Democratic Quotes

400+ Sourced quotes

The choice of future government should be left to the Iranian people to decide in a free election... What form it ultimately takes is up to them. The essential point to me is that there is no way we can achieve our aspirations as a nation unless we have a secular regime, as opposed to this theocracy... Without a clear separation of the state and religion you cannot have the beginning of any form of democratic system.

I think it is important for all those young out there, who someday hope to play real football, where you throw it and kick it and run with it and put it in your hands, a distinction should be made that football is democratic, capitalism, whereas soccer is a European socialist sport.

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

There are two options for any society: total prohibition as in a totalitarian state, or total license. Both avoid the ardors of decision. Both have the attraction of certainty. The difficult option is to decide where the line should be drawn and this, surely, is the responsibility of any civilized and democratic country.

One of its [the First World War's] most certain results will be the partial destruction of the aristocratic classes everywhere in northern Europe … This will tend to realize the standardization of type so dear to democratic ideals. If equality cannot be obtained by lengthening and uplifting the stunted of body and of mind, it can be at least realized by the destruction of the exalted of stature and of soul.

There was autocracy in political life, and it was superseded by democracy. So surely will democratic power wrest from you the control of industry. The fate of you, the aristocracy of industry, will be as the fate of the aristocracy of land if you do not now show that you have some humanity still among you. Humanity abhors, above all things, a vacuum in itself, and your class will be cut off from humanity as the surgeon cuts the cancer and alien growth from the body. Be warned ere it is too late.

George William Russell

Democratic man, dreaming eternally of Utopias, is ever a prey to shibboleths.

Beijing wants to impose its rule on Taiwan like it has in Hong Kong, Tibet and East Turkestan. If any half-way moral and sensible person had their way, the reverse would happen and Taiwan would export its democratic Chinese model to its 900-pound cousin. That's probably what will eventually happen anyway, even if China militarily conquers Taiwan in the meantime.

With people's revolutionary rage, the king will be ousted and a democratic state, Islamic Republic, will be established.

Ruhollah Khomeini

You have no idea how far state control goes and how much power the Nazi representatives have over our work... In this respect they certainly differ from the former Social-Democratic officials. These Nazi radicals think of nothing except 'distributing the wealth.' Some businessmen have even started studying Marxist theories, so that they will have a better understanding of the present economic system.

Günter Reimann

More and more too, the old name absorbs into me. Mannahatta, 'the place encircled by many swift tides and sparkling waters.' How fit a name for America's great democratic island city! The word itself, how beautiful! how aboriginal! how it seems to rise with tall spires, glistening in sunshine, with such New World atmosphere, vista and action!

It was the custom when men received nominations to come to me for contributions, and I made them and considered them good paying investments for the company. In a Republican district I was a strong Republican; in a Democratic district I was Democratic, and in doubtful districts I was doubtful. In politics I was an Erie Railroad man all the time.

You think that Mr Khomeini, [an] uneducated person … could have planned all this? Masterminded all this, set up all the organization? I know that one man alone could not have done it … I know that a tremendous amount of money was spent … I know that top experts in propaganda were used to show us like tyrants and monsters, and the other side as democratic liberal revolutionaries who want to save the country.

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi

The Democratic Party has exploited black leadership.

Crispin Sartwell

A university is a place for the free interchange of ideas. It is not only a traditional privilege of university people to dissect, examine and criticise the basis of current practices; it is an obligation to do so, provided only that their criticism is supported by and scholarly reasoning. This implies a freedom which must be jealously guarded and never abused. We live in a democratic community in which there is no place for the suppression of reasoned criticism. Universities have no monopoly of the right to criticise; nevertheless, they are centres of concentration of intellectual ideas, and it is not surprising that many decisions at government level have been suggested or stimulated through an expression of an academic viewpoint.

By their critisism of the existing system, which repeats the Social-Democratic critisism almost word for word, the Bolshevik opposition is preparing minds... for the acceptance of the positive platform of Social-Democracy.... Not only among the mass of the workers, but among communist workers as well, the opposition is rearing the shoots of ideas and sentiments which, if skillfully tended, may easily bear social-democratic fruit.

The great issues facing us today are not Republican issues or Democratic issues. The political parties can debate the means, but both parties must embrace the end objective, which is to make America great again.

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

Indiana was really, I suppose, a Democratic State. It has always been put down in the book as a state that might be carried by a close and careful and perfect organization and a great deal of— [from audience: soap, in reference to purchased votes, the word being followed by laughter]. I see reporters here, and therefore I will simply say that everybody showed a great deal of interest in the occasion, and distributed tracts and political documents all through the country.

Chester A. Arthur

It is a testament to the strength and purity of the democratic sentiment in the country, that the republic has not been overthrown by its newspapers.

Harriet Martineau

Despite being subjected to killing, arrest, and oppression, Morsy's supporters have held fast to the democratic process and prevented Egypt from descending into civil war.

Tawakkol Karman

The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while...I want you to quote this, the media here is the opposition party. They don't understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States... The elite media got it dead wrong, 100 percent dead wrong. [The 2016 election was] a humiliating defeat that they will never wash away, that will always be there...You're the opposition party. Not the Democratic Party. You're the opposition party. The media's the opposition party.

Let people realize clearly that every time they threaten someone or humiliate or unnecessarily hurt or dominate or reject another human being, they become forces for the creation of psychopathology, even if these be small forces. Let them recognize that every person who is kind, helpful, decent, psychologically democratic, affectionate, and warm, is a psychotheraputic force, even though a small one.

Modern science will continue to be blindly destructive as long as its operations are determined by the anarchism of market economic forces. The problem to be solved is whether science, technology, and industry can be brought under genuinely democratic control in the context of a global planned economy, so that all of us can collectively put our hard-won scientific knowledge to mutually beneficial use. I am confident it can be accomplished, but will it? If so, there is reason for optimism. If not... well, to paraphrase Keynes, "in the not-so-long run we're all dead."

Clifford D. Conner

For the institutions of the European Union are at present incomplete. A European Senate is badly needed to complete them. By creating an upper chamber in the European parliament, a new bridge could be built between national political classes, which retain democratic legitimacy, and the decision-making process in Brussels. Such a Senate should be recruited by indirect election from exisiting national parliaments.

Larry Siedentop