As summer comes to an end we look forward to the last long weekend of the season with the final installment of "democracy" quotes. The others appeared just before Memorial Day and the first week of July.
To safeguard democracy the people must have a keen sense of independence, self-respect, and their oneness.
The spirit of democracy cannot be imposed from without. It has to come from within.
In true democracy every man and women is taught to think for himself or herself.
The spirit of democracy cannot be established in the midst of terrorism, whether governmental or popular.
When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall -- think of it, ALWAYS.
The thing about democracy, beloveds, is that it is not neat, orderly, or quiet. It requires a certain relish for confusion.
The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.
There are no magic answers, no miraculous methods to overcome the problems we face, just the familiar ones: honest search for understanding, education, organization, action that raises the cost of state violence for its perpetrators or that lays the basis for institutional change -- and the kind of commitment that will persist despite the temptations of disillusionment, despite many failures and only limited successes, inspired by the hope of a brighter future."
In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued - they may be essential to survival.
Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.
An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.
Abraham Lincoln did not go to Gettysburg having commissioned a poll to find out what would sell in Gettysburg. There were no people with percentages for him, cautioning him about this group or that group or what they found in exit polls a year earlier. When will we have the courage of Lincoln?
The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.
Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.
Democracy, as has been said of Christianity, has never really been tried.
Democracy means not "I am as good as you are" but "You are as good as I am."
I know of no safe repository of the ultimate power of society but people. And if we think them not enlightened enough, the remedy is not to take the power from them, but to inform them by education.
A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.
I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master.
The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.
[C]reative ability and personal responsibility are strongest when the mind is free from supernatural belief and operates in an atmosphere of freedom and democracy.
Individual commitment to a group effort -- that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.
So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.
Did you, too, O friend, suppose democracy was only for elections, for politics, and for a party name? I say democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruit in manners, in the highest forms of interaction between [people], and their beliefs -- in religion, literature, colleges and schools -- democracy in all public and private life....
The purpose of democracy -- supplanting old belief in the necessary absoluteness of establish'd dynastic rulership, temporal, ecclesiastical, and scholastic, as furnishing the only security against chaos, crime, and ignorance -- is, through many transmigrations, and amid endless ridicules, arguments, and ostensible failures,
This entry continued ...
Governments exist to protect the rights of minorities. The loved and the rich need no protection: they have many friends and few enemies.
Elections are a good deal like marriages. There's no accounting for anyone's taste. Every time we see a bridegroom we wonder why she ever picked him, and it's the same with public officials.
Democracy is not being, it is becoming. It is easily lost, but never finally won.
America's support for human rights and democracy is our noblest export to the world.
