Best 3411 quotes in «democracy quotes» category

No less characteristic in a democracy is social justice. This demands a solution to the frightening indexes of infant mortality, of malnutrition, lack of education illiteracy, wages not sufficient to sustain life

Nonetheless, we continue to be obsessed with finding or inventing a European nation which, as in the nation state, guarantees homogeneity and thus an appropriate form of democracy and centralized government.

Nonviolence is not a weapon of the weak. It is a weapon of the strongest and bravest.

No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren’t designed to produce them, if we don’t speak about them and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.

No matter what happens, nothing can prevent the historical process by which society demands freedom and democracy.

No one should ever be locked away simply because they share the same race, ethnicity, or religion as a spy or terrorist. If that principle was not learned from the internment of Japanese Americans, then these are very dangerous times for our democracy.

No one can learn tolerance in a climate of irresponsibility, which does not produce democracy. The act of tolerating requires a climate in which limits may be established, in which there are principles to be respected. That is why tolerance is not coexistence with the intolerable. Under an authoritarian regime, in which authority is abused, or a permissive one, in which freedom is not limited, one can hardly learn tolerance. Tolerance requires respect, discipline, and ethics.

[N]o one's ever been able to show me any difference between democracy and brute force. It's just a majority ganging up on a minority with the minority giving in to avoid getting massacred.

No one is born a good citizen; no nation is born a democracy. Rather, both are processes that continue to evolve over a lifetime. Young people must be included from birth. A society that cuts off from its youth severs its lifeline.

No real journalist makes $5 million a year... Those in power fear and dislike real journalists.

No party has a monopoly on wisdom. No democracy works without compromise.

No tempest or conflagration, however great, is harder to quell than mob carried away by the novelty of power.

No politician can praise unemployment or inflation, and there is no way of combining high employment with stable prices that does not involve some control of income and prices. Otherwise the struggle for more consumption and more income to sustain it-a struggle that modern corporations, modern unions and modern democracy all facilitate and encourage-will drive up prices. Only heavy unemployment will then temper this upward thrust. Not many wish to confront the truth that the modern economy gives a choice only between inflation, unemployment, or controls.

No perfect democracy is possible without perfect nonviolence at the back of it.

Nothing to impede progress. If you want to see the fate of democracies, look out the windows.

Nothing so diminishes democracy as secrecy.

Notice, by extension, that in a democracy those committed to non-procreation could never, in the long run, prevail politically against those committed to procreation.

Now the question is, now that we are there, what should we do in the best interest of the U.S., not only from a standpoint of the necessity of some stable democracy in the Middle East.

Now as through this world I ramble, I see lots of funny men, Some rob you with a six gun, And some with a fountain pen.

Not less, but more democracy - that is the demand, that is the great goal that we have to prescribe for ourselves, and especially for our youth.

Now that our media companies and it appears are policies are traded for cash, what is there to check the continuing consolidation of power and diminishing of democracy?

Obamacare is a crime against democracy.

Obamacare is a crime against democracy because a material part of that bill was not disclosed to the Senate nor to the House of Representatives. The funding was hidden in the bill. That was fraud and I can't vote for any budget that fails to bring back that money from Obamacare.

Nuclear weapons are inherently threatening to all of civilization. If that had been a nuclear weapon at the World Trade Center, even the most primitive kind of the Hiroshima, Nagasaki, you wouldn't have a Manhattan. There wouldn't be a democracy of any kind in America.

Obama has already rejected the bright sunlight of public knowledge, which is democracy's great disinfectant and cure.

Obama's rhetorical overtures to democracy, it turned out, were just a decoy to conceal his unwavering determination to govern from the far left.

Of course I wrote most of the Constitution myself. I remember hesitating for a long time over the US presidential system. But it wouldn't have done - we were too trained in English democracy to sit down under a dictatorship which is what the American system really is.

Of course democracy is good, but it is a process, not a prescription.

Offering democracy to an Arab is like bringing a horse to a steakhouse.

Of governments there are said to be only two forms - democracy and oligarchy. For aristocracy is considered to be a kind of oligarchy, as being the rule of a few, and the so-called constitutional government to be really a democracy.

Of the many things we have done to democracy in the past, the worst has been the indignity of taking it for granted.

Oftentimes Westerners don't really understand fully the values of this particular culture. And I think the jury is still out as to whether democracy can really thrive in Iraq.

[On Brazil:] In our country everything is weakening. The money is weak. Democracy is weak and the politicians are very weak. Everything that is weak dies one day.

Once you don't vote your ideals ... that has serious undermining affects. It erodes the moral basis of our democracy.

On December 7, 1941, an event took place that had nothing to do with me or my family and yet which had devastating consequences for all of us - Japan bombed Pearl Harbour in a surprise attack. With that event began one of the shoddiest chapters in the tortuous history of democracy in North America.

One cannot have a trade union or a democratic election without freedom of speech, freedom of association and assembly. Without a democratic election, whereby people choose and remove their rulers, there is no method of securing human rights against the state. No democracy without human rights, no human rights without democracy, and no trade union rights without either. That is our belief; that is our creed.

One could always do more, faster and cleverer, but democracy has its own rhythm.

Of all forms of government and society, those of free men and women are in many respects the most brittle. They give the fullest freedom for activities of private persons and groups who often identify their own interests, essentially selfish, with the general welfare.

One has the right to be wrong in a democracy

One day we'll have a system that includes the rights of the people to make money and keep it, rather than a system where you can vote for the fox or the wolf, but there's no little box that endorses the chickens. Our time will come, you can be sure of that.

One does not export democracy in an armored vehicle.

One of the central assumptions of the concept of democracy, perhaps its most central assumption, is that by and large human beings are better judges of their own interests.... The operating maxim of the democratic ideology is, "Whoever wears the shoe knows best where it pinches.

One of the benefits of a properly functioning democracy is minority rights and majority rule.

One of the first things we must get rid of is the idea that democracy is tantamount to capitalism.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of a democratic period is the taste that all men have for easy success and present enjoyment. This occurs in the pursuits of the intellect as well as in others.

One of the chief obstacles to intelligence is credulity, and credulity could be enormously diminished by instructions as to the prevalent forms of mendacity. Credulity is a greater evil in the present day than it ever was before, because, owing to the growth of education, it is much easier than it used to be to spread misinformation, and, owing to democracy, the spread of misinformation is more important than in former times to the holders of power.

One of the most interesting reactions to come out of 1968 was in the first publication of the Trilateral Commission, which believed there was a 'crisis of democracy' from too much participation of the masses.

One of the most important signs of the existence of a democracy is that when there is a knock at the door at 5 in the morning, one is completely certain that it is the milkman.

One-man-one-vote combined with "free entry" into government-democracy--implies that every person and his personal property comes within reach of-and is up for grabs by-everyone else: a "tragedy of the commons" is created.

One reason the United States finds itself at the edge of a foreign policy disaster is its underinformed citizenry, a key weakness in democracy.