Explore Quotes on Democracy

If you have a sense of purpose and a sense of direction, I believe people will follow you. Democracy isn't just about deducing what the people want. Democracy is leading the people as well.

Majority rule rests on numbers; democracy rests on the well-grounded assumption that society is neither a collection of units nor an organism but a network of human relations.

Let's face it: however old-fashioned and out of date and devaluated the word is, we like the way of living provided by democracy.

Democracy, in the United States rhetoric refers to a system of governance in which elite elements based in the business community control the state by virtue of their dominance of the private society, while the population observes quietly. So understood, democracy is a system of elite decision and public ratification, as in the United States itself. Correspondingly, popular involvement in the formation of public policy is considered a serious threat. It is not a step towards democracy; rather it constitutes a 'crisis of democracy' that must be overcome.

If you establish a democracy, you must in due time reap the fruits of a democracy. You will in due season have great impatience of public burdens, combined in due season with great increase of public expenditure. You will in due season have wars entered into from passion and not from reason; and you will in due season submit to peace ignominiously sought and ignominiously obtained, which will diminish your authority and perhaps endanger your independence. You will in due season find your property is less valuable, and your freedom less complete.

The most popular man under a democracy is not the most democratic man, but the most despotic man. The common folk delight in the exactions of such a man. They like him to boss them. Their natural gait is the goose step.

Large-scale hog producers are a greater threat to the United States and U.S. democracy than Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network.

I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.

As for me, I am deeply a democrat; this is why I am in no way a socialist. Democracy and socialism cannot go together. You can't have it both ways. Socialism is a new form of slavery.

I met many Russians over the years who were convinced my brothers and I were a cabal, pulling strings behind the scenes to shape American policy. The Soviets had no conception of how a pluralistic democracy works and believed elected officials, up to and including the president of the United States, were only figureheads acting out the roles dictated to them by the real "powers that be" - in this case, my family.

The essence of globalization is a subordination of human rights, of labor rights, consumer, environmental rights, democracy rights, to the imperatives of global trade and investment.

Our civilization is locked in the grip of an ideology - corporatism. An ideology that denies and undermines the legitimacy of individuals as the citizen in a democracy. The particular imbalance of this ideology leads to a worship of self-interest and a denial of the public good. The practical effects on the individual are passivity and conformism in the areas that matter, and non-conformism in the areas that don't

Democracy will defeat the economist at every turn on its own genre.

The era of using people as production tools is coming to an end. Participation is infinitely more complex to practice than conventional corporate unilateralism, just as democracy is much more cumbersome than dictatorship. But there will be few companies that can afford to ignore either of them.

What we call a financial crisis is really at its core a crisis of management, and not just a crisis of management, but a crisis of management culture. ...In other words, what you had is a detachment of people who know the business from people who are running the business.

Democracy is a system where people are counted not weighed.

The rules of workplace democracy are founded in solidarity and mutual trust. They are at the core of a historic process which promises to introduce a new economy, and thereby a new society, after capitalism.

We still have a lot of work to do when it comes to democracy. We have political democracy but not economic democracy.

Liberty of the people is not my liberty!

If you want a good argument against democracy, spend five minutes with a voter.

Imagine if all of life were determined by majority rule. Every meal would be a pizza. Every pair of pants, even those in a Brooks Brothers suit, would be stone-washed denim. Celebrity diet and exercise books would be the only thing on the shelves at the library. And - since women are a majority of the population - we'd all be married to Mel Gibson.