Browsing Topic Best Democracy Quotes

I think [American] democracy, first of all, was never much to write home about.

A precondition of democracy is that the results of elections be recognized and respected, and if repeatedly challenged, this is a mortal threat. And this is the present peril.

You have to come out to protect your own future. It is you who have to protect your democracy, your sovereignty, and your independence. … This is your duty. I will not accept an imposed government.

China is willing to work together with Russia and the global community to promote real democracy based on nations’ own conditions.

Trusting the experts is not a function of science. It is not a function of democracy. It is a function of religion and totalitarianism, and it does not make for a healthier population.

Arbitrary rule has its basis, not in the strength of the state or the chief, but in the moral weakness of the individual, who submits almost without resistance to the domineering power.

Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.

We must practice revolutionary democracy in every aspect of our Party life. Every responsible member must have the courage of his responsibilities, exacting from others a proper respect for his work and properly respecting the work of others. Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories.

President Zelensky and the Ukrainian people have risen as historic symbols of courage and principle. Ukraine is the tip of the spear for the democratic embrace of dreams. If we allow it to fight alone, our soul as America is lost.

It’s 2022 and people still believe the US is pouring weapons into a foreign country to protect freedom and democracy. That’s like being 57 and still believing in the Tooth Fairy.

We’re risking a very fast, very radioactive third world war defending the ‘democracy’ of a regime who just banned eleven opposition parties.

Even in a fake democracy, people ought to get what they want once in a while.

… when the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people … will hate the New World Order and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to evaluate its promise, we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people.

In the world there is no democracy better than our democracy. Such a thing has never before been seen.

Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers’ enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.

The process of democracy is one of change. Our laws are not frozen into immutable form, they are constantly in the process of revision in response to the needs of a changing society.

History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.

If the test of patriotism comes only by reflexively falling into lockstep behind the leader whenever the flag is waved, then what we have is a formula for dictatorship, not democracy… But the American way is to criticize and debate openly, not to accept unthinkingly the doings of government officials of this or any other country.

Monarchy hardens into despotism. Aristocracy contracts into oligarchy. Democracy expands into the supremacy of numbers.

The Durham investigation has shown that the biggest threat to our democracy is not some foreign country, but rather the Power Elite led by the likes of Hillary Clinton and her co-conspirators in the mainstream media and security state who work to undermine our democracy from within.

The collapse of their position could be sudden and catastrophic, rather than happening slowly through a war of attrition. The army in the field will reach a point where it can neither be supplied nor withdrawn, and morale will vaporize. … Putin will not survive the defeat of his army … A Russian defeat will make possible a new birth of freedom, and get us out of our funk about the declining state of global democracy.

As for America’s own wars, democracy-versus-autocracy would seem to be a misguided way to describe any of them.

How can a country [the United States] that counts the Saudi monarchs, the Egyptian military junta, the Qatari slave owners, and the Emirati dictators as its closest partners and allies possibly claim with a straight face that it opposes tyranny and fights wars in order to protect democracy?

A love of the republic in a democracy is a love of the democracy, as the latter is that of equality. A love of the democracy is likewise that of frugality. Since every individual ought here to enjoy the same happiness, and the same advantages, they should consequently taste the same pleasures and form the same hopes, which cannot be expected but from a general frugality.

The government of man should be the monarchy of reason: it is too often the democracy of passions or the anarchy of humors.

What is the revolution that we need? We need to dissolve the lie that some people have a right to think of other people as their property. And we need at last to form a circle that includes us all, in which all of us are seen as equal… We do not belong to the other, but our lives are linked; we belong in a circle of others.

Our modern Western culture only recognises the first of these, freedom of desires. It then worships such a freedom by enshrining it at the forefront of national constituitions and bills of human rights. One can say that the underlying creed of most Western democracies is to protect their people’s freedom to realise their desires, as far as this is possible. It is remarkable that in such countries people do not feel very free. The second kind of freedom, freedom from desires, is celebrated only in some religious communities. It celebrates contentment, peace that is free from desires.

Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.

Super PACs and a corrupt campaign finance system are destroying American democracy. We’re proud that we have received four million individual contributions, more than any candidate in American history at this point.

No real journalist makes $5 million a year… Those in power fear and dislike real journalists.

Nothing frightens the ‘Jews’ more than a perfect unity in others: the unity of feeling in a movement, in a people. That is why they will always be for ‘democracy’ which has but one advantage, and that one for the nation’s enemy. For democracy will break up the unity and spirit of a people.

The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don’t have to waste your time voting.

There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all, but especially to democracies as against despots – suspicion.

A republic is not an easy form of government to live under, and when the responsibility of citizenship is evaded, democracy decays and authoritarianism takes over.

Democracy in the contemporary world demands, among other things, an educated and informed people.