A pure democracy is generally a very bad government, It is often the most tyrannical government on earth; for a multitude is often rash, and will not hear reason. — Noah Webster
Democracy is the form of government in which the free are rulers. — Aristotle
Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers. — Aristotle
The essence of a democracy is a free electorate. — Arlen Specter
Democracy is "government of, by and for the people". — Abraham Lincoln
Democracy is four wolves and a sheep voting on dinner. — Robert A. Heinlein
No government can be free that does not allow all its citizens to participate in the formation and execution of her laws. — Thaddeus Stevens
Democracy is the process by which people choose the man who'll get the blame. — Bertrand Russell
Democracy is the most demanding of all forms of government in terms of the energy, imagination, and public spirit required of the individual. — George C. Marshall
...one Greek city state had a fundamental law: anyone proposing revisions to the constitution did so with a noose around his neck. If his proposal lost he was instantly hanged. — Aristotle
Democracy is interactive... Its a constant job of information, education, explanation, listening, and interactive communication. — Dick Gephardt
Democracy is the suggestion box for slaves. — Stefan Molyneux
If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in government to the utmost. — Aristotle
Democracy is four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. — Ambrose Bierce
Short Direct Democracy Quotes
Democracy is not a spectator sport. It requires active participation from all citizens. — Alexei Navalny
Of the people, by the people, for the people. — Sun Yat-sen
Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve. — George Bernard Shaw
Democracy leads to anarchy, which is mob rule. — Plato
Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few. — George Bernard Shaw
Democratic principles are the result of equality of condition. — Mercy Otis Warren
Democracy is not a form of government, but a form of social organisation. — B. R. Ambedkar
Direct Democracy Image Quotes
Sometimes the smallest step in the right direction ends up being the biggest step of your life. Tip top if you must, but take the step.
Rousseau Quotes
Qu'ils mangent de la brioche. Let them eat cake. On being told that her people had no bread. Attributed to Marie-Antoinette, but remark is much older. Rousseau refers in his Confessions, 1740, to a similar remark, as a well-known saying. Others attribute the remark to the wife of Louis XIV. — Marie Antoinette
The artist must be a philosopher. Socrates the skilled sculptor, Jean-Jacques [Rousseau] the good musician, and the immortal Poussin, tracing on the canvas the sublime lessons of philosophy, are so many proofs that an artistic genius should have no other guide except the torch of reason. — Jacques-Louis David
The biggest mischief in the past century has been perpetrated by Rousseau with his doctrine of the goodness of human nature. The mob and the intellectuals derived from it the vision of a Golden Age which would arrive without fail once the noble human race could act according to its whims. — Jacob Burckhardt
Your heart knows the way. Run in that direction.
The only dance masters I could have were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Walt Whitman and Nietzsche. — Isadora Duncan
Capitalism, gaudy and greedy, has been inherent in western aesthetics from ancient Egypt on. It is the mysticism and glamour of things , which take on a personality of their own. As an economic system, it is in the Darwinian line of Sade, not Rousseau. — Camille Paglia
As Rousseau could not compose without his cat beside him, so I cannot play chess without my king's bishop. In its absense the game to me is lifeless and void. The vitalizing factor is missing, and I can devise no plan of attack. — Siegbert Tarrasch
Self-control is strength. Calmness is mastery. You have to get to a point where your mood doesn't shift based on the insignificant actions of someone else. Don't allow others to control the direction of your life. Don't allow your emotions to overpower your intelligence.
Rousseau and his disciples were resolved to force men to be free; in most of the world, they triumphed; men are set free from family, church, town, class, guild; yet they wear, instead, the chains of the state, and they expire of ennui or stifling lone lines. — Russell Kirk
I blame Rousseau, myself. "Man is born free", indeed. Man is not born free, he is born attached to his mother by a cord and is not capable of looking after himself for at least seven years (seventy in some cases). — Katharine Whitehorn
One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. — Walter Pater
The French painter Rousseau was once asked why he put a naked woman on a red sofa in the middle of his jungle pictures. He answered, 'I needed a bit of red there.' — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
What Is Democracy Quotes
Persuade your fellow citizens it's a good idea and pass a law. That's what democracy is all about. It's not about nine superannuated judges who have been there too long, imposing these demands on society. — Antonin Scalia
In my world, a woman was the most powerful thing that I knew. Still is. A woman made the money in my house; a woman made my food. A woman beat my ass when I wasn't a good kid. Women were behind a lot of what spurred South Africa toward democracy. — Trevor Noah
What a liberal really wants is to bring about change that will not in any way endanger his position. — Stokely Carmichael
In our so-called democracy we are accustomed to give the majority what they want rather than educate them to understand what is best for them. — Carter G. Woodson
Democracy needs support and the best support for democracy comes from other democracies. Democratic nations should come together in an association designed to help each other and promote what is a universal value - democracy. — Benazir Bhutto
If there was one decision I would overrule, it would be 'Citizens United.' I think the notion that we have all the democracy that money can buy strays so far from what our democracy is supposed to be. — Ruth Bader Ginsburg
I believe that during these times, we should not forget that many sacrificed to regain our democracy. We cannot just keep quiet because that is what happened during martial law. Our dictator then believed that he can do anything to keep himself in power. — Corazon Aquino
Amnesty International continues to report that extra judicial tortures and murders continue. This is not democracy that we are exporting to Mexico, and this is certainly not what the Mexican workers signed up for. — Stephen F. Lynch
You can make peace with an enemy, if the enemy abandons the idea of destroying you. That is the critical test. Democracies fail to understand what I just said. — Benjamin Netanyahu
True Democracy Quotes
True democracy or the swaraj of the masses can never come through untruthful and violent means. — Lal Bahadur Shastri
If voting made any difference they wouldn't let us do it. — Mark Twain
A Brother may not be a Friend, but a Friend will always be a Brother. — Benjamin Franklin
There cannot be true democracy unless women's voices are heard. There cannot be true democracy unless women are given the opportunity to take responsibility for their own lives. — Hillary Clinton
Everybody counts in applying democracy. And there will never be a true democracy until every responsible and law-abiding adult in it, without regard to race, sex, color or creed has his or her own inalienable and unpurchasable voice in government. — Carrie Chapman Catt
Democracy is liberty - a liberty which does not infringe on the liberty nor encroach on the rights of others; a liberty which maintains strict discipline, and makes law its guarantee and the basis of its exercise. This alone is true liberty; this alone can produce true democracy. — Chiang Kai-shek
Women's fight for equal rights is essentially a humanist and peaceful struggle for true democracy, and a higher form of civilization. — Leyla Zana
People often say that, in a democracy, decisions are made by a majority of the people. Of course, that is not true. Decisions are made by a majority of those who make themselves heard and who vote - a very different thing. — Walter Judd
It is not true that democracy will always safeguard freedom of conscience better than autocracy. Witness the most famous of all trials. Pilate was, from the standpoint of the Jews, certainly the representative of autocracy. Yet he tried to protect freedom. And he yielded to a democracy. — Joseph Schumpeter
It is not true that democracy will always safeguard freedom of conscience better than autocracy. Witness the most famous of all trials. Pilate was, from the standpoint of the Jews, certainly the representative of autocracy. Yet he tried to protect freedom. And he yielded to a democracy. — Joseph A. Schumpeter
Participatory Democracy Quotes
This is supposed to be a participatory democracy and if we're not in there participating then the people that will manipulate and exploit the system will step in there. — George Takei
What should be targeted is a concept of organic, and not just mechanic, democracy that preserves the rule of law, separation of powers, and that is participatory and pluralistic. — Recep Tayyip Erdogan
In other words, the bar should be maintained at the level of a pluralistic and participatory democracy. — Recep Tayyip Erdogan
I'm sometimes impatient with young people who demonstrate at my meetings and who don't want an argument, but who just want to go on television as having been there and made a fuss. This doesn't mean I don't believe in participatory democracy. — Pierre Trudeau
The ideals of participatory democracy are represented through suppleness rather than rigidity. — Liz Diller
This country has always been run by elite, and it's an elitist democracy. And that's not a radical concept. It's elitist democracy. When people talk about democracy, they don't talk - really talk about participatory democracy, until the point that we get us at Election Day. — Danny Glover
Democracy is not a spectator sport. It is a difficult, hard, full-contact, participatory endeavor. — Cory Booker
I'm impatient not with the House of Commons as an institution, but with the way in which it is operated. This doesn't prove I don't believe in participatory democracy. — Pierre Trudeau
Many people are alienated by faceless bureaucracy and what they see as an erosion of participatory democracy. Consequently, there has been a revival of interest in charitable service. — Frank Prochaska
A messy participatory process is representative democracy at its best. — Mark McKinnon
The vision I see is not only a movement of direct democracy, of self- and co-determination and non-violence, but a movement in which politics means the power to love and the power to feel united on the spaceship Earth. — Petra Kelly
America's corporate and political elites now form a regime of their own and they're privatizing democracy. All the benefits - the tax cuts, policies and rewards flow in one direction: up. — Bill Moyers
The more that social democracy develops, grows, and becomes stronger, the more the enlightened masses of workers will take their own destinies, the leadership of their movement, and the determination of its direction into their own hands. — Rosa Luxemburg
Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens. — Howard Zinn
The hate directed against the colored people here in St. Louis has always given me a sad feeling... How can you expect the world to believe in you and respect your preaching of democracy when you yourself treat your colored brothers as you do? — Josephine Baker
Democracy is like three oxen pulling a plough. The oxen are the independent powers, but you have to walk in the same direction; otherwise, you cannot plough and that is what was happening in Colombia. One ox was walking in one direction, the other in another direction, so the democracy was not working. — Juan Manuel Santos
No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people. — Walter Lippmann
Eventually I foresee voting on the Internet, which will lead to much more direct democracy. — Dick Gephardt
America is not a democracy. I think if your kids understood that - and most people don't. We are a representative republic. We're not a direct democracy. — Rush Limbaugh
After many unhappy experiments in the direction of an ideal Republic, it was found that what may be described as a Despotism tempered by Dynamite provides, on the whole, the most satisfactory description of ruler - an autocrat who dares not abuse his autocratic power. — W. S. Gilbert
If the ongoing struggles waged by young people are to matter, demonstrations and protests must give way to more sustainable organizations that develop alternative communities, autonomous forms of worker control, collective forms of health care, models of direct democracy and emancipatory modes of education. — Henry Giroux
The very design of neoliberal principles is a direct attack on democracy. — Noam Chomsky
We are not directly involved in Syria. But we will be working with our partners in the European Union and at the United Nations to see if we can persuade the Syrian authorities to go, as I say, more in that direction of respect for democracy and human rights. — William Hague
And when they do spin out of control there are important ramifications that affect America, not just its direct national interest but its broader interests as a nation which has thought of itself as a beacon to other nations, of freedom, liberty, democracy, whatever. — John Pomfret
The challenge as we saw in the Nigerian project was to restructure the economy decisively in the direction of a modern free market as an appropriate environment for cultivation of freedom and democracy and the natural emergence of a new social order. — Ibrahim Babangida
Education is a human right with immense power to transform — Kofi Annan
Democracy is direct self-government over all the people, for all the people, by all the people. — Theodore Parker
We intend to lead a government of purpose and direction so that we can offer the people of this nation the opportunity to move forward to independence, democracy and equality. — Alex Salmond
As the histories of ancient and modern democracies illustrate, the pressure of political movement in times of war, civil commotion, or general anxiety pushes in the direction of authority, not away from it. — Robert Heilbroner
I don't want to get too nuanced, but we have the electoral college in the United States and that means we don't have direct democracy. — Moby
I don't support direct democracy because I want a life, and that means I want to select people who work for me who do that sort of work for me. — Lawrence Lessig
I renounce war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatred it arouses, for the dictatorships it puts in place of democracy, for the starvation that stalks after it. I renounce war, and never again, directly or indirectly, will I sanction or support another. — Harry Emerson Fosdick
The idea was that those who direct the overall conspiracy could use the differences in those two so-called ideologies [Marxism/fascism/socialism v. democracy/capitalism] to enable them [the Illuminati] to divide larger and larger portions of the human race into opposing camps so that they could be armed and then brainwashed into fighting and destroying each other. — Myron Coureval Fagan
The consistent anarchist should be a socialist, but a socialist of a particular sort. He will not only oppose alienated and specialized labor and look forward to the appropriation of capital by the whole body of workers, but he will also insist that this appropriation be direct, not exercised by some elite force acting in the name of the proletariat. Some sort of council communism is the natural form of revolutionary socialism in an industrial society. It reflects the intuitive understanding that democracy is largely a sham when the industrial system is controlled by any form of autocratic elite, whether of owners, managers, and technocrats, a vanguard party, or a State bureaucracy. — Noam Chomsky
Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst off-sloughings of the planet are the ingredients of sovereignty. Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy the whores are us. — P. J. O'Rourke
I think clearly the United States, as well as other western nations, should stand by their commitments to human rights and democracy and should try to influence other countries to move in that direction. — Samuel P. Huntington
Social democracy seeks and finds the ways, and particular slogans, of the workers' struggle only in the course of the development of this struggle, and gains directions for the way forward through this struggle alone. — Rosa Luxemburg
A short exposure to the convention convinced me that the Internet may save the Democracy in that it is a way for the people, for the citizens, to have some direct influence on the government. — John Jay Hooker
The Russian people have unilaterally made their choice in direction of democracy in the early '90s. They will not be led astray. Nobody should be having any doubts. — Vladimir Putin
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. — Jeff Flake
The presidential campaign was oriented toward the way we elect the presidency, Electoral College, not the popular vote. The popular vote doesn't matter. This is not a direct democracy. We have a representative republic, and the popular vote doesn't matter and it never has, by design. — Rush Limbaugh
Cuba is not like bourgeois democracy the ones that imposes the blockade to make Cuba change. We have direct elections. Here they put people on a list and then tell the people supposedly what they have done so they can be elected. That is the difference and why we say our democracy is truly participatory and popular. — Alejandro Castro Espin
We are a representative democracy. But how did we get there? We got there through direct action. And that's enshrined in our Constitution and in our values. — Edward Snowden
Our concern is to help people counter the efforts of those who seek to "regiment the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers," so that the self-designated "responsible men" will be able to run the affairs of the world untroubled by the "bewildered herd" - the general public - who are to be marginalized and dispersed, directed to personal concerns, in a well-regulated "democracy." — Noam Chomsky
The fear is that we'll move in the direction from being a democracy to an oligarchy. — Jane Mayer
My links with [Mahatma] Gandhi now are very political links because I do not believe there is any other politics available to us in the late twentieth century, a period of a totalitarianism linked with the market. There is really no other way you can do politics and create freedom for people without the kinds of instruments he revived. Civil disobedience is a way to create permanent democracy, perennial democracy, a direct democracy. — Vandana Shiva
America is the one place in the world where I just innately understood [that] South Africa and the United States of America have a very similar history. It's different timelines, but the directions we've taken and the consequences - dealing with the aftermath of what we consider to be democracy, and realizing that freedom is just the beginning of the conversation, that's something I've learned. — Trevor Noah
I ask myself whether Russia is moving in the direction of democracy. I don't believe it is! Bit by bit, Russia is slipping back into an authoritarian empire. — Vladimir Sorokin
It is clear that in a monarchy, where he who commands the exceution of the laws generally thinks himself above them, there is lessneed of virtue than in a popular government, where the person entrusted with the execution of the laws is sensible of his being subject to their direction. — Baron de Montesquieu
This country has attained 'Swarajya', but unfortunately the dream of 'Surajya' is left unfulfilled. Today, if there is any major challenge before this country, it is that of a 'Surajya' and since the last decade, Gujarat is working in the direction of attaining Surajya. — Narendra Modi
Representative democracy betrays the electorate when laws have no roots in the people but in oligarchies. Studies on the concept and modalities of direct democracy are therefore becoming more topical — Alfred-Maurice de Zayas
I'm all for experimenting with sortition - randomly selected representative bodies of citizens. But I don't favor direct democracy. We're busy. We have lives. There is reddit. Who has time to work out the right answer to the thousand policy choices a gov't must make all the time? — Lawrence Lessig
Everyone knew that democracy - direct rule by all the people - required such spartan, soul-denying virtue on the part of all the people that it was likely to survive only where poverty made upright behavior necessary for the perpetuation of the race. — Bernard Bailyn
The danger is not only that these austerity measures are killing the European economies but also that they threaten the very legitimacy of European democracies - not just directly by threatening the livelihoods of so many people and pushing the economy into a downward spiral, but also indirectly by undermining the legitimacy of the political system through this backdoor rewriting of the social contract. — Ha-Joon Chang
In Conclusion
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