2,003 Quotes About Democracy

Every democracy deserves the government it gets.

The fundamental absurdity of a majority taxing itself in order to maintain a propaganda organization aimed at persuading the same majority to go further than it is yet willing should be obvious. [...] The propriety of such agencies in a democracy spending public funds on publicity in favor of extending their activities must remain questionable.

Most of them hadn’t even chosen their spouses, and now they were meant to choose who would govern them.

Fixing our democracy is the equivalent of repairing a crack in your home's foundation. It's expensive and time consuming. It doesn't boost your curb appeal. But it's the only way to make every other alteration last.

Allow more people to vote, and more people who support voting rights will get elected. The more successfully we defend our republic, the easier our republic becomes to defend. There are ideas that benefit from years or even decades of nitpicky polish. Fixing our country's foundation is not one of them.

Every democracy, whether ochlocracy, aristocracy, oligarchy, monarchy, anarchy, proletarian, popular, or liberal, is by its very nature always a scotocracy, that is, the rule of obscurants, derived from Greek words σκότος for darkness, and κράτος for power, dominion, strength. But the "power" of obscurants is based on ignorance and madness, and, like night, from which only shadows remain when the sun rises, is powerless against the light of knowledge and reason.

The truth is not democratic, it’s not populist and it’s not for everyone.

...that, I suppose, was the part of politics that would always give me the most pleasure: the part that couldn't be diagrammed, that defied planning or analytics. The way in which, when it works, a campaign - and by extension a democracy - proved to be a chorus rather than a solo act.

You are either Ataturk's turk or Erdogan's turk, you cannot be both.