Democracy Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Helen Thomas

Benito Mussolini

Bernard Baruch

Otto Hermann Kahn

J. William Fulbright

Allen Ginsberg

Muhammad Ali Jinnah

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

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere.

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.

A democracy is a volcano which conceals the fiery materials of its own destruction. These will produce an eruption and carry desolation in their way.

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

The first and continuing argument for the curtailment of working hours and the raising of the minimum age was that education was necessary in a democracy and working children could not attend school.

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

Ibrahim Babangida

Democracy! Bah! When I hear that word I reach for my feather Boa!

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

Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it.

Joseph Schumpeter

Our democracy must be not only the envy of the world but the engine of our own renewal. There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.

Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy. You in America will see that some day.

Benito Mussolini

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

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

The more information a guy has, the more likely he is to say, "Hey, King Charlie, you really blew that call." That's why democracy happened. The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.

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

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.

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

Theodore H. White

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.

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

Chinks in America's egalitarian armor are not hard to find. Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.

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

You don't spread democracy through the barrel of a gun.