Democracy Quotes - Page 52

As long as individuals are compelled to rent themselves on the market to those who are willing to hire them, as long as their role in production is simply that of ancillary tools, then there are striking elements of coercion and oppression that make talk of democracy very limited, if even meaningful.

I greet you all in the name of peace, democracy and freedom for all.

My optimism is not based primarily on the successful march of democracy in recent times but rather is based on the experience of having lived in a fear society and studied the mechanics of tyranny that sustain such a society.

Democracy may become frenzied, but it has feelings and can be moved. As for aristocracy, it is always cold and never forgives.

In Egypt today most people are concerned with getting bread to eat. Only some of the educated understand how democracy works.

Don't fully trust anyone until he has stuck with a good cause which he saw was losing.

Democracy is the wholesome and pure air without which a socialist public organization cannot live a full-blooded life.

The soviet people want full-blooded and unconditional democracy.

Contemporary social democracy is what I believe is the right concept.

Democracy must learn to defend itself.

And in a democracy, when we say we're mad at what's going on, what we need to be saying is we're mad at ourselves.

Eloquence is an engine invented to manage and wield at will the fierce democracy, and, like medicine to the sick, is only employed in the paroxysms of a disordered state.

Flawed as they may be, science and the secular Enlightenment values expressed in Western democracies are our best hope for survival.

Here's what I don't think works: An economic system that was founded in the 16th century and another that was founded in the 19th century. I'm tired of this discussion of capitalism and socialism; we live in the 21st century, we need an economic system that has democracy as its underpinnings and an ethical code.

The hegemony of finance and the banks has produced the indebted. Control over information and communication networks has created the mediatized. The security regime and the generalized state of exception have constructed a figure prey to fear and yearning for protection—the securitized. And the corruption of democracy has forged a strange, depoliticized figure, the represented. These subjective figures constitute the social terrain on which—and against which—movements of resistance and rebellion must act.

In our democracy, near equality is no equality. Government either treats everyone the same, or it doesn't. And right now it doesn't.

In a democracy, the public should be asked how much security and how much privacy they want for themselves.

Democracy cannot sustain itself amid a high degree of violence.

Democracy must be conceived as a process, not a goal.

Some commentators have drawn such a stark and gloomy picture of the Weimar Republic's early difficulties that the Republic seems foredoomed to failure from the outset... The conditions in which Weimar democracy were born were certainly not such as to help it flourish; and as it unfolded, it was clearly saddled with a burden of problems, in a range of areas.

We are living through an epochal shift. If we aren't careful, the elementary foundations of our pluralistic democracy will be threatened.

The principles of the SPD have remained the same for 150 years: democracy, human dignity, justice and inclusion. We will never change those principles.

What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter if you can't afford to buy a hamburger?

Globilization in its current form cannot deliver the benefits expected of it. Civil society, particularly in developing countries, must ensure that it does.

Only a government that is rich and safe can afford to be a democracy, for democracy is the most expensive and nefarious kind of government ever heard of on earth