Democratic Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Britain, which in the years immediately before this war was rapidly losing such democratic virtues as it possessed, is now being bombed and burned into democracy.

J. B. Priestley

It is one of the saddest spectacles of our time to see a great democratic movement support a policy which must lead to the destruction of democracy and which meanwhile can benefit only a minority of the masses who support it. Yet it is this support from the Left of the tendencies toward monopoly which make them so irresistible and the prospects of the future so dark.

Friedrich Hayek

Why are so many people ashamed of having intelligence and using it? There is nothing democratic about such an attitude. To pretend to be less intelligent that one is deceives nobody and begets dislike, for intelligence cannot be hidden; like a cough, it will out, stifle it how you may. No man has ever won commendation for standing at less than his full height, either physically, morally, or intellectually.

Robertson Davies

The leaders who are now managing the Democratic Party in this state are the men who at the regular session of the legislature in 1861, declared that, if an army went from Indiana to assist in puting down the rebellion, it must first pass over their dead bodies.

Oliver P. Morton

It is a waste of words to try to impute to the Creator democratic ideas or social virtues; or to think that one can move Him with weeping and wailing, and persuade Him with logic and legal quibbles. Nothing is so pointless as words.

Halldór Laxness

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in a mordant protest written soon after the [1952] election, found the intellectual in a situation he has not known for a generation. After twenty years of Democratic rule, during which the intellectual had been in the main understood and respected, business had come back into power, bringing with it the vulgarization which has been the almost invariable consequence of business supremacy.

Richard Hofstadter

While posing as the pursuer of thieves, and the restorer of stolen goods, the government is actually the biggest thief of all. In fact, progressives have turned a large body of Americans—basically, Democratic voters—into accessories of theft by convincing them that they are doing something just and moral by picking their fellow citizens' pockets.

Everything Lumumba would have done in the Congo, Castro actually accomplished in Cuba: drumhead justice, mass executions, confiscation of industry, collectivization of the land, suspension of civil rights, suspension of democratic processes, alliances with the Iron Curtain. All these became the trade marks of the Castro regime.

W. Cleon Skousen

The bridge was not of such great importance or social significance, but it was symbolical that Labour was capable of decision, that the machinery of democratic public administration would work if the men and women in charge were determined that it should work.

Herbert Morrison

A democratic and equitable international order is inherent in the fundamental human rights that humanity shares. It is achievable, step-by-step, when every country and people act at the local, regional and international levels, aware that such an international order must be based on the United Nations Charter and the human rights treaties, which together make up what we can safely call the Constitution of the modern world.

Alfred de Zayas

A democratic Iran would be a natural ally of the United States while the Saudis, with their popularly backed medieval system, are natural enemies. At some point the U.S. will pivot, and the pivot will likely be permanent, but until the clerical regime in Tehran reforms itself out of all recognition or is overthrown from below, we're stuck with the awkward and ailing alliance we have. Let's try not to squander it further.

In any country, if you don't have countervailing institutions, the power of any one president is problematic for democratic development.

Condoleezza Rice

Less than three months after Japanese capitulation... he discarded all the democratic concepts expressed by his predecessors wartime undertakings... He ditched the Roosevelt thesis and put in first place his declared determination to use the all the power of the government to enable United States imperialism to dominate the post-war world and organize it in its own image.

The entrapment of black voters in the Democratic party has been a disaster, and it's one of the reasons that progress on racial equality has been infinitesimal or at best incremental since the Civil Rights movement.

Crispin Sartwell

The cyberpunk circuitry of self-organizing planetary commoditronics escaped nominal bourgeois control in the late nineteenth century, provoking technocratic-corporatist (i.e. fascist / 'social democratic') political cultures in allergic reaction.

I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word "faggot", so I — so kind of an impasse — can't really talk about Edwards.

The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.

Let us say in passing that since (philosophical) remedies are often worse than the malady, our age, in order to be cured of the Plato sickness, has swallowed such doses of a relativist, vaguely skeptical, lightly spiritualist and insipidly moralist medicine, that it is in the process of gently dying, in the small bed of its supposed democratic comfort.

The most popular man under a democracy is not the most democratic man, but the most despotic man. The common folk delight in the exactions of such a man. They like him to boss them. Their natural gait is the goose step.

Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the U.S. economy. [Senate Minority Leader] Harry Reid was talking about soup lines. And [Senator] Hillary Clinton was talking about the economy being on the verge of collapse. Yet in the same breath they say that Social Security is rock solid and there's no crisis there. How are you going to work – you've said you are going to reach out to these people – how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality? — January 26, 2005

Richard Nixon has never been one of my favorite people anyway. For years I've regarded his existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad. The Nixon I remembered was absolutely humorless; I couldn't imagine him laughing at anything except maybe a paraplegic who wanted to vote Democratic but couldn't quite reach the lever on the voting machine.

Hunter S. Thompson

The rappers brought back rhyme. Critics try to put these kids down, but many of them are good writers. I shouldn't be surprised by the sophistication, some of the allusions—some of them have read widely and just draw on a whole lot of different material. They really have restored an interest in poetry. It's democratic and it's worldwide.

One of the great fallacies of our age is democratic discourse.

We can never forget that our fate as Americans is, finally, collective, and that we fail our mission as a democratic nation whenever we submit to any sort of segregation that would remake the rules and distort the truth in the interest of creating or satisfying a constituency unwilling to assert the tragic optimism so intrinsic to the blues and to the Constitution.

The whole purpose of college is to learn how to deal with difficult situations, not to run away from them. A micro-aggression is exactly that : micro. But in a macro sense, one of the most dangerous places on a college campus is the so-called 'safe space', because it creates a false impression that we can isolate ourselves from those who hold different views. We can't, and we shouldn't try—not in politics or in the workplace. Graduates, in the global economy, and in a democratic society, an open mind is the most valuable asset you can possess.

Michael Bloomberg