What we say is that democracy means that you have the right to vote without intimidation and undue burdens. But if you stand in line for six hours, technically, today there is no document, no standard, no law that says that that's wrong.
Democratic institutions, even in the oldest operating democracy in the world, are anything but perfect.
The first official statements of President Asif Ali Zardari's new government have been firm and robust. Pakistan is obviously a renewed democracy.
Freedom is found through the portals of our nation's libraries.
You can't be a full participant in our democracy if you don't know our history.
Obama has already rejected the bright sunlight of public knowledge, which is democracy's great disinfectant and cure.
It is assumed in many parts of the world that democracy is a group of people facing a certain problem, who come together to solve it in a way where everyone has an equal say.
We live in an age of de-democratization. The number of democracies in the world has been going backwards since 2005, and even many existing democracies including in Europe have been becoming less democratic.
I am not a person of the left. But one of the things, the central idea of democracy is that you have a bigger investment in the system as a whole than you do in any particular outcome.
Democracy is not about protests. Democracy is about meetings.
So little of what makes a democracy work is written down. So much of it is just the things you don't do. There are a lot of things that a prime minister or a president can do and they don't do them because it never occurs to them to do them.
Americans are about to discover that their system is more vulnerable than they thought. There's a lot of complacency in American politics, there's a lot of complacency in advanced democracies generally.
Brains are like representative democracies. They are built of multiple, overlapping experts who weigh in and compete over different choices.
If you want to reinstate the 14.4 billion dollars that Bush cut out of the veterans program then vote democrat.
I think Donald Trump should be delegitimized for many reasons. And his response to this hacking is also cause for delegitimization. But to say we should move on, when the bedrock of American democracy, the sanctity of our elections, has been messed with, just raises suspicions. His denial of it happening or its seriousness shows that there is something really amiss from his end of it.
The core threat to democracy is not in the White House, it's the [Bush] haters themselves.
Liberty lives in protest and democracy prospers under conditions of change. When we travel about the world and come to a country whose newspapers are filled with bad news we feel that liberty lives in that land. When we come to a country whose newspapers are filled with good news, we feel differently.
The sense the great democracies of the world - Europe, the United States, Japan, others - are going to set the agenda for the world. [Russians] want to bring that down.
It's the good old paradox of democracy. We are individually pretty small drops in the bucket, but collectively we are all powerful.
I am a firm believer in the importance of democracy, not only as the ultimate goal, but also as an essential part of the process.
For good or for bad, India has rejected a more totalitarian approach to how it will deal with its social problems. We would starve but we would not give up our democracy and our love for our freedoms and to deal with these problems in an atmosphere of democracy and the rule of law without necessarily going, sort of resorting to civil disobedience or any kind of violent revolution.
In dreams we stand in this great democracy of the possible and there we are right pilgrims indeed. There we go forth to meet what we shall meet.
To define twentieth-century humanism briefly, I would say that it is a philosophy of joyous service for the greater good of all humanity in this natural world and advocating the methods of reason, science, and democracy.
I would like to ask the many Filipino people to pray together, to help each other so that we will be able to preserve the democracy we restored 20 years ago.
I'm very proud that we stood for the proposition that no man, woman or child should ever have to live in tyranny. We believed in democracy and promoted it.
