Democracy Quotes - Page 59

The will of the nation is one of those phrases most widely abused by schemers and tyrants of all ages.

I have always insisted on the need for local self-government for Russia, but I never opposed this model to Western democracy. On the contrary, I have tried to convince my fellow citizens by citing the examples of highly effective local self-government systems in Switzerland and New England, both of which I saw first-hand.

What we are doing in fact is recovering and progressing and sustaining the recovery of our democracy.

When there is a crisis, the first thing that gets damaged and gets harmed is democracy.

Democracy, material wealth, and universal education are the soil upon which modernism exists.

By rejecting the authority of the individual and replacing it by the numbers of some momentary mob, the parliamentary principle of majority rule sins against the basic aristocratic principle of Nature.

My own ideals for the university are those of a genuine democracy and serious scholarship. These two, indeed, seem to go together.

Why is acquiescence to the numerous viewed as better servitude than bowing to might?

Democracy, or "majority rules," is another trick of our society to force us to do things we don't want to do. Even if we actually lived in a pure democracy (and the system we do live in is not even close), where everyone got a single vote on every subject, forcing the minority to obey the majority is no different to one man, if he had the power, forcing everyone else to do what he wanted them to-simply because he could.

A great democracy doesn't make it harder to vote than to buy an assault weapon.

Democracy gives the aura of legitimacy to acts that would otherwise be considered tyranny.

The Soviet Union attempted to export communism to the entire world. We know what came of that. Now the West is trying to export democracy, including to regions where there is no traditional foundation for it. That cannot end well.

The Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov once said: In a Democracy, portraits of a nation's leader should never exceed the size of a postage stamp. That won't happen so quickly in Russia.

For Russia, there is not and there may not be another political option but democracy. However, Russian democracy is... not at all the realization of standards imposed on us from outside.

There can be no democracy without observing the law and everyone must observe it - that is the most basic and important thing that we all should remember.

EU didn't advance our [Eastern Europe] democracy by a single millimeter.

The constitution is a sacred document in a democracy.

It should come as no surprise that Russia continues its effort to manipulate Western democracies in a way to sow discord and disagreements between our countries in NATO and within the United States or any other Western European country. And it's something the United States obviously must be on guard against.

Women waited 144 years before earning suffrage. If a mature, multiparty democracy was so darn easy, everybody would have one.

I worry that we don't currently have a democracy in the United States. Instead we have what [political philosopher] Sheldon Wolin has recently labeled a sort of inverted totalitarianism.

Trump was so different - in a bad way - that I thought the best thing I could do was to resist him. And that's because he was attacking the institutions of our democracy, from the First Amendment and the free press to the judiciary. He was stifling internal dissent, and then he was making false and misleading statements routinely. And to me, that's what takes us down the road to authoritarianism and that's why I decided to start resisting him.

I don't see democracy getting better. I see democracy diminishing. More rules, more legislation. Eventually governments will see everything.

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.

In a democracy, every ordinary citizen is effectively a king--but a king in a constitutional democracy, a monarch who decides only formally, whose function is merely to sign off on measures proposed by an executive administration. This is why the problem with democratic rituals is homologous to the great problem of constitutional monarchy: how to protect the dignity of the king? How to maintain the appearance that the king effectively makes decisions, when we all know this not to be true?

In a democracy, regulation of the press and imposing standards on it must be voluntary.