Democracy Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Helen Thomas

Ibrahim Babangida

Otto Hermann Kahn

Bernard Baruch

Benito Mussolini

Allen Ginsberg

Muhammad Ali Jinnah

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.

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

The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.

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

Reinhold Niebuhr

Democracy is not so much a form of government as a set of principles.

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.

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.

It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting.

It is not true that democracy will always safeguard freedom of conscience better than autocracy. Witness the most famous of all trials. Pilate was, from the standpoint of the Jews, certainly the representative of autocracy. Yet he tried to protect freedom. And he yielded to a democracy.

Joseph Schumpeter

This is the criminal left that belongs not in a dormitory, but in a penitentiary. The criminal left is not a problem to be solved by the Department of Philosophy or the Department of English—it is a problem for the Department of Justice…. Black or white, the criminal left is interested in power. It is not interested in promoting the renewal and reforms that make democracy work; it is interested in promoting those collisions and conflict that tear democracy apart.

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

So long as we have enough people in this country willing to fight for their rights, we'll be called a democracy.

Roger Nash Baldwin

The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambsh. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.

Robert Maynard Hutchins

Without the power of the Industrial Union behind it, Democracy can only enter the State as the victim enters the gullet of the Serpent.

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

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

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

The flood of money that gushes into politics today is a pollution of democracy.

Theodore H. White

If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: Thou shalt not ration justice.

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

All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.

Alfred Emanuel Smith

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

William Beveridge

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.

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

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

Lee Harvey Oswald