Explore Quotes on Democracy

I believe that if Israel were to put an end to the settlements in the West Bank tomorrow, as it did in Gaza, there would still be reluctance on the part of the Palestinian Authority to recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish secular democracy.

Most liberal democracies don't try to figure out what the truth is.

Laws are important precisely because in a democracy they reflect the attitudes and aspirations of those they govern.

Candor and accountability in a democracy is very important. Hypocrisy has no place.

I will not take 'but' for an answer. Negroes have been looking at democracy's 'but' too long.

All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it's your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.

When you fight, you don't fight for abstract values like the flag, or the nation, or democracy. You fight for your buddy. You fight to keep him alive, and he fights to keep you alive, and you go on that way, day after day, battle after battle. And when one of your buddies dies, something inside you dies as well. But you go on. You fight, so that his death isn't meaningless, his sacrifice isn't for nothing.

Our Creator has put in us hungers that this earth can- not satisfy. We cannot be completely self-contained on earth. Physical sense cannot give us a full life, nor can knowledge alone. No life is full unless it is linked to some- thing that goes on after we are dead.... If we have nothing more to live for than just to get ahead in a competitive system, then democracy will go down before other philosophies.

I'd like to teach Iraq about Democracy because we're so experienced with it. First they should know that after 100 years they should free their slaves. Then after 150 years they should give their women the right to vote. Oh, and of course when they start it all they should begin with some genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Democracy is always an unfinished experiment, testing the capacity of each generation to live freedom nobly.

The aim of life is no more to control the mind, but to develop it harmoniously; not to achieve salvation here after, but to make the best use of it here below; and not to realise truth, beauty and good only in contemplation, but also in the actual experience of daily life; social progress depends not upon the ennoblement of the few but on the enrichment of democracy; universal brotherhood can be achieved only when there is an equality of opportunity - of opportunity in the social, political and individual life.

I have made a film about jazz that tries to look through jazz to see what it tells us about who we are as a people. I think that jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a kind of look into our redemptive future possibilities.

The view that we hold in Iraq now is this - that democracy is associated with elections. I believe that elections are possible.

In this era of the global village, the tide of democracy is running. And it will not cease, not in China, not in South Africa, not in any corner of this earth, where the simple idea of democracy and freedom has taken root.

We must practice revolutionary democracy in every aspect of our Party life. Every responsible member must have the courage of his responsibilities, exacting from others a proper respect for his work and properly respecting the work of others. Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories.

America is not a democracy, it's an absolute monarchy ruled by King Kid. In a nation of immigrants, the child is automatically more of an American than his parents. Americans regard children as what Mr. Hudson in Upstairs, Downstairs called betters. Aping their betters, American adults do their best to turn themselves into children. Puerility exercises droit de seigneur everywhere.

Democracy belongs to those who exercise it.

This is supposed to be a participatory democracy and if we're not in there participating then the people that will manipulate and exploit the system will step in there.

Democracy is the suggestion box for slaves.

Debate is almost non-existent and no one is apparently accountable to anybody apart from their political party bosses. It is bad news for democracy in this country.

But Friedman seemed to share Friedrich Hayek's extreme and inaccurate view that socialism of the sort that Britain embraced under the old Labour Party was incompatible with democracy, and I don't think that there is a good theoretical or empirical basis for that view. The Road to Serfdom flunks the test of accuracy of prediction!