Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Democracy.
Democracy without morality is impossible.
Jack Kemp
When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It's a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin.
Gore Vidal
Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing. What is necessary now is one thing and one thing only that democracy become again democracy in action, not democracy accomplished and piled up in goods and gold.
Archibald MacLeish
Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.
G. K. Chesterton
In a democracy the majority of citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority...and that oppression of the majority will extend to far great number, and will be carried on with much greater fury, than can almost ever be apprehended from the dominion of a single sceptre. Under a cruel prince they have the plaudits of the people to animate their generous constancy under their sufferings; but those who are subjected to wrong under multitudes are deprived of all external consolation: they seem deserted by mankind, overpowered by a conspiracy of their whole species.
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the
What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority.
Walter Lippmann
Unless democracy is to commit suicide by consenting to its own destruction, it will have to find some formidable answer to those who come to it saying: I demand from you in the name of your principles the rights which I shall deny to you later in the name of my principles.
This is one of the paradoxes of the democratic movement -- that it loves a crowd and fears the individuals who compose it -- that the religion of humanity should have no faith in human beings.
As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.
Abraham Lincoln
If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
John Stuart Mill
The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity.
James Fenimore Cooper
It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny.
Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what it is you want to hear.
Alan Coren
We go by the major vote, and if the majority are insane, the sane must go to the hospital.
Horace Mann
No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
Sir Winston Churchill, Speech in
That a peasant may become king does not render the kingdom democratic.
Woodrow Wilson
The world must be made safe for democracy.
America is the place where you cannot kill your government by killing the men who conduct it.
I believe in democracy, because it releases the energies of every human being.
