Democracies Have Quotes

We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.

Elections belong to the people. It's their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy.

Democracy has two excesses to avoid: the spirit of inequality, which leads to an aristocracy, or to the government of a single individual; and the spirit of extreme equality, which conducts it to despotism, as the despotism of a single individual finishes by conquest.

Education is a human right with immense power to transform. On its foundation rest the cornerstones of freedom, democracy and sustainable human development.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.

Of the people, by the people, for the people.

Democracy needs support and the best support for democracy comes from other democracies. Democratic nations should come together in an association designed to help each other and promote what is a universal value - democracy.

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

A total work of art is only possible in the context of the whole of society. Everyone will be a necessary co-creator of a social architecture, and, so long as anyone cannot participate, the ideal form of democracy has not been reached. Whether people are artists, assemblers of machines or nurses, it is a matter of participating in the whole.

Democracy has nothing to do with freedom. Democracy is a soft variant of communism, and rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else.

Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking.

Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.

Bad officials are the ones elected by good citizens who do not vote.

The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.

No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

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

When free discussion is denied, hardening of the arteries of democracy has set in, free institutions are but a lifeless form, and the death of the republic is at hand.

Democracy is four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.

Democracy is necessary to peace and to undermining the forces of terrorism.

Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.

Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.

The leading student of business propaganda, Australian social scientist Alex Carey, argues persuasively that “the 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.

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.

It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.

Democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largesse out of the public treasure. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefit from the public treasury, with the result that democracy always collapses over a loose fiscal policy, always to be followed by a dictatorship, and then a monarchy.

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

There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship.

It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority.

Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death.

That government is best which governs least.

Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.

As long as the differences and diversities of mankind exist, democracy must allow for compromise, for accommodation, and for the recognition of differences.

Liberalism and Western-style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today these two concepts have failed. Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems.

The ballot is stronger than the bullet.

In nation after nation, democracy has taken the place of autocracy.

The issuing power [of money] should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.

Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority.

The idea of democracy has been stripped of it moral imperatives and come to denote hollowness and hypocrisy.

No democracy has ever long survived the failure of its adherents to be ready to die for it. My own conviction is this, the people must either go on or go under.

In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme.