. … Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters. – Edmund Burke
Men speak of natural rights, but I challenge anyone to show where in nature any rights existed or were recognized until there was established for their declaration and protection a duly promulgated body of corresponding laws. – Calvin Coolidge
Money will cease to be master and become the servant of humanity. Democracy will rise superior to the money power. – Abraham Lincoln.
Mothers all want their sons to grow up to be president but they don’t want them to become politicians in the process. – John F. Kennedy
My Democratic friends just can’t accept the fact that the American people chose Donald Trump to be president – it’s called democracy. My advice to them, and I say this gently: Fill out a ‘Hurt Feelings Report’ and let’s move on. – John Kennedy
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me – and I welcome their hatred. I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it, the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it, these forces met their master. – Franklin D. Roosevelt
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. – Margaret Mead
No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer. – George Orwell
No democratic world will work as it should work until we recognize that we can only enjoy any right so long as we are prepared to discharged its equivalent duty. This applies just as much to states in their dealing with one another as to individuals within the states. – Anthony Eden
No free government nor the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people, but by … a frequent recurrences to fundamental principles. – George Mason, Virginia Declaration of Rights, 1776
No freeman shall be taken, or imprisoned, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any way harmed … except by the legal judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. – Magna Carta, 1215
No government can be long secure without a formidable opposition. – Benjamin Disraeli
No governmental action, no economic doctrine, no economic plan or project can replace that God-imposed responsibility of the individual man and woman to their neighbors. – Herbert Hoover, 1931
No man in this country is so high that he is above the law. No officer of the law may set that law at defiance with impunity. All the officers of the government from the highest to the lowest are bound to obey it. – Samuel F. Miller
No oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the perversion and exorbitance of legal authority. – Joseph Addison
No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country … it must invariably and immeasurably increase the powers of the civil government; it must almost compulsorily concentrate the direction of all men and the management of all things in the hands of the administration. … All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and the shortest means to accomplish it. – Alexis de Tocqueville
Nobody makes a greater mistake than he who does nothing because he could do only a little. – Edmund Burke
None of the state constitutions have provided sufficient checks against democracy. – Edmund Randolph
Not only every juror’s right but his Duty … to find the Verdict according to his own best Understanding, Judgment and Conscience, tho in Direct opposition to the Direction of the Court. – John Adams
Nothing is more important to America than citizenship; there is more assurance of our future in the individual character of our citizens than in any proposal I, and all the wise advisers I can gather, can ever put into effect in Washington. – Warren G. Harding, 1920
Nothing is so irresistible as the tyrannical power commanding in the name of the people, because while wielding the moral power which belongs to the will of the greater number, it acts at the same time with the quickness and persistence of a single man. – Alexis de Tocqueville
Now the whole world needs restructuring, i.e., progressive development, a fundamental change. – Mikhail Gorbachev
O democracy, where are you leading us? / Ω δημοκρατία, ποι προβιβάς ημάς ποτε; – Aristophanes, 445-386 BC, Ancient Greek comic playwright ‐ Birds
Of the three forms of government, monarchy, aristocracy, and the people, the best is a mixture of all three for each one taken on its own can lead to disaster. Kings can be capricious, aristocrats, self-interested, and an unbridled multitude enjoying unwanted power more terrifying then a conflagration or a raging sea. – Cicero
On inky rebellion and publication of the Occupied Wall Street Journal: We thought it was important that there be a media outlet that reflected what was under way. A newspaper is tactile, engages all the senses, and leads to more immersive reading than what people might do online. – Arun Gupta
Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear. – Harry S. Truman
One of the distinguishing characteristics of a democratic period is the taste that all men have for easy success and present enjoyment. This occurs in the pursuits of the intellect as well as in others. – Alexis de Tocqueville
One of the keys to the survival of free institutions is the relationship between private and public life, the way citizens do, or do not, participate in the public sphere. – Robert N. Bellah
Only very slowly and late have men come to realize that unless freedom is universal it is only extended privilege. – Christopher Hill
Our children should learn the general framework of their government, and then they should know where they come in contact with the government, where it touches their daily lives and where their influence is exerted on the government. It must not be a distant thing, someone else’s business, but they must see how every cog in the wheel of a democracy is important and bears its share of responsibility for the smooth running of the entire machine. – Eleanor Roosevelt
Peace is more than just the absence of war. True peace is justice, true peace is freedom. And true peace dictates the recognition of human rights. – Ronald Reagan, 1986
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
Political democracy … with all its threatening evils, supplies a training school for making first class men. It is life’s gymnasium, not of good only, but of all. – Walt Whitman
Political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it social democracy. What does social democracy mean? It means a way of life which recognizes liberty, equality and fraternity as the principles of life. – B. R. Ambedkar
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. – Ronald Reagan, 1977
Politics ought to be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges of free people. – Dwight D. Eisenhower
Power is not an end in itself, but is an instrument that must be used toward an end. – Jeane J. Kirkpatrick
Prosperity or egalitarianism – you have to choose. I favor freedom – you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion. – Mario Vargas Llosa
Pure democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. – James Madison, Federalist 10
Real liberty is neither found in despotism or the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments. – Alexander Hamilton
Religion. The inefficacy of this restraint on individuals is well known. The conduct of every popular assembly, acting on oath, the strongest of religious ties, shews that individuals join without remorse in acts against which their consciences would revolt, if proposed to them separately in their closets. When indeed religion is kindled into enthusiasm, its force like that of other passions is increased by the sympathy of a multitude. But enthusiasm is only a temporary state of religion, and whilst it lasts will hardly be seen with pleasure at the helm. Even in its coolest state, it has been much oftener a motive to oppression than a restraint from it. – James Madison, 1787
Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. – John Adams
Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms. – Aristotle
Right law must be intelligible, intellectually accessible to the people whom that law is to serve, whose law it is, the law-consumers and the citizen. – Karl N. Llewellyn
Rights that do not flow from duty well performed are not worth having. – Mohandas K. Gandhi
Salus populi suprema lex esto the welfare of the people shall be the supreme law. – first attributed to Cicero
Self-sufficiency and a contempt of the science and experience of others are too prevailing traits of character in this country. – Alexander Hamilton, 1798
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will arise to make them miserable. – Aldous Huxley
Suffrage is the pivotal right. – Susan B. Anthony
Surely anyone who has ever been elected to public office understands that one commodity above all others, namely the trust and confidence of the people, is fundamental in maintaining a free and open political system. – Hubert H. Humphrey
Teach self-denial and make its practice pleasure, and you can create for the world a destiny more sublime that ever issued from the brain of the wildest dreamer. – Sir Walter Scott
Term limits mean that you don’t trust the voters. ‘Stop me before I vote again.’ – Garry Wills
That businessmen should from time to time direct candid criticism toward our Government is only understandable but salutary in a free democracy. – Clarence B. Randall
That government is the strongest of which every man feels himself a part. – Thomas Jefferson
That the schools make worthy citizens is the most important responsibility placed on them. – Franklin D. Roosevelt
The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. – James Madison
The average man votes below himself; he votes with half a mind or a hundredth part of one. A man ought to vote with the whole of himself, as he worships or gets married. A man ought to vote with his head and heart, his soul and stomach, his eye for faces and his ear for music; also (when sufficiently provoked) with his hands and feet. … The question is not so much whether only a minority of the electorate votes. The point is that only a minority of the voter votes. – G. K. Chesterton
The ballot is stronger than the bullet. – Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1865, American President
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
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. – Winston Churchill, 1874-1965, British Prime Minister, Nobel 1953
The best cause requires a good pleader. – Dutch proverb
The best cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy. – Edward Abbety, ‘A Voice Crying In The Wilderness’.
The best defense against democracy is to distract people. – Noam Chomsky, 1928-, American linguist, philosopher, social activist
The best democracy is where everybody is afraid of the law like a tyrant. / Κρατίστην είναι δημοκρατίαν εν ή πάντες ως τύραννον φοβούνται τον νόμον. – Bias of Priene, 625-540 BC, one of the 7 sages of Ancient Greece
The best way to enhance freedom in other lands is to demonstrate here that our democratic system is worthy of emulation. – Jimmy Carter
The blind lead the blind, it’s the democratic way. – Henry Miller, 1891-1980, American writer
The body politic, like the human body, begins to die from its birth, and bears in itself the causes of its destruction. – Jean Jacques Rousseau
The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life – to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity. – Archibald MacLeish
The capacity to combine commitment with skepticism is essential to democracy. – Mary Catherine Bateson
The cause of democracy’s stupidities is confidence in the anonymous citizen; and the cause of its crimes is the anonymous citizen’s confidence in himself. – Nicolas Gomez Davila, 1913-1994, Colombian writer
The chief support of an autocracy is a standing army. The chief support of a democracy is an educated people. – Lotus D. Coffman
The complete independence of the courts of justice is peculiarly essential in a limited constitution. – Alexander Hamilton
The Constitution … is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary which they may twist and shape into any form they please. – Thomas Jefferson, letter to Judge Spencer Roane, September 6, 1819
The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy. – H.L. Mencken (also attributed to Alfred E. Smith)
The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern. – Lord Acton
The deadliest enemies of nations are not their foreign foes; they always dwell within their borders. … The nation blessed above all nations is she in whom the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans or empty quacks. – William James
The deadliest foe of democracy is not autocracy but liberty frenzied. – Otto Kahn
The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment. – Robert M. Hutchins
The democratic tradition does not advance a single and agreed ideal of popular rule, but is rather an arena of debate in which the notion of popular rule is discussed. – Andrew Heywood, ‘Political Theory’.
The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don’t have to waste your time voting. – Charles Bukowski, 1920-1994, American writer
The effect of a representative democracy is to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of the nation. – James Madison
The election is not very far off when a candidate can recognize you across the street. – Kin Hubbard, 1868-1930, American cartoonist
The electorate is the most unstable and unpredictable thing. / Ως ο μεν δήμος εστιν ασταθμητότατον πράγμα των πάντων και ασυνθετώτατον. – Demosthenes, 384-322 BC, Ancient Athenian & statesman orator
The empires of the future are the empires of the mind. – Winston Churchill
The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. – Elbridge Gerry
The experience of a century and a half has demonstrated that our system of free government functions best when the maximum degree of information is made available to our people. – Brien McMahon
The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself – always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested in adversity. – Jimmy Carter
The fabric of democracy is always fragile everywhere because it depends on the will of citizens to protect it, and when they become scared, when it becomes dangerous for them to defend it, it can go very quickly. – Margaret Atwood, 1939 -, Canadian writer
The fact that a man is to vote forces him to think. You may preach to a congregation by the year and not affect its thought because it is not called upon for definite action. But throw your subject into a campaign and it becomes a challenge. – John Jay Chapman
The first requirement of politics is not intellect or stamina but patience. Politics is a very long run game and the tortoise will usually beat the hare. – John Major
The flood of money that gushes into politics today is a pollution of democracy. – Theodore White
The freedom of the press is one of the great bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained but by despotic government. – George Mason
The freeman, casting with unpurchased hand The vote that shakes the turrets of the land. – Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
The future of this republic is in the hands of the American voter. – Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1949
The general object was to produce a cure for the evils under which the United States labored; that in tracing these evils to their origins, every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy. – Edmund Randolph
The general question must be between a republican government in which the majority rule the minority, and a government in which a lesser number or the least number rule … no government … can be perfect. … The abuses of all other governments have led to the preference for republican government as the best of all governments, because the least imperfect that the vital principle of republican government is the lex majoris partis, the will of the majority. – James Madison. 1833
The germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal judiciary; an irresponsible body, (for impeachment is scarcely a scare-crow) working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped from the states, and the government of all be consolidated into one. – Thomas Jefferson, letter to Charles Hammond, Aug 18, 1821
The goal of a great democracy should be fulfillment, not ease. It should be adequacy, not serenity. – Abram Sachar
The goal to strive for is a poor government but a rich people. – Andrew Johnson
The good of man must be the end of the science of politics. – Aristotle
The government of the Union, then, is emphatically and truly a government of the people. In form and in substance it emanates from them. Its powers are granted by them, and are to be exercised directly on them for their benefit. – John Marshall, 1819
The government of the United States is a government limited … by the authority of a paramount Constitution. – James Madison, 1788
The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion. – George Washington, Treaty of Tripoli, 1796
The great object of my fear is the federal judiciary. That body, like gravity, ever acting, with noiseless foot, and unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step, and holding what it gains, is engulfing insidiously the special governments into the jaws of that which feeds them. – Thomas Jefferson, letter to Judge Spencer Roane, Mar 9, 1821
The greatest praise government can win is, that its citizens know their rights and dare to maintain them. – Wendell Phillips
The high office of president has been used to foment a plot to destroy the Americans’ freedom, and before I leave office I must inform the citizen of his plight. – John F. Kennedy, Columbia University, November 12, 1963
The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society. – Karl Marx
The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all. – John F. Kennedy
The judiciary of the United States is the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working under ground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric. They are construing our constitution from a coordination of a general and special government to a general and supreme one alone. – Thomas Jefferson, letter to Thomas Ritchie, December 25, 1820
The legislative cannot transfer the power of making laws to any other hands: for it being but a delegated power from the people, they who have it cannot pass it over to others. – John Locke, Second Treatise of Government
The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done. – Abraham Lincoln.
The life of a republic lies certainly in the energy, virtue, and intelligence of its citizens. – Andrew Jackson, 1865
The main problem of participatory democracy is not how to run it, but how to reach it. – C.B. Macpherson, ‘The Life And Times Of Liberal Democracy.
The method of democracy is to bring conflicts out into the open where their special claims can be seen and appraised, where they can be discussed and judged. – John Dewey, ‘Political Writings’.
The military constitutes a specialized community governed by a separate discipline from that of the civilian. – Robert H. Jackson
The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong. – George Bernard Shaw, 1856-1950, Irish writer, Nobel 1925
The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. – John Adams, A Defense of the American Constitutions, 1787
The more I study it the Constitution, the more I have come to admire it, realizing that no other document devised by the hand of man ever brought so much progress and happiness to humanity. – Calvin Coolidge, 1929
The more the state ‘plans’ the more difficult planning becomes for the individual. – Friedrich Hayek
The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations. – Noam Chomsky, 1928-, American linguist, philosopher, social activist
The nation blessed above all nations is she in whom the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day… by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans or empty quacks. – William James
The object of government is not to change men from rational beings into puppets, but to enable them to develop their minds and bodies in security, and to employ their reason unshackled. … The true aim of government is liberty. – Baruch Spinoza
The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority. – Lord Acton, 1834-1902, English historian
The only distinction that democracies reward is a high degree of conformity. – Ambrose Bierce, 1842–1914, American writer
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror. – Franklin D. Roosevelt, March 4, 1933
The only thing wrong with democratic process is the failure to use it. – Seymour Graubard
The only title in our democracy superior to that of President is the title of citizen. – Louis Brandeis, 1937
The only way to practice democracy, is to practice democracy. – Hu Shih.
The opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves, in their own sphere of action, but for the legislature and executive also in their spheres, would make the judiciary a despotic branch. – Thomas Jefferson, letter to Abigail Adams, September 11, 1804
The people I admire most are those who are sensitive and want to create something or discover something, and do not see life in terms of power, and such people get more of a chance under a democracy than elsewhere. – E. M. Forster, 1879-1970, British writer
The people made the Constitution, and the people can unmake it. It is the creature of their own will, and lives only by their own will. – John Marshall, 1821
The power vested in the American courts of justice of pronouncing a statute to be unconstitutional forms one of the most powerful barriers that have ever been devised against the tyranny of political assemblies. – Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835
The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or anyone else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about anyone else. – Teddy Roosevelt, Kansas City Star, May 7, 1918
The price of democracy is the ongoing pursuit of the common good by all of the people. – Saul Alinsky.
The principle on which this country was founded and by which it has always been governed is that Americanism is a matter of the mind and heart; Americanism is not, and never was, a matter of race and ancestry. A good American is one who is loyal to this country and to our creed of liberty and democracy. – Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1943
The progress of democracy seems irresistible, because it is the most uniform, the most ancient and the most permanent tendency which is to be found in history. – Alexis de Tocqueville
The prospects for stable democracy in a country are improved if its citizens and leaders strongly support democratic, ideas, values, and practices. The most reliable support comes when these beliefs and predispositions are embedded in the country’s culture and are transmitted, in large part, for one generation to the next. In other words, the country possesses a democratic political culture. – Robert Dahl, 1998
The public welfare demands that constitutional cases must be decided according to the terms of the Constitution itself, and not according to judges’ views of fairness, reasonableness, or justice. I have no fear of constitutional amendments properly adopted, but I do fear the rewriting of the Constitution by judges under the guise of interpretation. – Hugo L. Black
The real danger of democracy is, that the classes which have the power under it will assume all the rights and reject all the duties-that is, that they will use the political power to plunder those-who-have. – William Graham Sumner
The real difference between democracy and oligarchy is poverty and wealth. Wherever men rule by reason of their wealth, whether they be few or many, that is an oligarchy, and where the poor rule, that is a democracy. – Aristotle.
The real safeguard of democracy…is education. – Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The real strength of democracy is that anyone who is not specifically against it must ultimately be for it, while communism suffers from the great tactical liability that anyone who is not specifically for it is eventually forced to oppose it. – Edwin O. Reichauer
The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind. – Thomas Jefferson, 1790
The role of dissident is not, and should not be, a claim of membership in a communion of saints. In other words, the more fallible the mammal, the truer the example. – Christopher Hitchens
The secret of the demagogue is to appear as dumb as his audience so that these people can believe themselves as smart as he is. – Karl Kraus
The security of our nation is not at the ramparts alone. Security also lies in the value of our free institutions. A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know. – Murray I. Gurfein
The simple act of voting is the ground upon which the edifice of elective government rests ultimately. – Judith N. Shklar
The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right. – Learned Hand
The Spirit that prevails among Men of all degrees, all ages and sexes is the Spirit of Liberty. – Abigail Adams, 1775
The stakes … are too high for government to be a spectator sport. – Barbara Jordan
The struggle for democracy has to be maintained on as many fronts as culture has aspects: political, economic, international, educational, scientific and artistic. – John Dewey.
The support of state governments in all their rights, as the most competent administration for our domestic concerns, are the surest bulwarks against anti-republican tendencies. – Thomas Jefferson, 1801
The Tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy. – Montesquieu, 1689-1755, French thinker
The tyranny of a prince is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy. – Montesquieu, 1748
The U.S. political system has decayed over time because its traditional system of checks and balances has deepened and become increasingly rigid. In an environment of sharp political polarization, this decentralized system is less and less able to represent majority interests and gives excessive representation to the views of interest groups and activist organizations that collectively do not add up to a sovereign American people. … The depressing bottom line is that given how self-reinforcing the country’s political malaise is, and how unlikely the prospects for constructive incremental reform are, the decay of American politics will probably continue until some external shock comes along to catalyze a true reform coalition and galvanize it into action. – Francis Fukuyama
The United States must of course remain militarily strong, but it should rely less on its military strength and more on the attraction of a free, open, and prosperous country that is strong enough and confident enough not to impose its will upon others and to allow diversity in the world’s political and economic systems. – Lee Hamilton
The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of bourgeois stupidity. – Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1880, French writer
There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the body. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People. – Oscar Wilde
There can be no democracy without truth. There can be no truth without controversy, there can be no change without freedom. Without freedom there can be no progress. – Andrew Young
There is a better chance of seeing a camel pass through the eye of a needle than of seeing a really great man ‘discovered’ through an election. – Adolf Hitler, 1889-1945, German dictator
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge. – Isaac Asimov
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge. – Isaac Asimov.
There is a debt of service due from every man to his country, proportioned to the bounties which nature and fortune have measured to him. – Thomas Jefferson
There is a limit to the application of democratic methods. You can inquire of all the passengers as to what type of car they like to ride in, but it is impossible to question them as to whether to apply the brakes when the train is at full speed and accident threatens. – Leon Trotsky
There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents. – Thomas Jefferson
There is but one method of rendering a republican form of government durable, and that is by disseminating the seeds of virtue and knowledge through every part of the state by means of proper places and modes of education and this can be done effectively only by the aid of the legislature. – Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence
There is in the American Government … a want of unity. … The Sailors, the helmsman, the engineer, do not seem to have one purpose or obey one will so that instead of making steady way, the vessel may pursue a devious or zigzag course, and sometimes merely turn round and round in the water. – James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, 1888
There is more selfishness and less principle among members of Congress … than I had any conception of, before I became President of the United States. – James K. Polk, December 16, 1846
There is no nobler motive for entering public life then the resolution not to be ruled by wicked men. – Cicero
There is not Communism or Marxism, but representative democracy and social justice in a well-planned economy. – Fidel Castro
There is nothing wrong in America that can’t be fixed with what is right in America. – Bill Clinton
There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all, but especially to democracies as against despots. What is it? Distrust. – Demosthenes
There is only one motivation for imposing burdens on voting that are ostensibly designed to discourage voter-impersonation fraud, if there is no actual danger of such fraud, and that is to discourage voting by persons likely to vote against the party responsible for imposing the burdens. – Judge Richard A Posner, 7th Circuit Court of Appeals
There’s really no point to voting. If it made any difference, it would probably be illegal. – H.L. Mencken, 1880-1956, American columnist & cultural critic
They should rule who are able to rule best. – Aristotle
They that are discontented under monarchy, call it tyranny; and they that are displeased with aristocracy, call it oligarchy: so also, they which find themselves grieved under a democracy, call it anarchy, which signifies the want of government; and yet I think no man believes, that want of government, is any new kind of government. – Thomas Hobbes
This sacrifice of individual interests to the greater good of the whole formed the essence of republicanism and comprehended for Americans the idealistic goal of their Revolution. … This republican ideology both presumed and helped shape the American’s conception of the way their society and politics should be structured and operated. – Gordon Wood, 1969
This was the object of the Declaration of Independence. Not to find out new principles, or new arguments never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take. Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion. – Thomas Jefferson, letter to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825
Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard. – Robert H. Jackson
Those who wish to reap the blessings of liberty must undergo the fatigues of supporting it. – Thomas Paine.
Though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful, must be reasonable, that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate which would be oppression. – Thomas Jefferson
Though written constitutions may be violated in moments of passion or delusion, yet they furnish a text to which those who are watchful may gain rally and recall the people; they fix too for the people the principles of their political creed. – Thomas Jefferson, 1802
Thought control is a copyright of totalitarianism and we have no chain to it. – Robert H. Jackson
Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings. – Salman Rushdie
Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart. – Alexis de Tocqueville
To all of which is added a selection from the elementary schools of subjects of the most promising genius, whose parents are too poor to give them further education, to be carried at the public expense through the college and university. The object is to bring into action that mass of talents which lies buried in poverty in every country, for want of the means of development, and thus give activity to a mass of mind, which, in proportion to our population, shall be double or treble of what it is in most countries. – Thomas Jefferson, letter to Jose Correa de Serra, November 25, 1817
To be a stateless individual is one of the most dreadful political fates that can befall anyone in the modern world. – Judith N. Shklar
To consider the Supreme Court of the United States strictly as a legal institution is to underestimate its significance in the American political system. For it is also a political institution, an institution, that is to say, for arriving at decisions on controversial questions of national policy. As a political institution, the court is highly unusual, not least because Americans are not quite willing to accept the fact that it is a political institution and not quite capable of denying it; so that frequently we take both positions at once. This is confusing to foreigners, amusing to logicians, and rewarding to ordinary Americans who thus manage to retain the best of both worlds. – Robert Dahl
To defend a doctrine of natural rights today, requires either insensibility to the world’s progress or else considerable courage in the face of it. Whether all doctrines of natural rights of man died with the French Revolution or were killed by the historical learning of the nineteenth century, everyone who enjoys the consciousness of being enlightened knows that they are, and by right ought to be, dead. The attempt to defend a doctrine of natural rights before historians and political scientists would be treated very much like an attempt to defend the belief in witchcraft. It would be regarded as emanating only from the intellectual underworld. – Morris R. Cohen, Reason and Nature, 1932
To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed. – Teddy Roosevelt, 1907
Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within. – Hannah Arendt
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around. – Gilbert K. Chesterton
Two cheers for democracy one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: There is no occasion to give three. – E.M. Forster
Two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three. – E. M. Forster, 1879-1970, British writer
Two cheers for Democracy; one because it admits variety, and two because it permits criticism. – E. M. Forster
Two of the most basic components of a good life are success in one’s work and the joy that comes from serving one’s community. And … the two are so closely intertwined that a person cannot usually have one without having the other. – Robert N. Bellah
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule – and both commonly succeed, and are right. – H.L. Mencken, 1880-1956, American columnist & cultural critic
Vote, v. The instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country. – Ambrose Bierce, 1842–1914, American writer
War should never be entered upon until every agency of peace has failed. – William McKinley, March 4, 1897
We Americans have no commission from God to police the world. – Benjamin Harrison
We are a democracy, and there is only one way to get a democracy on its feet in the matter of its individual, its social, its municipal, its state, its national conduct, and that is by keeping the public informed about what is going on. – Joseph Pulitzer
We are Americans because we practice democracy and believe in republican government, not because we practice revealed religion and believe in Bible-based government. – John Stuart Mill.
We are as great as our belief in human liberty – no greater. And our belief in human liberty is only ours when it is larger than ourselves. – Archibald MacLeish
We are bound by ideals that teach us what it means to be citizens. Every child must be taught these ideals. Every citizen must uphold them. … I ask you to be citizens. Citizens, not spectators. Citizens, not subjects. Responsible citizens building communities of service and a nation of character. – George W. Bush, 2001 Inaugural Address
We are teaching the world the great truth that governments do better without kings and nobles than with them. The merit will be doubled by the other lesson that religion flourishes in greater purity, without than with the aid of government. – James Madison, 1822
We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both. – Louis D. Brandeis
We cannot possibly reconcile the principle of democracy, which means co-operation, with the principle of governmental omniscience under which everyone waits for an order before doing anything. That way lies loss of freedom, and dictatorship. – Lewis H. Brown
We don’t need democratization of privilege. What we need is the self-discipline of democracy. – Thomas I. Parkinson
We have become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different dreams. – Jimmy Carter
We mean by ‘politics,’ the people’s business – the most important business there is. – Adlai Stevenson
We must learn to judge our social and economic choices by whether they empower the powerless, protect the earth, and foster true democracy. – Jim Wallis, ‘Soul Of Politics’.
We’d all like to vote for the best man but he’s never a candidate. – Kin Hubbard, 1868-1930, American cartoonist
What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws, and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few – as we have learned to our sorrow.
What free-market economists are not telling us is that the politics they want to get rid of are none other than those of democracy itself. When they say we need to insulate economic policies from politics, they are in effect advocating the castration of democracy. – Ha-Joon Chang
What I want is to get done what the people desire to have done, and the question for me is how to find that out exactly. – Abraham Lincoln
What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interest alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned, but has never quite forgotten – that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side-by-side with the greatest. – Learned Hand
What would you do, cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? … and when the law was down and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide … the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast. Man’s laws, not God’s. And if you cut them down … do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety’s sake. – Robert Bolt, A Man for all Seasons
What you’re seeing is a loss of confidence in institutions and their legitimacy because they are not seen as delivering. It’s hardly a surprise that it’s producing a degree of paralysis. Politics becomes very reactive and it’s hard to deal with the bigger issues. – Jonathan Wood
Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy. – Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1865, American President
When Benjamin Franklin was asked after a session of the Constitutional Convention, What kind of a government have you given us? he replied, A democracy, if you can keep it. Our republic is founded on the principle that it will continue only as long as the people keep democracy alive. – Thomas A. Watson
When threatened, the first thing a democracy gives up is democracy. – Mignon McLaughlin, 1913-1983, American magazine editor
When we got into office, the thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as we’d been saying they were. – John F. Kennedy
Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights. – Thomas Jefferson, 1788
Whenever war is declared, truth is the first casualty. – Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in Wartime: Propaganda Lies of the First World War, 1928
Where everyman is … participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year but every day … he will let the heart be torn out of his body sooner than his power be wrested from him by a Caesar or a Bonaparte. – Thomas Jefferson, 1816
Where liberty dwells, there is my country. – Latin phrase of unknown authorship; motto of Algernon Sydney and James Otis
Where you see wrong or inequality or injustice, speak out, because this is your country. This is your democracy. Make it. Protect it. Pass it on. – Thurgood Marshall
Wherever Law ends, Tyranny begins. – John Locke, 1690
Whether in private or in public, the good citizen does something to support democratic habits and the constitutional order. – Judith N. Shklar, 1991
While democracy must have its organizations and controls, its vital breath is individual liberty. – Charles Evans Hughes
Wipe out college-the Electoral College, that is. It’s not merely that the constitutional provisions for it are anachronistic, but its continued existence is downright dangerous to our democratic system. – Malcolm Forbes
Without deviation, without exception, without any ifs, buts, or whereases, freedom of speech means you shall not do something to people for views they have, express, speak, or write. – Hugo L. Black
Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep. – Rosa Luxemburg
Without the ability to participate intelligently in politics, one cannot use one’s votes to advance one’s aims nor can one be said to participate in a process of reasoned deliberation among equals. – Tom Christiano, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Yet among the countries most comparable to the United States and where democratic institutions have long existed without breakdown, not one has adopted our American constitutional system. – Robert A. Dahl, ‘How Democratic Is The American Constitution?’
Yet as I read the Constitution, one of its essential purposes was to take government off the backs of people and keep it off. – William O. Douglas
You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man’s freedom. You can only be free if I am free. – Clarence Darrow
You can’t have meaningful political democracy without functioning economic democracy. – Noam Chomsky, 1928-, American linguist, philosopher, social activist
