Democracy Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

John Adams

Spiro Agnew

Fisher Ames

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

Clement Attlee

Bernard Baruch

William Beveridge

All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it's your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.

In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.

The greatest blessing of our democracy is freedom. But in the last analysis, our only freedom is the freedom to discipline ourselves.

Being 'at the mercy of legislative majorities' is merely another way of describing the basic American plan: representative democracy.

I believe we are on an irreversible trend towards more freedom and democracy, but that could change.

America's greatest contribution to the world is its concept of democracy, its concept of freedom, freedom of action, freedom of speech, and freedom of thought.

Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions — it only guarantees equality of opportunity.

Unfortunately, the true force which propels our endless political disputes, our constant struggles for political advantage, is often not our burning concern for democracy, it is often of our dedication to the principle of the rule of law.

Olusegun Obasanjo

Industrial capitalism brought representative democracy, but with a weak public mandate and inert citizenry. The digital age offers a new democracy based on public deliberation and active citizenship.

Informed by our sad experience of history, we require nothing short of a foundation for lasting democracy.

Ibrahim Babangida

Two world wars were fought to make the world safe for democracy. Today we have to wage a war on all fronts. This war has to be waged in peace time, but it has to be waged as energetically and with as much total national effort as in times of war. The war we have to wage today has only one goal, and that is to make the world safe for diversity.
The concept of peaceful coexistence has been criticized by many who do not see the need to make the world safe for diversity. I wonder if they have ever paused to ask themselves the question: What is the alternative to coexistence?

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

In a democracy dissent is an act of faith. Like medicine, the test of its value is not its taste, but its effect,...

J. William Fulbright

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 Schumpeter

You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists.

I have no religion, and at times I wish all religions at the bottom of the sea. He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government; it is as if he would catch his people in a trap. My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go. Let them worship as they will; every man can follow his own conscience, provided it does not interfere with sane reason or bid him against the liberty of his fellow-men.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

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

Democracy may mean something more than a theoretically absolute popular government, but it assuredly cannot mean anything less.

And that is my definition of democracy, the right to be in a minority and not be suppressed

Lee Harvey Oswald

Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.

Each state is guided by its interests, not by some nebulous concept of common interest. And not many states are even democratic. So, you have a problem with the concept between international institutions and sovereignty. To my mind, there is a solution which has to do with democracy, because democratic governments are subject to the will of the people. So, if the people will it, you can actually create international institutions through the democratic states.

The deadliest foe of democracy is not autocracy but liberty frenzied. Liberty is not foolproof. For its beneficent working it demands self-restraint, a sane and clear recognition of the practical and attainable, and of the fact that there are laws of nature which are beyond our power to change.

Otto Hermann Kahn

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.

Reinhold Niebuhr

Aggression is simply another name for government. Aggression, invasion, government, are interconvertible terms. The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control. He who attempts to control another is a governor, an aggressor, an invader; and the nature of such invasion is not changed, whether it is made by one man upon another man, after the manner of the ordinary criminal, or by one man upon all other men, after the manner of an absolute monarch, or by all other men upon one man, after the manner of a modern democracy.

Benjamin Tucker

Ignorance is an evil weed, which dictators may cultivate among their dupes, but which no democracy can afford among its citizens.

William Beveridge