2,003 Quotes About Democracy

Universal suffrage enfranchised everyone and, in doing so, reduced everyone's power to the smallest share possible. While this was acceptable when it was conceived as impotence over others, it becomes intolerable when we realize that our power over ourselves is included in the bargain. The individual in a regime of universal suffrage has an absolute minimum of influence.

Socialists have advocated numerous ways of democratizing the economy, from setting up worker cooperatives to nationalizing major industries... At the core of economic democracy is the notion that control should not be vested in a small group of people, but in the people who do the labor. Managers and owners shouldn't decide what the workers have to do, the workers should decide what managers have to do (or if they need managers at all). And they should own the workplaces themselves.

No matter the time and era, if ever a government in any corner of the world, begins to persecute a population on the basis of race, religion, gender or sexual orientation, in the name of national security and prosperity, then it is the existential responsibility of every thinking human to stand up and defy the authority of such heinous, uneducated, megalomaniacal, delusional and self-righteous government.

Democracy is itself a religious faith. For some it comes close to being the only formal religion they have. And so when I see the first faint shadow of orthodoxy sweep across the sky, feel the first cold whiff of its blinding fog steal in from sea, I tremble all over, as though I had just seen an eagle go by, carrying a baby.EB White Bedfellows1956

There can be no question but that the great principles of freedom of conscience, separation of church and state, and voluntarism in religion, so basic in American Protestantism and so essential to democracy, ultimately are derived from the Anabaptists of the Reformation period, who for the first time clearly enunciated them and challenged the Christian world to follow them in practice.

...people don't need the illusory freedom of free-market choice (aka, the freedom to die when your medical bill exceeds your paycheck), nor the farcical freedom of an authoritarian police state; they need the ability to meaningfully choose between a lot of different routes of happiness. If this isn't what's happening, then you're not creating a socialist state, you're building an abominable perversion of socialism's ideals.

I don't want to become famous but infamous for raising my voice where democracy punishes you for freedom of speech.

Only if all members of society can satisfy the needs they share with all others – physical and emotional intimacy, economic independence, and political self-determination – by relying on the sympathy and support of their partners in interaction will our society have become social in the full sense of the term.

The power lies in the power of the votes of those whom the masses have vested their power by giving their vote.