A selection from Democracy Quotes.
If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost. – Aristotle.
It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives. – Dorothy Thompson.
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.- E.B. White.
The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don’t agree with. – Eleanor Holmes-Norton.
The unconscious democracy of America is a very fine thing. It is a true and deep and instinctive assumption of the equality of citizens, which even voting and elections have not destroyed. – G.K. Chesterton.
Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve. George Bernard Shaw.
Civilization is the process in which one gradually increases the number of people included in the term ‘we’ or ‘us’ and at the same time decreases those labelled ‘you’ or ‘them’ until that category has no one left in it. – Howard Winters.
Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions – it only guarantees equality of opportunity. Irving Kristol.
We have learned to say that the good must be extended to all of society before it can be held secure by any one person or any one class. But we have not yet learned to add to that statement, that unless all [people] and all classes contribute to a good, we cannot even be sure that it is worth having. – Jane Addams.
Voting is one of the few things where boycotting in protest clearly makes the problem worse rather than better. – Jane Auer.
The price of the democratic way of life is a growing appreciation of people’s differences, not merely as tolerable, but as the essence of a rich and rewarding human experience. – Jerome Nathanson.
Democracy encourages the majority to decide things about which the majority is ignorant. – John Simon.
Democracy is a process by which the people are free to choose the man who will get the blame. – Laurence J. Peter.
Decision by democratic majority vote is a fine form of government, but it’s a stinking way to create. Lillian Hellman.
We preach the virtues of democracy abroad. We must practice its duties here at home. Voting is the first duty of democracy. – Lyndon B. Johnson.
To safeguard democracy the people must have a keen sense of independence, self-respect, and their oneness. – Mohandas K Ghandi.
The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment. – Robert M Hutchins.
Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. – Rosa Luxemburg.
Democracy means not “I am as good as you are” but “You are as good as I am.” – Theodore Parker.
I know of no safe repository of the ultimate power of society but people. And if we think them not enlightened enough, the remedy is not to take the power from them, but to inform them by education. – Thomas Jefferson.
So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men. – Voltaire.
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