Best 3411 quotes in «democracy quotes» category

If the government was as afraid of disturbing the consumer as it is of disturbing business, this would be some democracy.

If the great Western experiment fails and we end up living in totalitarian war-on-terrorism states, one day someone's going to say, 'Well democracy doesn't work because they had to give it up'.

If the institutions of parliamentary democracy are worth preserving, the duty to explain them to the people they are meant to serve becomes vitally important.

If the measures which have been pursued are approved by the majority, it is the duty of the minority to acquiesce and conform.

If the members of parliament no longer consider themselves mandatories of the taxpayers but deputies of those receiving salaries, wages, subsidies, doles, and other benefits from the treasury, democracy is done for.

If there is a rotten government in a democracy, the main reason for this is that there is a rotten majority over there!

If there was one decision I would overrule, it would be Citizens United. I think the notion that we have all the democracy that money can buy strays so far from what our democracy is supposed to be.

If the strong exploit the weak, democracy will not be stable.

If the war on terror is endless, you could forget about democracy.

if the world is not safe for babies you are never going to get a democracy worth having.

If those people in power never made any mistakes, we'd be done for as a democracy. But people keep making mistakes. History is a series of mistakes.

If Voting Changed Anything They'd Abolish It

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

If we care about universal principles such as freedom, democracy and the rule of law, we cannot leave them to the care of market forces; we must establish some other institutions to safeguard them.

If we don't participate in it, it ceases to be a democracy. So Obama will rise or fall based not so much on what he does but on what we do to support him.

If we desire a society without discrimination, then we must not discriminate against anyone in the process of building this society. If we desire a society that is democratic, then democracy must become a means as well as an end.

If we don't have an informed electorate we don't have a democracy. So I don't care how people get the information, as long as they get it. I'm just doing it my particular way and I feel lucky I can do it the way I want to do it.

If we don't have workers organized into labor unions, we're in great peril of losing our democracy.

If we dwell in a community that is comfortable, then it's probably not broad enough a coalition.

If we fail to meet our problems here, no one else in the world will do so. If we fail, the heart goes out of progressives throughout the world.

If we have a chance of succeeding and bringing stability and democracy to Iraq, it will mean learning from our mistakes, not denying them and not ignoring them.

If we had had time and the occasion to develop a new socialism in the GDR, socialism with a human face, with democracy, this might have been an example also to West Germany. The development would have run the other way.

If we incline too much to democracy, we shall soon shoot into a monarchy.

If we're going to preach about democracy we're going to have to make difficult decisions. We're not going to sell our values out for basing rights, particularly when (Defense) Secretary (Donald) Rumsfeld himself noted that there were options to the base in Uzbekistan

If we want to cultivate a true spirit of democracy we cannot afford to be intolerant. Intolerance betrays want of faith in one's cause.

If we were going to address what involves the biggest number of women, reproductive freedom is a fundamental human right - like freedom of speech, the most basic right. Freedom from violence, since women worldwide are still like 70% at least of all victims of violence. Equality in the family, democracy in the family, since the family is the microcosm of everything else, so if you have inequality and violence in the family, it normalizes it in the street, for foreign policy, for every place else.

If you are called upon to govern humans, treat them humanely.

If you are a designer, sometimes it is better not to delegate, because someone pays money for something that you designed, so it should be exactly the way you want it, exactly the way you would have chosen it. People call me a control freak, and I say, "Well, my name is on the shoe." It means the heel needs to be the way I want it and not the way somebody else wants it, and the toe needs to be exactly the way I want it, and the fabric and the material have to be exactly the way I want it. It is not a democracy - it is a dictatorship.

If you believe in democracy, why shouldn't you know what the government is doing?

If you care for the quality of life in our American democracy, then you have to be for censorship.

If you consider, for example, that democracy is much like a religion then 9/11 is akin to finding the body of God.

If you have reservations about the system and want to change it, the democratic argument goes, do so within the system: put yourself forward as a candidate for political office, subject yourself to the scrutiny and the vote of fellow citizens. Democracy does not allow for politics outside the democratic system. In this sense, democracy is totalitarian.

If you had said to anyone in 1945, at the end of the Second World War with the continent it ruins, that you could have a European Union of 28 member states stretching from Portugal in the West to Estonia in the East, all of them more-or-less liberal democracies - they wouldn't have believed you.

If you establish a democracy, you must in due time reap the fruits of a democracy. You will in due season have great impatience of public burdens, combined in due season with great increase of public expenditure. You will in due season have wars entered into from passion and not from reason; and you will in due season submit to peace ignominiously sought and ignominiously obtained, which will diminish your authority and perhaps endanger your independence. You will in due season find your property is less valuable, and your freedom less complete.

If you have an internet service provider that's capable of slowing down other sites, or putting other sites out of business, or favoring their own friends and affiliates and customers who can pay for fast lanes, that's a horrible infringement on free speech. It's censorship by media monopolies. It's tragic: here we have a technology, the internet, that's capable really of being the town square of democracy, paved with broadband bricks, and we are letting it be taken over by a few gatekeepers. This is a first amendment issue; it's free speech versus corporate censorship.

If you live in a democracy and don't have freedom of information, it's not a democracy. And people have to understand that if you don't have freedom of information online, it's not going to be offline, either.

If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don't know how to read, you don't know how to decide. That's the great thing about our country - we're a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.

If you look at Indian society, it's a society made up of minorities. There's nobody who's not a minority, whether it's ethnicity, caste or religion. But the whole effort now is to confect a political constituency - an ethnic or a religious constituency that can coalesce into a political majority in order to deal with this model of representative democracy. That process has been a hundred years in the making in this part of the world.

If you look at US internal documents, they explain very clearly what the threat of Cuba was. So, back in the early 1960s the State Department described the threat of Cuba as Castro's successful defiance of US policy, going back to the Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine established the US claim to dominate the Western hemisphere and Castro was successfully defying that. That's not tolerable. It is like somebody saying "let's have democracy in Greece," and we just can't tolerate that so we have to destroy the threat at its roots.

If you look at the way all of the new reform movements dedicated to the public interest are living and thriving on the Internet, I do think there is still some considerable hope that the full participation of individuals in that conversation of democracy can once again restore the integrity of the way our democracy works.

If you read Mein Kampf, Hitler's book, which I have outside, I bought it when I was eleven, Hitler said, "democracy inevitably leads to Marxism" - now you work that one out. It's so interesting that when the poor have the vote they will use it to remove the privileges of the rich.

If you put your politicians up for sale, as the US does (alone in this among industrialized democracies), then someone will buy them--and it won’t be you; you can’t afford them.

If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.

If you want a good argument against democracy, spend five minutes with a voter.

If you're not turned on by politics, politics will turn on you.

If you want to be a Jewish state and you want to remain a democracy, you have to have a two-state solution.

If you want to reinstate the 14.4 billion dollars that Bush cut out of the veterans program then vote democrat.

I guess 35 years ago, I thought we had more of a democracy than we actually do. Majority support doesn't help unless the majority is active and votes - but the opposition minority votes a much greater proportion, so we often lose by a narrow margin.

I gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2016 and warned of Trump. America has survived for almost 250 years with its imperfect democracy, but, you know, maybe it's a better democracy than elsewhere. And I am sure American democracy will survive.

I grew up in San Francisco. And so I'm informed in a certain kind of way about, you know, believing in democracy and believing in America. And I'm a very ardent patriot.