Quotes on Democracies Have

Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.

The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders...tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.

The greatest task of democracy, its ritual and feast - is choice.

It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.

The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.

Laws provide against injury from others; but not from ourselves.

No man is good enough to govern another man without the other's consent.

We’ve learned that it will take more than one generation to bring about change. The fight for civil rights has developed into a broader concern for human rights, and that encompasses a great many people and countries. Those of us who live in a democracy have a responsibility to be the voice for those whose voices are stilled.

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

Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.

It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.

Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death.

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.

So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.

We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

Democratic institutions form a system of quarantine for tyrannical desires.

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.

Brothers and sisters, our democracy has been hijacked. Brothers and sisters, all electoral freedoms in this country are over so long as it's controlled by corporations. Brothers and sisters, we are not going to allow these streets to be taken over by the Democrats or the Republicans. Because it's all of us who have built this city, and we can tear it down unless they give us what we need.