Famous Quotes on Democracy

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Quote	Author	Rating	Rate
"Anything that keeps a politician humble is healthy for democracy."	Irish Blessing
"I was resolved to sustain and preserve in my college the bite of the mind, the chance to stand face to face with truth, the good life lived in a small, various, highly articulate and democratic society."	Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve
"Our enemy sees us clearly. ... They will not start a war. They're worried about one thing: If democracy develops here, if we succeed, we will win."	Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev
"The role of the teacher remains the highest calling of a free people. To the teacher, America entrusts her most precious resource, her children; and asks that they be prepared ... to face the rigors of individual participation in a democratic society."	Shirley Mount Hufstedler
"It is the common failing of totalitarian regimes that they cannot really understand the nature of our democracy. They mistake dissent for disloyalty. They mistake restlessness for a rejection of policy. They mistake a few committees for a country. They misjudge individual speeches for public policy." (Answering North Vietnamese charge that US could not endure)"	Lyndon Baines Johnson
"What I want to fix your attention on is the vast overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence -- moral, cultural, social or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how 'democracy' (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient dictatorships, and by the same methods? The basic proposal of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be 'undemocratic.' Children who are fit to proceed may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval's attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT. We may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when 'I'm as good as you' has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will vanish. The few who might want to learn will be prevented; who are they to overtop their fellows? And anyway, the teachers -- or should I say nurses? -- will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching. We shall no longer have to plan and toil to spread imperturbable conceit and incurable ignorance among men."	Clive Staples Lewis
"I take a grave view of the press. It is the weak slat under the bed of democracy."	A. J. Liebling
"Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary."	Reinhold Niebuhr
"Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking."	Clement Attlee
"...Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth."	Abraham Lincoln
"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
"While democracy must have its organizations and controls, its vital breath is individual liberty."	Charles Evans Hughes
"So long as we have enough people in this country willing to fight for their rights, we'll be called a democracy."	Roger Nash Baldwin
"The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment."	Robert Maynard Hutchins
"[Congress is] functioning the way the Founding Fathers intended-not very well. They understood that if you move too quickly, our democracy will be less responsible to the majority."	Barber B. Conable, Jr
"The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother's always a Democrat."	Robert Lee Frost
"Personally, I'm in favor of democracy, which means that the central institutions of society have to be under popular control. Now, under capitalism, we can't have democracy by definition. Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control. Thus, a corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist; that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be establishedat every level--there's little bargaining, a little give and take,but the line of authority is perfectly straightforward. Just as I'm opposed to political fascism, I'm opposed to economic fascism. I think that until the major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it's pointless to talk about democracy."	Noam Chomsky
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."	Louis Dembitz Brandeis
"Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions - it only guarantees equality of opportunity."	Irving Kristol
"Information is the currency of democracy."	Thomas Jefferson
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Browse Democracy quotes by Author:

Abraham Lincoln	Aristotle	Author Unknown
A. J. Liebling	Barber B. Conable, Jr	Charles Evans Hughes
Clare Boothe Luce	Clement Attlee	Clive Alexander Barnes
Clive Staples Lewis	Demosthenes	George Bernard Shaw
George Frost Kennan	Gilbert Keith Chesterton	Irish Blessing
Irving Kristol	James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr.	Jawaharial Nehru
Louis Dembitz Brandeis	Lyndon Baines Johnson	Mary Catherine Bateson
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev	Noam Chomsky	Reinhold Niebuhr
Robert Lee Frost	Robert Maynard Hutchins	Roger Nash Baldwin
Sam(uel) James Ervin, Jr.	Shirley Mount Hufstedler	Thomas Jefferson
Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve	Walt Whitman	Will Rogers
Wystan Hugh Auden