What is Democracy?

Notable Quotes

Alexis de Tocqueville:

The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colours breaking through.

Aristotle:

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 the government to the utmost.

Barbara Ehrenreich:

That’s free enterprise, friends: freedom to gamble, freedom to lose. And the great thing — the truly democratic thing about it — is that you don’t even have to be a player to lose.

E. B. White:

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

Eugene McCarthy:

As long as the differences and diversities of mankind exist, democracy must allow for compromise, for accommodation, and for the recognition of differences.

Eugene V. Debs:

When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right.

Frank Owen:

In 1929 the wise, far-seeing electors of my native Hereford sent me to Westminster and, two years later, the lousy bastards kicked me out.

George Washington:

As Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality.

H. L. Mencken:

Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.

Hubert H. Humphrey:

The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.

Irving Kristol:

Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions — it only guarantees equality of opportunity.

J. William Fulbright:

In a democracy, dissent is an act of faith.

Jerome Nathanson:

The price of the democratic way of life is a growing appreciation of people’s differences, not merely as tolerable, but as the essence of a rich and rewarding human experience.

Jesse Jackson:

In politics, an organized minority is a political majority.

Jinping Xi:

Democracy is not true if the people are awakened only at the time of voting and then go to sleep, if they listen to the hype only at the time of campaigning and then have no voice after the election, if they are favored only at the time of campaigning and then are left out after the election. Democracy is not for decoration, but for solving problems that the people need to solve. In a democracy, the people are the master of the country.

John Simon:

Democracy encourages the majority to decide things about which the majority is ignorant.

Laurence J. Peter:

Democracy is a process by which the people are free to choose the man who will get the blame.

Mark Twain:

We adore titles and heredities in our hearts and ridicule them with our mouths. This is our democratic privilege.

Meg Greenfield:

Everybody’s for democracy in principle. It’s only in practice that the thing gives rise to stiff objections.

Plato:

An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.

Stuart Chase:

Democracy, as has been said of Christianity, has never really been tried.

Theodore Parker:

Democracy means not ‘I am as good as you are’ but ‘You are as good as I am.’

Thomas Jefferson:

Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.

Unknown:

Creative ability and personal responsibility are strongest when the mind is free from supernatural belief and operates in an atmosphere of freedom and democracy.

Walt Whitman:

Did you, too, O friend, suppose democracy was only for elections, for politics, and for a party name? I say democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruit in manners, in the highest forms of interaction between [people], and their beliefs — in religion, literature, colleges and schools — democracy in all public and private life.

Wendell Phillips:

Governments exist to protect the rights of minorities. The loved and the rich need no protection: they have many friends and few enemies.

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