Explore Quotes on Democracy

Liberty is the soul's right to breathe.

America's experiment with government of the people, by the people, and for the people depends not only on constitutional structure and organization but also on the commitment, person to person, that we make to each other.

Of the many things we have done to democracy in the past, the worst has been the indignity of taking it for granted.

Freedom is not an end. Freedom is a beginning.

In contrast to totalitarianism, democracy can face and live with the truth about itself.

Democracy is moral before it is political.

No tempest or conflagration, however great, is harder to quell than mob carried away by the novelty of power.

This excessive licence, which the anarchists think is the only true freedom, provides the stock, as it were, from which a tyrant grows.

Where a majority are united by a common sentiment, and have an opportunity, the rights of the minor party become insecure.

Democracy was the right of the people to choose their own tyrant.

The will of the nation is one of those phrases most widely abused by schemers and tyrants of all ages.

If we incline too much to democracy, we shall soon shoot into a monarchy.

The experience of all former ages had shown that of all human governments, democracy was the most unstable, fluctuating and short-lived.

It is one of the evils of democratical governments, that the people, not always seeing and frequently misled, must often feel before they can act.

The great majority of women are more intelligent, better educated, and far more moral than multitudes of men whose right to vote no man questions.

The first step toward liberation of any group is to use the power in hand... And the power in hand is the vote.

We have forgotten that democracy must live as it thinks and think as it lives.

Chinks in America's egalitarian armor are not hard to find. Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.

For our democracy has been marred by imperialism, and it has been enlightened only by individual and sporadic efforts at freedom.

You see few people here in America who really care very much about living a Christian life in a democratic world.

It is obvious that the most despotic forms of social organization would be suitable for inert men who are satisfied with the situation fate has placed them in, and that the most abstract form of democratic theory would be practicable among sages guided only by their reason. The only problem is to what degree it is possible to excite or to contain the passions without endangering public happiness.