Quotes on Democracy

Laughter is a force for democracy.

Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.

High school is neither a democracy nor a dictatorship - nor, contrary to popular belief, an anarchic state. High school is a divine-right monarchy. And when the queen goes on vacation, things change.

Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.

Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

Men who find themselves late are never sure. They are all the things the civics books tell us the good citizen should be: partisans but never zealots, respectors of the facts which attend each situation but never benders of those facts, uncomfortable in positions of leadership but rarely unable to turn down a responsibility once it has been offered . . . or thrust upon them. They make the best leaders in a democracy because they are unlikely to fall in love with power.

Democracy is not something that happens, you know, just at election time, and it's not something that happens just with one event. It's an ongoing building process. But it also ought to be a part of our culture, a part of our lives.

Freedom is participation in power.

There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.

Lawyer: one who protects us against robbery by taking away the temptation.

We are usually convinced more easily by reasons we have found ourselves than by those which have occurred to others.

Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.

Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.

In our political system, money is power. And that means a few can have a lot more power than the rest. That's bad news for everyone else - and for our democracy itself.