2,003 Quotes About Democracy

If you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible.

. And it especially cannot endure when powerful groups in that society seek at every turn to undermine and destroy its very being. The threats to democracy are not always from enemies abroad. They can come from those within who espouse the language of democracy and use the liberties afforded them by democratic institutions to undermine the substance of democracy. Weimar cautions us to be wary of those people as well. What comes next can be very bad, even worse than imaginable.

In a democratic country everything is very simple: If you choose a good government, good things will happen; if you choose a bad government, bad things will happen!

government is legitimate not so much because it represents the 'general will', but because its policies are, ideally and counterfactually, the result of the public deliberation of all who are concerned by the decision

This deeply free and public space plays a vital role in our world, equally important in our digital age as in Greco-Roman times, when they were marketplaces for goods and ideas. As common ground, squares are equitable and democratic; they have played a fundamental role in the development of free speech.

Squares have defined urban living since the dawn of democracy, from which they are inseparable. From the start, the public square has been synonymous with a society that acknowledges public life and a life in public, which is to say a society distinguishing the individual from the state [Michael Kimmelman, "Culture: Power of the Place"].

Failed coup has put the people in general on a long trudge to freedom while creating a situation to consolidate more power to exercise the legitimised arbitrariness of Erdoğanian democracy.

Two things form the bedrock of any open society — freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don’t have those things, you don’t have a free country."[Don’t allow religious hooligans to dictate terms (The Times of India, January 16, 2008)]

What the United States call democracy is actually a vertical model of remote governance by oligarchs—economic barons and their political representatives. The result is that citizens in the United States have little control over what the U.S. government does.