Democracy Quotes - Page 88

Silence is not an effective political strategy, and what we do if we silence the public interest, which is so hard to hear anyway, is that we silence ourselves and then we do not have a democracy.

Democracy needs a moral compass.

There should be just no end to what we can do when we operate with the courage of our convictions and we get out there in the street, in the voting booth, we assert our power and we take our democracy back.

In Afghanistan, there is a plan to build democracy; hundreds of thousands of troops are protecting it. There is a plan to rebuild and reconstruct there. But many thousands of Americans die from violence and poverty every year and we don't have a plan for reconstruction at home.

Government by blackmail is incompatible with democracy.

NATO is based on shared values. Democracy, individual civil liberties and the rule of law. In public and also in meetings with the allies, I have repeatedly pointed out how crucial these common values are. They are the basis for our unity, and unity is the most important basis for our strength.

It can sound trite if you just say citizens need to be educated for democracy to work, but for him it wasn't trite. It was really this strenuous challenge to citizens to use their moments of leisure, which he defined as time away from work, to collect the facts that were necessary for full democratic participation.

Whenever I felt tempted to, I don’t know, watch cat videos or bad Netflix TV instead of writing this Brandeis biography, I thought of his stern but kindly visage and buckled down and wrote the damn thing, because there’s so much information out there, and these are such anxious times in democracy, such unreasonable times.

My favorite forgotten President in American history is James Buchanan, who in defending really robust and sharp-elbowed debates said, "I like the noise of democracy. I like the sound of people in the streets making noise."

You can't always say what's popular and you ought to go with it. I think that's why the founders were concerned about direct democracy. That's why we have a republic and that's why we have representatives who who are supposed to look at the issues and to look out for the next generation as well.

Reckless, outrageous and undignified behavior has become excused and countenanced as telling it like it is when it is actually just reckless, outrageous and undignified. And when such behavior emanates from the top of our government, it is something else. It is dangerous to a democracy.

The general will is always right.

If there were a nation of Gods, it would govern itself democratically. A government so perfect is not suited to men.

I'm a patriot, and I think democracy is the best system available. It's very flawed, but it works better than anything else.

Primarily, Warsaw and Brussels share the central basic values of the EU: human dignity, democracy, and the religious freedom of every single human being. We believe in these values.

Charity erodes the cultural prerequisites for a vigorous democracy.

Are democracy and poetry exclusive of one another and, if so, why?

The fear is that we'll move in the direction from being a democracy to an oligarchy.

All those hints and glimpses of a larger and more satisfying democracy, which literature and our own hopes supply, have a tendency to slip away from us and to leave us sadly unguided and perplexed when we attempt to act upon them.

The importance of the ordinary citizen is very greatly underestimated - not so much by those in authority as by the ordinary citizen himself.

I think Donald Trump believes in democracy and the right to change of power.

Democracy is nothing more than an experiment in government, more likely to succeed in a new soil, but likely to be tried in all soils, which must stand or fall on its own merits as others have done before it. For there is no trick of perpetual motion in politics any more than in mechanics.

Democracy is that form of society, no matter what its political classification, in which every man has a chance and knows that he has it.

Iggy. This is not a democracy," I said,(...)"It's a Maxocracy.

This is not a democracy," I said, understanding he fear but unable to do anything about it. "It's a Maxocracy.