Democracy Quotes - Page 46

The majority of men cannot be made disinterested for life by exhortation, by religious services, by any expenditure of subsidized works, or even by grave and manifest public need. They can be made permanently unselfish only by being helped to become disinterested in their individual purposes. In the complete democracy a man must in some way be made to serve the nation in the very act of contributing to his own individual fulfillment. Not until his personal action is dictated by disinterested motives can there be any such harmony between private and public interests.

You don't spread democracy through the barrel of a gun.

Disarmament by war and democracy by occupation are difficult prospects.

Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.

Democracy is grounded upon so childish a complex of fallacies that they must be protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even halfwits would argue it to pieces. Its first concern must be to penalize the free play of ideas.

If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x times y is less than y

The first and continuing argument for the curtailment of working hours and the raising of the minimum age was that education was necessary in a democracy and working children could not attend school.

I do not admire 'the people,' as such. No one really does. Their folk wisdom is usually false, their instincts predatory. Even their sense of survival - so highly developed in the individual - goes berserk in the mass. A crowd is a fool.

What is a political party but a conspiracy?

(Tradition) is the democracy of the dead.

At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man, walking into the little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper. . . .

The best way to defeat an ideology is with a better ideology. And I believe democracy is a better ideology.

You can't put democracy and freedom back into a box.

Democracy is a word all public men use and none understand.

There is no democracy in Russia. Dictators do not go away through the vote. Putin relies on riot police, thousands of them, with heavy equipment, fighting Russian youngsters from opposition.

Democracy represents the disbelief in all great men and in all elite societies: everybody is everybody's equal.

When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself.

The United States Constitution has proved itself the most marvelously elastic compilation of rules of government ever written.

Democracy is an interesting, even laudable, notion and there is no question but that when compared to Communism, which is too dull, or Fascism, which is too exciting, it emerges as the most palatable form of government.

Democracy may have arisen in the West as the way of striving for the universal aspiration to dignity and freedom, but it isn't alien to the underlying concepts that infuse religion and moral philosophy everywhere.

There is no society that protects freedom of religion more than secular democracies, because in societies where one religion rules, different viewpoints will be labelled as heresy and blasphemy. Why? Because the society is built on religion - not freedom for all points of view.

The birth of democracy in Iraq is one of the great positive changes of our era.

A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.

For poets (bear the word) Half-poets even, are still whole democrats.

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.