Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Dictators can fix up their entire families in good jobs, in or around government, and often do. In democracies, such a practice is frowned upon. Privileged access to the corridors of power through family connections and a kind of old boys' network, is also deemed an abuse of power, and so it is.
If you had said to anyone in 1945, at the end of the Second World War with the continent it ruins, that you could have a European Union of 28 member states stretching from Portugal in the West to Estonia in the East, all of them more-or-less liberal democracies - they wouldn't have believed you.
This is what democracy is all about. People have every right to protest whoever's in the White House, without fear of persecution. If this happened in Iran, people would be shot on the streets. This is the United States of America, and we have a First Amendment that protects this kind of speech.
You can't always say what's popular and you ought to go with it. I think that's why the founders were concerned about direct democracy. That's why we have a republic and that's why we have representatives who who are supposed to look at the issues and to look out for the next generation as well.
We need to take a close look at the relationship between the economic system of Capitalism and the political system of Democracy. A democracy with high concentrations of private wealth buys votes and interferes with the ability of Capitalism to perform well. It is no longer one citizen, one vote.
It's just that to a lot of British people George Bush represents the worst of all things American. He's the right-wing Christian crusader, the toxic Texan who refused Kyoto, the poll-cheat eel who undermined democracy on the back of something called 'chads,' a notion we've never entirely grasped.
Deception can cost billions. Think Enron, Madoff, the mortgage crisis. Or in the case of double agents and traitors, like Robert Hanssen or Aldrich Ames, lies can betray our country. They can compromise our security. They can undermine democracy. They can cause the deaths of those that defend us.
In a mass television democracy - which all of us nowadays have - it is impossible to take basic political decisions with long-term consequences without the public knowing it, without the public understanding at least some of it, without the public forming its judgment, heterogeneous as it may be.
Despite what one might gather from the shrill rantings of the leftist commentariat, for whom religion is a sort of disease, religious difference in the United States has rarely led to serious social strife. That is no small achievement, and one that virtually no other Western democracy can boast.
That's what's great about Howard Zinn. Here's a guy who says, "Look, democracy doesn't come from above - it comes from below." The only way change will ever happen is if we speak up, and we have to know that it actually has an impact. Because we have a lot more power than we think we do, I think.
The objective I propose is quite simple to state: to foster the infrastructure of democracy - the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities - which allows a people to choose their own way to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means.
You don't get the fox to be in charge of the chicken coop. You don't give the outgoing regime - which has been practicing dictatorship, is an authoritarian system, it's a bunch of military people - the task of changing Egypt into a second republic, a new Egypt with democracy, freedom, rights, etc.
Democracy is a revelation, but it's complicated. There are elections to hold, politics to create, rights to assert, grievances to settle and institutions to build. To many, it's exhilarating. For others, it can be disappointing when it turns out that democracy doesn't immediately make life better.
In some respects I have been the most unlucky because I have spent more time living as a refugee outside my country than I have spent in Tibet. On the other hand, it has been very rewarding for me to live in a democracy and to learn about the world in a way that we Tibetans had never known before.
Democracy is our commitment. It is our great legacy, a legacy we simply cannot compromise. Democracy is in our DNA. I have seen the strength of democracy. If there were no democracy then someone like me, Modi, a child born in a poor family, how would he sit here? This is the strength of democracy.
My publication, 'The Post,' has taken the initiative to translate many of my pieces and publish them in Arabic. For that, I am grateful. Arabs need to read in their own language so they can understand and discuss the various aspects and complications of democracy in the United States and the West.
Democracy is a way of life controlled by a working faith in the possibilities of human nature. . . . This faith may be enacted in statutes, but it is only on paper unless it is put in force in the attitudes which human beings display to one another in all the incidents and relations of daily life.
On December 7, 1941, an event took place that had nothing to do with me or my family and yet which had devastating consequences for all of us - Japan bombed Pearl Harbour in a surprise attack. With that event began one of the shoddiest chapters in the tortuous history of democracy in North America.
Popularity makes no law invulnerable to invalidation. Americans accept judicial supervision of their democracy - judicial review of popular but possibly unconstitutional statutes - because they know that if the Constitution is truly to constitute the nation, it must trump some majority preferences.
I am very worried about this concentration of power, and it's not only because of Erdogan. We have the ballot box, but we don't have the culture of democracy. The government says: You see, we have the majority, we're entitled to do anything we want. But that's not democracy, that's majoritarianism.
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
The U.S.-led western alliance, while acting as an advocate of democracy, rule of law and human rights, is acting from the opposite position, rejecting the democratic principle of the sovereign right of states enshrined in the U.N. Charter and trying to decide for others what is good and what is bad.
politicians ... turn patriotism into shopkeeping and their own interest - men who care far more for who governs us than for how we are governed.. And what will be the end of such ways? I will tell you. We shall have a Democracy that will be the reign of those who know the least and talk the loudest.
Even under the most perfect Social Democracy we should, without Communism, still be living like hogs, except that each hog would get his fair share of grub.... Whilst we are hogs, let us at least be well-fed, healthy, reciprocally useful hogs, instead of--well, instead of the sort we are at present.
The neoliberal programs of the last generation have in fact been, and were intended to be, a pretty serious attack on democracy, but also they've led to stagnation or decline for large parts of the population - the working class, the lower middle class, these people have essentially been cast aside.
No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren’t designed to produce them, if we don’t speak about them and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.
Only by transforming our own economy to one of peace can we make possible economic democracy in the Third World or our own country. The present economy generates wars to protect its profits and its short-term interests, while squandering the future. Unless we transform the economy, we cannot end war.
As long as individuals are compelled to rent themselves on the market to those who are willing to hire them, as long as their role in production is simply that of ancillary tools, then there are striking elements of coercion and oppression that make talk of democracy very limited, if even meaningful.
We have learned to say that the good must be extended to all of society before it can be held secure by any one person or any one class. But we have not yet learned to add to that statement, that unless all [people] and all classes contribute to a good, we cannot even be sure that it is worth having.
My father offered his life so our democracy could live. My mother devoted her life to nurturing that democracy. I will dedicate my life to making our democracy reach its fullest potential: that of ensuring equality for all. My family has sacrificed much and I am willing to do this again if necessary.
In Cuba, we have a democracy that represents the humble, the dispossessed, those who make up the vast majority of the population. It is for those who carry the main weight of society's load in matters of the production of goods and services. These are not the ones that live from financial speculation.
Donald Trump will be the next president, the 45th President of the United States. And it will be up to him to set up a team that he thinks will serve him well and reflect his policies. And those who didn't vote for him have to recognize that that's how democracy works. That's how this system operates.
Liberty lives in protest and democracy prospers under conditions of change. When we travel about the world and come to a country whose newspapers are filled with bad news we feel that liberty lives in that land. When we come to a country whose newspapers are filled with good news, we feel differently.
'Chinese Democracy' wasn't trying to tell China to have a democracy or anything like that. I don't have an opinion on what kind of government they should have. My thing is, I went to stay there for about three months, and everywhere I went, the people are so shielded from what's going on in the world.
Communism seemed to be an ideal experiment in trying to achieve a state where all persons have greater democracy. I might add, like other persons here and elsewhere, I found myself concerned with the problem of increasing need for greater economic and political democracy for greater numbers of people.
To include freedom in the very definition of democracy is to define a process not by its actual characteristics as a process but by its hoped for results. This is not only intellectually invalid, it is, in practical terms, blinding oneself in advance to some of the unwanted consequences of the process.
Democracy is like three oxen pulling a plough. The oxen are the independent powers, but you have to walk in the same direction; otherwise, you cannot plough and that is what was happening in Colombia. One ox was walking in one direction, the other in another direction, so the democracy was not working.
We have no desire to permanently rule over millions of Palestinians, who double their numbers every generation. Israel, which wishes to be an exemplary democracy, will not be able to bear such a reality over time. The Disengagement Plan presents the possibility of opening a gate to a different reality.
We all have a large stake in preserving our democracy, but I maintain that those without power in our society, the black, the brown, the poor of all colors, have the largest stake not because we have the most to lose, but because we have worked the hardest, and given the most, for what we have achieved.
The G7 - and earlier, the G8 - were a group of countries that shared the same values with regard to freedom and democracy, and through the annexation of Crimea, Russia made it clear at a certain point that these values of keeping the peace, integrity of the borders of a country were not being respected.
Bolivia is a striking example. The mostly white, Europeanized elite, which is a minority, happens to be sitting on most of the hydrocarbon reserves. For the first time Bolivia is becoming democratic. So it's therefore bitterly hated by the West, which despises democracy, because it's much too dangerous.
We know that greater participation in our democracy will make our government more responsible and make elected officials more representative of the people we serve. Making that participation easier while improving the integrity and security of our elections is something we should all be able to support.
I'm a great aficionado of history. I was deeply affected by seeing the disintegration of any chance of democracy coping with fascism in the Weimar republic, where woolly-minded, well-meaning liberalism actually allowed the forces of darkness to use democracy, to exploit democracy, to overturn democracy.
I actually worry that we're so mindlessly following the herd on privacy and data being the principle concerns when the actual things that are affecting the felt sense of your life and where your time goes, where your attention goes, where democracy goes, where teen mental health goes, where outrage goes.
What’s happened is that, almost overnight, we’ve switched from democracy in real-property recording to oligarchy in real-property recording. There was no court case behind this, no statute from Congress or the state legislatures. It was accomplished in a private corporate decision. The banks just did it.
What created democracy was Thomas Paine and Shays' Rebellion, the suffragists and the abolitionists and on down through the populists and the labor movement, including the Wobblies. Tough, in your face people... Mother Jones, Woody Guthrie... Martin Luther King and Caesar Chavez. And now it's down to us.
The experience of a century and a half has demonstrated that our system of free government functions best when the maximum degree of information is made available to our people. In fact, free and candid discussion of vexing problems is the bedrock of democracy and it may be our surest safeguard for peace.
The Chinese have certain advantages. The fact that it's a single party government. But I do believe in the long run the fact that India is a functioning democracy committed to the rule of law. Our system is slow to move but I'm confident that once decisions are taken they are going to be far more durable.
We benefit, intellectually and personally, from the interplay between different selves, from the balance between long-term contemplation and short-term impulse. We should be wary about tipping the scales too far. The community of selves shouldn't be a democracy, but it shouldn't be a dictatorship, either.
We should know that only replacing the economics of competition and greed with the economics of equitable cooperation will guarantee a globalization that takes advantage of potential efficiency gains in ways that also promote environmental protection, international equity, economic democracy, and variety.