Democracy Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Helen Thomas

Ibrahim Babangida

Otto Hermann Kahn

Bernard Baruch

Benito Mussolini

Allen Ginsberg

Muhammad Ali Jinnah

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

Benito Mussolini

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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 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

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

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

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

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

Ibrahim Babangida

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

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.

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

William Beveridge

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

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

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

Alfred Emanuel Smith

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.

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

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