Democracy Quotes
Read the best selected
democracy quotes by some famous people of their times. These
quotes about democracy will motivate and inspire you and you
will be much wiser about the subject.
Democracy is not so much a form of government as a set of principles. Woodrow T. Wilson
The worst thing I can say about democracy is that it has tolerated the Right Honorable Gentleman for four and a half years. Aneurin Bevan
Democracy: In which you say what you like and do what you're told. Dave Barry
I believe in democracy, because it releases the energies of every human being. Woodrow T. Wilson
When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It's a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it. John Kenneth Galbraith
Democracy with its semi-civilization sincerely cherishes junk. The artist's power should be spiritual. But the power of the majority is material. When these worlds meet occasionally, it is pure coincidence. Paul Klee
The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity. James F. Cooper
As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Abraham Lincoln
Democracy! Bah! When I hear that word I reach for my feather Boa! Allen Ginsberg
Democracy is a process by which the people are free to choose the man who will get the blame. Laurence J. Peter
Democracy is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequal alike. Plato
Two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Edward M. Forster
The best way of learning to be an independent sovereign state is to be an independent sovereign state. Kwame Nkrumah
This is one of the paradoxes of the democratic movement -- that it loves a crowd and fears the individuals who compose it -- that the religion of humanity should have no faith in human beings. Walter Lippmann
There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship. Ralph Nader
Chinks in America's egalitarian armor are not hard to find. Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism. Florence King
The ship of Democracy, which has weathered all storms, may sink through the mutiny of those aboard. Grover Cleveland
You must drop all your democracy. You must not believe in ''the people.'' One class is no better than another. It must be a case of Wisdom, or Truth. Let the working classes be working classes. That is the truth. There must be an aristocracy of people who have wisdom, and there must be a Ruler: a Kaiser: no Presidents and democracies. D. H. Lawrence
Everything that is right or natural pleads for separation. The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, 'Tis time to part. Thomas Paine
It is not enough to merely defend democracy. To defend it may be to lose it; to extend it is to strengthen it. Democracy is not property; it is an idea. Hubert H. Humphrey
Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people. Harry Emerson Fosdick
Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. John Adams
I swear to the Lord, I still can't see, why Democracy means, everybody but me. Langston Hughes
Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated. Gilbert K. Chesterton
No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent. Abraham Lincoln
Democracy is the wholesome and pure air without which a socialist public organization cannot live a full-blooded life. Mikhail Gorbachev
Let the people think they govern and they will be governed. William Penn
Nor is the people's judgment always true: the most may err as grossly as the few. John Dryden
Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates. Gore Vidal
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. Norman Mailer
The soviet people want full-blooded and unconditional democracy. Mikhail Gorbachev
Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few. George Bernard Shaw
The freeman, casting with unpurchased hand the vote that shakes the turrets of the land. Oliver Wendell Holmes
Unless democracy is to commit suicide by consenting to its own destruction, it will have to find some formidable answer to those who come to it saying: ''I demand from you in the name of your principles the rights which I shall deny to you later in the name of my principles.'' Walter Lippmann
When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. Eugene V. Debs
The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population -- the intelligent ones or the fools? I think we can agree it's the fools, no matter where you go in this world, it's the fools that form the overwhelming majority. Henrik Ibsen
It has been said that Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. Winston Churchill
It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive. Thomas Mann
I talk democracy to these men and women. I tell them that they have the vote, and that theirs is the kingdom and the power and the glory. I say to them ''You are supreme: exercise your power.'' They say, ''That's right: tell us what to do;'' and I tell them. I say ''Exercise our vote intelligently by voting for me.'' And they do. That's democracy; and a splendid thing it is too for putting the right men in the right place. George Bernard Shaw
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what They want, and deserve to get it good and hard. H. L. Mencken
Democracy encourages the majority to decide things about which the majority is blissfully ignorant. John Simon
That a peasant may become king does not render the kingdom democratic. Woodrow T. Wilson
There is a limit to the application of democratic methods. You can inquire of all the passengers as to what type of car they like to ride in, but it is impossible to question them as to whether to apply the brakes when the train is at full speed and accident threatens. Leon Trotsky
Democracy without morality is impossible. Jack Kemp
The world must be made safe for democracy. Woodrow T. Wilson
These, then, will be some of the features of democracy... it will be, in all likelihood, an agreeable, lawless, parti-colored commonwealth, dealing with all alike on a footing of equality, whether they be really equal or not. Plato
Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing. What is necessary now is one thing and one thing only that democracy become again democracy in action, not democracy accomplished and piled up in goods and gold. Archibald Macleish
America is the place where you cannot kill your government by killing the men who conduct it. Woodrow T. Wilson
Democracy is a political method, that is to say, a certain type of institutional arrangement for arriving at political -- legislative and administrative -- decisions and hence incapable of being an end in itself. Joseph A. Schumpeter
Freedom without obligation is anarchy. Freedom without obligation is democracy. Earl Riney
Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions -- it only guarantees equality of opportunity. Irving Kristol
Democracy means the opportunity to be everyone's slave. Karl Kraus
I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. H. L. Mencken
Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. Oscar Wilde
Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust. Jean Baudrillard
It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd. Henry Miller
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. Elwyn Brooks White
All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy. Alfred E. Smith
Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization. Winston Churchill
The more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else. D. H. Lawrence
The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy. H. L. Mencken
Democracy give every man the right to be his own oppressor. James Russell Lowell
What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority. Walter Lippmann
Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin. Gore Vidal
Democracy don't rule the world, you better get that in your head; this world is ruled by violence, but I guess that's better left unsaid. Bob Dylan
The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry. William F. Buckley
In a democracy everybody has a right to be represented, including the jerks. Chris Patten
We once worried that democracy could not survive if an undereducated populace knew too little. Now we worry if it can survive us knowing too much. Robert Bianco
Democracy is also a form of religion. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses. H. L. Mencken
I am a democrat only on principle, not by instinct -- nobody is that. Doubtless some people say they are, but this world is grievously given to lying. Mark Twain
Everybody's for democracy in principle. It's only in practice that the thing gives rise to stiff objections. Meg Greenfield
Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary. Reinhold Niebuhr
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