Democracy Quotes - page 12

In a democracy... someone who fails to get elected to office can always console himself with the thought that there was something not quite fair about it. (Thucydides)
As for democracy, the men of sense among us knew what it was, and I perhaps as well as any, as I have more cause to complain of it; but there is nothing new to be said of a patent absurdity-meanwhile we did not think it safe to alter it under the pressure of your hostility. View quote
Thucydides
The money pigs of capitalist democracy... Money has made slaves of us... Money is the curse of mankind. It smothers the seed of everything great and good. Every penny is sticky with sweat and blood. View quote
Joseph Goebbels
The motive power of democracy is love. View quote
Henri Bergson
All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy. Variant: The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy. View quote
Al Smith
Despite what the pundits want us to think, contested primaries aren't civil war, they are democracy at work, and that's beautiful. View quote
Sarah Palin
If you have reservations about the system and want to change it, the democratic argument goes, do so within the system: put yourself forward as a candidate for political office, subject yourself to the scrutiny and the vote of fellow citizens. Democracy does not allow for politics outside the democratic system. In this sense, democracy is totalitarian. View quote
J. M. Coetzee
True democracy makes no enquiry about the color of skin, or the place of nativity, whereever it sees man, it recognizes a being endowed by his Creator with original inalienable rights. View quote
Salmon P. Chase
The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections. View quote
John W. Campbell
Politics, under a democracy, reduces itself to a mere struggle for office by flatterers of the proletariat; even when a superior man prevails at that disgusting game he must prevail at the cost of his self-respect. Not many superior men make the attempt. The average great captain of the rabble, when he is not simply a weeper over irremediable wrongs, is a hypocrite so far gone that he is unconscious of his own hypocrisy.. a slimy fellow, offensive to the nose. View quote
H. L. Mencken
What is any political campaign save a concerted effort to turn out a set of politicians who are admittedly bad and put in a set who are thought to be better. The former assumption, I believe is always sound; the latter is just as certainly false. For if experience teaches us anything at all it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar. (H. L. Mencken)
The doctrine that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy is like saying that the cure of crime is more crime. View quote
H. L. Mencken
The highfalutin aims of democracy, whether real or imaginary, are always assumed to be identical with its achievements. This, of course, is sheer hallucination. Not one of those aims, not even the aim of giving every adult a vote, has been realized. It has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good. View quote
H. L. Mencken
If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x × y is less than y. View quote
H. L. Mencken
I don't believe in democracy. In the second place, neither did our white forefathers. I believe, as they did, in a republican authoritarian republic with a limited electorate - just like the one the writers of our Constitution meant this country to be. When these white Christian patriots sat down to write the Declaration of Independence, there were no black citizens for them to worry about. View quote
George Lincoln Rockwell
If we have a chance of succeeding and bringing stability and democracy to Iraq, it will mean learning from our mistakes, not denying them and not ignoring them. View quote
Carl Levin
In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy. View quote
Matt Taibbi
On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does. View quote
Will Rogers
The American flag is the most recognized symbol of freedom and democracy in the world. View quote
Virginia Foxx
Without democracy freedom is a chimera. View quote
Octavio Paz
In a few decades, the relationship between the environment, resources and conflict may seem almost as obvious as the connection we see today between human rights, democracy and peace. (Wangari Maathai)
Democracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements. View quote
Agnes Repplier
Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what you think it is you want to hear. View quote
Alan Coren
The major western democracies are moving towards corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan, with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies - socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor - and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war. This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonalds is to food. View quote
John Pilger
Now, al Qaeda's on the run. Afghanistan is no longer a base of operations. The Afghan government is a friendly government that is trying to bring democracy to its people. View quote
Condoleezza Rice