c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
[Stephen] Harper had said he would use all legal means, and what [John] Baird suggested was an option the prome minister was considering. If the governor general had refused his request, he could have replaced her with a more compliant one, making the case to the Queen that the people of Canada were opposed in great numbers to a coalition replacing his government.
— Lawrence Martin, Harperland: The Politics Of Control
If I were making a country, I'd get the sewage pipes first, then the democracy, then I'd go about giving pamphlets and statues of Gandhi to other people, but what do I know? I'm just a murderer!
— Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger
Being called a murderer: fine, I have no objection to that. It's a fact: I am a sinner, a fallen human. But to be called a murderer by the police!
— Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger
A democracy can only be produced if a majority movement is built. The guerilla strategy depends on a collapse of will in the ruling class to produce the social crisis out of which revolution occurs, whether the majority favors it or not.
— Anarchist Communist Collective
As demonstrated in Russia and numerous other countries, when faced with a choice between democracy without capitalism or capitalism without democracy, Western elites unhesitatingly embrace the latter.
— Michael Parenti
He read the words, wondering when cruelty won the vote from democracy.
— Gayendra Abeywardane, Crocodile Chamber
In modern democracies, one is always too few and two are always too many
— Idiotneil
The cunning villains used our innocence, naivety and honesty; they incited and steered our virtue, purity and fervent temperaments. When we realized the actual absurdity of the situation and began to demand our democratic rights, we were subjected to unprecedented persecution and suppression. Our youth, passion, learning, idealism and joy were all sacrificed to the terrible rule of this wicked tyranny. How can this not be blood?
— Lin Zhao
Modifying Clausewitz’ aphorism—war is the continuation of diplomacy by other means—one could say that in ideologically divided countries civil war is but the continuation of parliamentarism with other means.
— Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism Revisited: from de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot
Open confession of dictatorship is far less dangerous than sham democracy. One can defend oneself against the former
—  the latter is like a creeper attached to the body of a drowning man.
Democracy can exist only in the countries where people are brave! Coward nations always live under the authoritarian regimes!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Changing entrenched systems is daunting; the odds against reshaping the nation's police forces are high. But there are few things more important than making sure their profession is the brave, honorable service it should be. We have to do it, or watch our communities and our democracy disintegrate.
— Ann Medlock
Democracy! Bah! When I hear that word I reach for my feather boa!
— Allen Ginsberg
A totally befuddled voter may look at a Vote for McGovern sign and do just that.
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72
I am a congenital optimist about America, but I worry that American democracy is exhibiting fatal symptoms. DC has become an acronym for Dysfunctional Capital: a swamp in which partisanship has grown poisonous, relations between the White House and Congress have paralyzed basic functions like budgets and foreign agreements, and public trust in government has all but disappeared. These symptoms are rooted in the decline of a public ethic, legalized and institutionalized corruption, a poorly educated and attention-deficit-driven electorate, and a 'gotcha' press - all exacerbated by digital devices and platforms that reward sensationalism and degrade deliberation. Without stronger and more determined leadership from the president and a recovery of a sense of civic responsibility among the governing class, the United States may follow Europe down the road of decline.
— Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?
It is a melancholy fact which exponents of democracy must face that, while all men may be on a level in the eyes of the State, they will continue in fact to be preposterously unequal.
— John Buchan, John MacNab
The institution known as "school" isn't just a facility for doing classwork. It's essentially a microcosm of society, all of humanity put together in a little diorama. Bully exists in schools because war and conflict exist in the world, and school castes reflect our stratified, hierarchical society. Living in a democracy, the tyranny of the majority naturally applies at school, too. The majority -- that is to say, the people with the most friends -- are superior.
— Wataru Watari, やはり俺の青春ラブコメはまちがっている 2
There is no middle ground for moral choice and political decision because by being on a safe side, any indecisive act poses a moral hazard to the individual freedom and integrity of a democratic society.~ Danny Castillones Sillada, The Postmodern Filipino Prince: The Moral Hazard of Political Indecision
— Danny Castillones Sillada
He was holding his breath so as not to inhale the odor of democracy.
— Henry James, The American
Meanwhile, two other great currents in political thought, had a decisive significance on the development of socialist ideas: Liberalism, which had powerfully stimulated advanced minds in the Anglo-Saxon countries, Holland and Spain in particular, and Democracy in the sense. to which Rousseau gave expression in his Social Contract, and which found its most influential representatives in the leaders of French Jacobinism. While Liberalism in its social theories started off from the individual and wished to limit the state's activities to a minimum, Democracy took its stand on an abstract collective concept, Rousseau's general will, which it sought to fix in the national state. Liberalism and Democracy were pre-eminently political concepts, and since most of the original adherents of both did scarcely consider the economic conditions of society, the further development of these conditions could not be practically reconciled with the original principles of Democracy, and still less with those of Liberalism. Democracy with its motto of equality of all citizens before the law, and Liberalism with its right of man over his own person, both were wrecked on the realities of capitalist economy. As long as millions of human beings in every country have to sell their labour to a small minority of owners, and sink into the most wretched misery if they can find no buyers, the so-called equality before the law remains merely a pious fraud, since the laws are made by those who find themselves in possession of the social wealth. But in the same way there can be no talk of a right over one's own person, for that right ends when one is compelled to submit to the economic dictation of another if one does not want to starve.
— Rudolf Rocker, Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism
The form of association, however, which if mankind continue to improve, must be expected in the end to predominate, is not that which can exist between a capitalist as chief, and work-people without a voice in the management, but the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers elected and removable by themselves.
— John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy: And Chapters on Socialism
The Roman Empire, born out the Roman Republic, with its ideas of democracy among a certain group of wealthy men (no vote for men without land -as with our Founding Fathers- and certainly no vote for women and slaves. Why are democracies built on top of one form of slavery or another?)
— Tina Packer, Women of Will: Following the Feminine in Shakespeare's Plays
You’re a raptor who sees all his people as defenseless little flit-wrens—and you’ll save them, if only they give up the fanciful notion that they can lead themselves, that they can protect themselves.” “You understand nothing.” “Meanwhile,” Sinjir says, really leaning into it now, “your opponent is a woman who wants to give democracy to the entirety of the galaxy. Freedom for all. Oppression for none.” “It’s naïve.” “It may be. But at this point, I’m going to side with her precious naïveté over your authoritarian bluster.
— Chuck Wendig, Star Wars - Aftermath - Empire's End
If we reject, as we must, the doctrine that the majority is always right, to submit moral issues to the vote is to gamble that what we believe to be right will come out of the ballot with more votes behind it than what we believe to be wrong; and that is a gamble we will often lose.
— Peter Singer
In an absolutism, the autocrat is visible and tangible. The real despotism of republican institutions is far deeper, more insidious, because it rests on the popular delusion of self-government and independence. That is the subtle source of democratic tyranny, and, as such, it cannot be reached with a bullet.
— Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist
Darwin and Nietzsche were the common spiritual and intellectual source for the mean-spirited and bellicose ideological assault on progress, liberalism, and democracy that fired the late-nineteenth-century campaign to preserve or rejuvenate the traditional order. Presensitized for this retreat from modernity, prominent fin-de-siècle aesthetes, engages literati, polemical publicists, academic sociologists, and last but not least, conservative and reactionary politicians became both consumers and disseminators of the untried action-ideas.Oscar Wilde and Stefan George were perhaps most representative of the aristocratizing aesthetes whose rush into dandyism or retreat into cultural monasticism was part of the outburst against bourgeois philistinism and social levelling. Their yearning for a return to an aristocratic past and their aversion to the invasive democracy of their day were shared by Thomas Mann and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, whose nostalgia for the presumably superior sensibilities of a bygone cultivated society was part of their claim to privileged social space and position in the present. Although they were all of burgher or bourgeois descent, they extolled ultra-patrician values and poses, thereby reflecting and advancing the rediscovery and reaffirmation of the merits and necessities of elitism. Theirs was not simply an aesthetic and unpolitical posture precisely because they knowingly contributed to the exaltation of societal hierarchy at a time when this exaltation was being used to do battle against both liberty and equality. At any rate, they may be said to have condoned this partisan attack by not explicitly distancing themselves from it.Maurice Barrès, Paul Bourget, and Gabriele D'Annunzio were not nearly so self-effacing. They were not only conspicuous and active militants of antidemocratic elitism, but they meant their literary works to convert the reader to their strident persuasion. Their polemical statements and their novels promoted the cult of the superior self and nation, in which the Church performed the holy sacraments. Barrès, Bourget, and D'Annunzio were purposeful practitioners of the irruptive politics of nostalgia that called for the restoration of enlightened absolutism, hierarchical society. and elite culture in the energizing fires of war.
— Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War
Without a sharp turnaround toward democracy and equality in the United States, Europe will be virtually alone in its commitment to social democracy. The pressures of low-wage immigrant labor, cheap imports from Eastern Europe and Asia, and free-market practices of governments are already threatening once secure areas of employment and causing right-wing populism to pop up in various Western European countries. Surprising numbers of middle-class and working-class voters have supported ultranationalist, neofascist parties throughout Europe because, like white male workers in the United States, they see their status slipping.
— Steve Brouwer, Sharing the Pie : A Citizen's Guide to Wealth and Power
It was not, however, to these Fascist groups, numerically unimportant as they were, that the Third Republic owed its collapse. On the contrary, the plain, if paradoxical, truth is that their influence was never so slight as at the moment when the collapse actually took place. What made France fall was the fact that she had no more true Dreyfusards, no one who believed that democracy and freedom, equality and justice could any longer be defended or realized under the republic.
— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Monarchy is like a splendid ship, with all sails set it moves majestically on, but then it hits a rock and sinks for ever. Democracy is like a raft. It never sinks but, damn it, your feet are always in the water. That is a good metaphor, for raft, he implies, is simply swept along by the tide or the current; one can with a paddle or a plank steer a little to stay afloat, trim forward direction slightly to left or right, perhaps even slow down or speed up a little, but there is no turning back against the current of democracy.
— Bernard Crick, Democracy: A Very Short Introduction
President George Washington’s namesake capital, once a marketplace for slave auctions, is now synonymous with democracy and freedom; so is the iconic Jefferson, who wanted to build an “Empire of Liberty” for the world.
— Patrick Mendis, Peaceful War: How the Chinese Dream and the American Destiny Create a New Pacific World Order
The biggest mistake of a democratic country is to underestimate the power of a democratically elected pro-fascist leader because it is always easier to destroy a castle from within!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
If a nation is leaving democracy and choosing fascism, it means that it is taking itself from a peaceful garden to a bloody slaughter house!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
The demand for equality has two sources; one of them is among the noblest, the other is the basest, of human emotions. The noble source is the desire for fair play. But the other source is the hatred of superiority. At the present moment it would be very unrealistic to overlook the importance of the latter.
— C.S. Lewis
The author also participated in Operation Uphold Democracy (in Haiti, a year after the catastrophic denouement of Operation Restore Hope in Somalia). ... Hope was not restored in Somalia. Democracy was not upheld in Haiti.
— Stan Goff, Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century
This is all very personal for me, but it's also collective, and the two are not disconnected. I have never believed that you only advocate for the things that you stand for and embody. I've always believed that our liberation, my liberation, is tied up with yours. To make a country that works for me, there's gotta be a country that works for you.
— Pramila Jayapal
The reduced sense of responsibility and the absence of effective volition in turn explain the ordinary citizen's ignorance and lack of judgement in matters of domestic and foreign policy which are if anything more shocking in the case of educated people and of people who are successfully active in non-political walks of life than it is with uneducated people in humble stations.
— Joseph Alois Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
Voters thereby prove themselves bad and indeed corrupt judges of such issues and often they even prove themselves bad judges of their own long-run interests, for it is only the short-run promise that tells politically and only short-run rationality that asserts itself effectively.
— Joseph Alois Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
Open avowal of dictatorship is much less dangerous than sham democracy. The first one can fight
—  sham democracy is insidious.
I’d watched the election of Barack Obama with them, in Harlem: the celebration had spilled out onto the streets and erupted into dancing, outdoor champagne-drinking, euphoria. This [the 1/21/17 Women's March on Washington, DC] was different. It was like laughter at a funeral—what else can you do but hold on to who you are and who you love? What can you do but try to stay sane and fight like hell for what life is all about?
— Sarah Larson
After a democratic interlude the "monarchy" returns with a vengeance, returns by the back door, camouflaged, masked and diabolically perverted—a blood-curdling metamorphosis we know only from nightmares or surrealist films. The reassertion of the natural father-urge does not result in the restitution of the paternal kingdom but in the rise of the Terrifying Father, a Krónos devouring his own children, who are paralyzed by his magnetic glare like rabbits facing a boa constrictor.
— Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
One cannot equate "capitalism" and "democracy.
— Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism
How do the day’s event(s) compare with the famous quote you’ve picked to write about in So This Just Happened: The Journal for USA Current Events?Journal your thoughts on current events inside, in light of the 101 famous and thought-provoking quotes about the United States of America, democracy and more.Abnormal times call for first person accounts: witness current events compared to the United States of America’s values, laws, and principles. So This Just Happened: The Journal for USA Current Events includes 101 thought-provoking and insightful quotes by Founding Fathers’, famous historical figures, past Presidents and more for you to compare and contrast with current events.With a quote on every other lined journal page; you can write in order or flip to the most relevant quote for the day’s events to write about. Each lined page for you to write on has a spot to write the date at the top.
— Samuel B. Jonathan, So This Just Happened: The Journal for USA Current Events
Without free speech one cannot claim other liberties, or defend them when they are attacked. Without free speech one cannot have a democratic process, which requires the statement and testing of policy proposals and party platforms. Without free speech one cannot have a due process at law, in which one can defend oneself, accuse, collect and examine evidence, make a case or refute one. Without free speech there cannot be genuine education and research, enquiry, debate, exchange of information, challenges to falsehood, questioning of governments, proposal and examination of opinion. Without free speech there cannot be a free press, which...is necessary...as one of the two essential estates of a free society (the other being an independent judiciary).
— A.C. Grayling, The Challenge of Things: Thinking Through Troubled Times
You gotta remember the smartest thing the Congress did was to limit the voters in this country. Out of 3 1/2 to 4 million people, 200,000 voted. And that was true for a helluva long time, and the republic would have never survived if all the dummies had voted along with the intelligent people.
— Richard Nixon
British democracy was not given by the elite. It was largely taken by the masses.
— Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson "Why Nations Fail"
When I voted, my equality tumbled into the box with my ballot; they disappeared together.
— Louis Veuillot
We believe in equality for all, and privileges for none. This is a belief that each American regardless of background has equal standing in the public forum, all of us. Because we believe this idea so firmly, we are an inclusive, rather than an exclusive party. Let everybody come.
— Barbara Jordan, We Rise: Speeches by Inspirational Black Women
I would go one step further and say that the willingness to challenge professional economists - and other experts - should be the foundation of democracy. When you think about it, if all we have to do is to listen to the experts, what is the point of having a democracy at all? Unless we want our societies to be run by a body of self-elected experts, we all have to learn economics and challenge professional economists
— Ha-Joon Chang, Economics: The User's Guide
Tribal Chief 1: The will of the people is what is best. That is what democracy meansTribal Chief 2: But if the people don’t know what they are talking about, how can that be the best?
— Leonard Wibberley, A Feast of Freedom
Under a democratical government, the citizens exercise the powers of sovereignty; and those powers will be first abused, and afterwards lost, if they are committed to an unwieldy multitude.
— Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Volume I
A democracy is not truly democratic unless it's secular.
— Shawn Lawrence Otto, The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It
The great gift of American democracy is freedom to think, act, and carry out our lives in a manner that imbues meaning not only to our own life but enhances other people’s lives through our everyday actions.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
No blue-blooded family, however degenerate, could have produced the idiots one finds in any parliament.
— Klonovsky
Organizational democracy will begin to become a fundamental management practice to update the hierarchical command-control systems.
— Pearl  Zhu, It Innovation: Reinvent It for the Digital Age
the things common to all men are more important than the things peculiar to any men. Ordinary things are more valuable than extraordinary things; nay, they are more extraordinary. Man is something more awful than men; something more strange. The sense of the miracle of humanity itself should be always more vivid to us than any marvels of power, intellect, art, or civilization. The mere man on two legs, as such, should be felt as something more heartbreaking than any music and more startling than any caricature. Death is more tragic even than death by starvation. Having a nose is more comic even than having a Norman nose.This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately. And the second principle is merely this: that the political instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common. Falling in love is more poetical than dropping into poetry. The democratic contention is that government (helping to rule the tribe) is a thing like falling in love, and not a thing like dropping into poetry. It is not something analogous to playing the church organ, painting on vellum, discovering the North Pole (that insidious habit), looping the loop, being Astronomer Royal, and so on. For these things we do not wish a man to do at all unless he does them well. It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly.
— G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
When Putin or any wealthy corrupted dictator can decide who is the US President, while Obama or the regular democratic authorities don't have the same power to decide who is the Russian or Chinese president, then the problem is not about Donald Trump, not about The Person,rather it is structural gap related to the Democracy and Dictatorship in deep substance and concept, and should be discussed, reflected, thought, spoke and solved from this very respect, not from drawing daily cartoons for Trump's hairstyle!
— Waseem Kanjo
Debate is never finished; it can't be, lest democracy be no longer democratic and society be stripped of or forfeit its autonomy. Democracy means that the citizen's task is never complete. Democracy exists through persevering and unyielding citizens' concern. Once that concern is put to sleep, democracy expires. And so there is no, and cannot be, a democracy, an autonomous society, without autonomous citizens - that is, citizens endowed with individual liberty and individual responsibility for the ways they use it. That liberty is another value - though unthinkable in separation from the value of democracy. Democracy rests on the freedom of its citizens, and citizens rest their confidence of being free and the courage to be free on the democracy of their polis. The two make each other and are made in the process of that making.
— Zygmunt Bauman, Europe: An Unfinished Adventure
Between the black box proprietary code, barebones computers we call voting machines and a mass of completely unqualified election officials, our election system is up for grabs to anybody with even a modest interest and some script kiddie capability. The cyber-kinetic attack surface here is wide open.
— James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
The collaboration between secretaries of state, election officials and the voting system manufacturers on the matter of enforcing this black box proprietary code secrecy with election systems, is nothing less than the commoditization and monetization of American Democracy
— James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
You think an Air Gap is a defense? Sofacy, Stuxnet, Uroburos, AirHopper, BitWhisperer and ProjectSauron…enough said!
— James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
There are three kinds of constitution, and an equal number of deviation-forms--perversions, as it were, of them. The constitutions are monarchy, aristocracy, and thirdly that which is based on a property qualification, which it seems appropriate to call timocratic, though most people are wont to call it polity. The best of these is monarchy, the worst timocracy. The deviation from monarchy is tyranny; for both are forms of one-man rule, but there is the greatest difference between them; the tyrant looks to his own advantage, the king to that of his subjects. For a man is not a king unless he is sufficient to himself and excels his subjects in all good things; and such a man needs nothing further; therefore he will not look to his own interests but to those of his subjects; for a king who is not like that would be a mere titular king. Now tyranny is the very contrary of this; the tyrant pursues his own good. And it is clearer in the case of tyranny that it is the worst deviation-form; but it is the contrary of the best that is worst. Monarchy passes over into tyranny; for tyranny is the evil form of one-man rule and the bad king becomes a tyrant. Aristocracy passes over into oligarchy by the badness of the rulers, who distribute contrary to equity what belongs to the city-all or most of the good things to themselves, and office always to the same people, paying most regard to wealth; thus the rulers are few and are bad men instead of the most worthy. Timocracy passes over into democracy; for these are coterminous, since it is the ideal even of timocracy to be the rule of the majority, and all who have the property qualification count as equal. Democracy is the least bad of the deviations;
— Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Somehow, people always forget that it's much easier to install a dictator than to remove one
— Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped
What we see in a democracy governed by “representatives” is not a government “for the people” but an organized conflict of interests that only results in the setting up of unstable balances of power.
— Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
I am blessed to live in a democracy, not a totalitarian state. But the democracy I cherish is constantly threatened by a brand of politics that clothes avarice and the arrogance of power in patriotic and religious garb.
— Parker J. Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life
As long as there exist stupid people supporting stupid governments in their countries, people living in those countries will continue fluttering badly in the cesspool created by this utter foolishness!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
One of the strengths, and weaknesses, of liberal democratic societies is giving the benefit of the doubt even to one's enemies
— Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped
Anyone who thinks he's too small to make a difference has never been bit by a mosquito", I'd tell people.
— Jeannette Walls, Half Broke Horses
Dictators seem to learn from history much better than democrats
— Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped
Civic duty? Perhaps it would be a little naive to try to coerce me into voting. I assure you my basic standards of healthy living are very different from yours, which is the reason I do not vote. You should note that, as nonsensical a scenario, if forced to choose I would most definitely rather live in a failing, Christ-honoring, God-fearing nation than a flourishing one that mocks said Creator. Beware of my personal ambitions.
— Criss Jami
The message of such silence is simple: "we the people" will no longer conspire in supporting the illusions that help corrupt leaders maintain control. By withholding our cheers and falling into silence, we take a small step toward withdrawing the consent that helps maintain abusive power. We no longer affirm, or pretend to affirm, that the national flags and religious symbols in which corrupt leaders wrap themselves have any meaning -- except as an implicit judgment on the duplicity of those leaders.
— Parker J. Palmer
You know history better than I do, you've been teaching all your life. Without real opposition you get dictators down the line. Idi, Amin, Mugabe. No democracy without opposition.
— Nadine Gordimer, No Time Like the Present
Democracy is easy; republicanism is hard. Democracy is fueled by passion; republicanism is founded on moderation. Democracy is loud, raucous, disorderly; republicanism is quiet, cool, judicious – and that we still live in its light is the Founders' most wondrous deed.
— Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation
He recounted how, at a Jesuit retreat put on by the UCA, the fathers had been talking politics and discussing the issues of democracy in Latin America. Apparently they were sitting around castigating the FMLN for its authoritarianism. Then someone pointed out that in a real democracy, not just the priests but the women who were serving them lunch were going to have something to say about the way things were run, and one of the men blurted out, "You can't do that. They'd make horrible mistakes."Well, said Martín-Baró, that's right: Democracy definitely means that people will make mistakes. "And," he added, "we should welcome them.
— Sara  Miles, Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion
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.
— Nilantha Ilangamuwa
In Kingdom - Like the King, Like the People In Democracy - Like the People, Like the Ruler
— Venkat Gandhi
-I got the conch!" --Piggy (in Lord of the Flies), attempting Democracy
— William Golding
How can you put human rights to a popular vote and call it democracy? How many times do you need to redefine or haggle about the meaning of the word EQUALITY.
— Christina Engela
Democracy provides the institutional framework for the reform of political institutions (other than this framework). It makes possible the reform of institutions without using violence, and thereby the use of reason in the designing of new institutions and the adjusting of old ones. It cannot provide reason. The question of the intellectual and moral standard of its citizens is to a large degree a personal problem. (The idea that this problem can be tackled, in turn, by an institutional eugenic and educational control is, I believe, mistaken ; some reasons for my belief will be given below.) It is quite wrong to blame democracy for the political shortcomings of a democratic state. We should rather blame ourselves. In a non-democratic state, the only way to achieve reasonable reforms is by the violent overthrow of the government, and the introduction of a democratic framework. Those who criticize democracy on any ' moral ' grounds fail to distinguish between personal and institutional problems. It rests with us to improve matters. The democratic institutions cannot improve themselves. The problem of improving them is always a problem of persons rather than of institutions.
— Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies - Volume One: The Spell of Plato
the U.S. government has a long history of overclassifying information that shouldn't be classified at all—and keeping information classified until long after any justification for classifying it has disappeared.
— Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon
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.
— Thomas Jefferson
Money has replaced the vote.
— Chris Hedges
If either one or two candidates is dominating the field at the time of the first primaries and caucuses, the voters are superfluous because the victor is already guaranteed. If, however, no candidate is dominant, then the primaries and caucuses will determine the winner. Nonetheless, in recent campaign cycles, that determination has been made earlier and earlier in the process, by fewer and fewer voters, who pick from only a few candidates - the ones who have not already eliminated themselves from serious contention by their weak performances in the pre-primary phase.
— Roger Lawrence Butler, Claiming the Mantle: How Presidential Nominations Are Won and Lost Before the Votes Are Cast
If you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible.
— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
In retrospect, these events are discouraging: too many scientists seem to have been in the service of money and power. Too many in the media saw it as their duty to be "neutral" by uncritically reporting every theory, rather than investigating who sponsored them and whether they were backed by solid evidence. Too many government officials seem to have been willing to sacrifice poor fisherfolk on the altar of high growth.
— Timothy S. George, Minamata: Pollution and the Struggle for Democracy in Postwar Japan
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!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
On paper, the people now choose the party nominees for president. And yet, the process seems to have come full circle. [back to party bosses choosing] Voters theoretically get to pick the candidates, but in practice they rarely get the opportunity. In most cases, the contest is over in a few weeks after a burst of activity in a handful of states. How did the reform movement [late 60s, early 70s] get so far away from the plan? The answer is that there was no single plan, nor a single entity hat could craft a system to meet the original intent of the reformers. [To democratize the process]
— Roger Lawrence Butler
Libraries are more than community centers, just as librarians do more than answer questions you could easily ask Google. From the opening of the BPL, the first public library, to the expansion of public libraries across America through the Carnegie libraries, the library as an institution has been fundamental to the success of our democracy. Libraries provide access to the skills and knowledge necessary to fulfill our role as active citizens. Libraries also function as essential equalizing institutions in our society. For as long as a library exists in most communities, staffed with trained librarians, it remains true that individuals' access to our shared culture is not dictated by however much money they have.
— John Palfrey, BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google
For many citizens, libraries are the one place where the information they need to be engaged in civic life is truly available for free, requiring nothing more than the time to walk into a branch. The reading room of a public library is the place where a daily newspaper, a weekly newsmagazine, and a documentary film are all available for free. In many communities, the library's public lecture room is the only place to hear candidates for office comparing points of view or visiting professors explaining their work on climate change, immigration or job creation. That same room is often the only place where a child from a family without a lot of money can go to see a dramatic reading or a production of a Shakespeare play. (Another of these simple realities in most communities is that a big part of public librarians job is to figure out how to host the community's homeless in a safe and fair manner.) Democracies can work only if all citizens have access to information and culture that can help them make good choices, whether at the voting booth or in other aspects of public life.
— John Palfrey, BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google
The administration often used the analogy of planting the “seeds of democracy” in the Middle East, as if they’d sprout into democratic regimes as nature took its course. Democracy doesn’t sprout like apple trees. Scattering the seeds isn’t enough, no matter how many soldiers do it. To continue with the gardening analogy the Bush administration seemed to love (there were also many “seeds of terror” and “seeds of hope”), democracy is more like a fragile flower that requires constant attention and the right soil. Dictatorships and fascist regimes are hardy weeds that sprout on their own.
— Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East
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.
— Catie Marron, City Squares: Eighteen Writers on the Spirit and Significance of Squares Around the World
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"].
— Catie Marron, City Squares: Eighteen Writers on the Spirit and Significance of Squares Around the World
What is democracy? It is what it says, the rule of the people. It is as good as the people are, or as bad.
— Mary Renault, The Last of the Wine
Men are not born equal in themselves, so I think it beneath a man to postulate that they are. If I thought myself as good as Sokrates I should be a fool; and if, not really believing it, I asked you to make me happy by assuring me of it, you would rightly despise me. So why should I insult my fellow-citizens by treating them as fools and cowards? A man who thinks himself as good as everyone else will be at no pains to grow better. On the other hand, I might think myself as good as Sokrates, and even persuade other fools to agree with me; but under a democracy, Sokrates is there in the Agora to prove me wrong. I want a city where I can find my equals and respect my betters, whoever they are; and where no one can tell me to swallow a lie because it is expedient, or some other man's will.
— Mary Renault, The Last of the Wine
Here, then, are some ways we can try to prevent mistakes. We can foster the ability to listen to each other and the freedom to speak our minds. We can create open and transparent environments instead of cultures of secrecy and concealment. And we can permit and encourage everyone, not just a powerful inner circle, to speak up when they see the potential for error.These measures might be a prescription for identifying and eliminating mistakes, but they sound like something else: a prescription for democracy. That's not an accident. Although we don't normally think of it in these terms, democratic governance represents another method—this time a political rather than an industrial or personal one—for accepting the existence of error and trying to curtail its more dangerous incarnations.
— Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
LENIN = "Revolutionary Social Democracy"American Socialists = "Democratic Socialism". What is the difference? The USSR held democratic referendums too; all of which increased the power of the central planners and reduced the individual to nothingness.
— A.E. Samaan
All Socialism is Democratic Socialism. Socialist nations take away civil liberties by referendum.
— A.E. Samaan
ethanol may actually make some kinds of air pollution worse. It evaporates faster than pure gasoline, contributing to ozone problems in hot temperatures. A 2006 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that ethanol does reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 12 percent relative to gasoline, but it calculated that devoting the entire U.S. corn crop to make ethanol would replace only a small fraction of American gasoline consumption. Corn farming also contributes to environmental degradation due to runoff from fertilizer and pesticides.But to dwell on the science is to miss the point. As the New York Times noted in the throes of the 2000 presidential race, ―Regardless of whether ethanol is a great fuel for cars, it certainly works wonders in Iowa campaigns. The ethanol tax subsidy increases the demand for corn, which puts money in farmers‘ pockets. Just before the Iowa caucuses, corn farmer Marvin Flier told the Times, ―Sometimes I think [the candidates] just come out and pander to us, he said. Then he added, ―Of course, that may not be the worst thing. The National Corn Growers Association figures that the ethanol program increases the demand for corn, which adds 30 cents to the price of every bushel sold.Bill Bradley opposed the ethanol subsidy during his three terms as a senator from New Jersey (not a big corn-growing state). Indeed, some of his most important accomplishments as a senator involved purging the tax code of subsidies and loopholes that collectively do more harm than good. But when Bill Bradley arrived in Iowa as a Democratic presidential candidate back in 1992, he ―spoke to some farmers‖ and suddenly found it in his heart to support tax breaks for ethanol. In short, he realized that ethanol is crucial to Iowa voters, and Iowa is crucial to the presidential race.
— Charles Wheelan, Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science
Think about ethanol again. The benefits of that $7 billion tax subsidy are bestowed on a small group of farmers, making it quite lucrative for each one of them. Meanwhile, the costs are spread over the remaining 98 percent of us, putting ethanol somewhere below good oral hygiene on our list of everyday concerns. The opposite would be true with my plan to have left-handed voters pay subsidies to right-handed voters. There are roughly nine right-handed Americans for every lefty, so if every right-handed voter were to get some government benefit worth $100, then every left-handed voter would have to pay $900 to finance it. The lefties would be hopping mad about their $900 tax bills, probably to the point that it became their preeminent political concern, while the righties would be only modestly excited about their $100 subsidy. An adept politician would probably improve her career prospects by voting with the lefties.Here is a curious finding that makes more sense in light of what we‘ve just discussed. In countries where farmers make up a small fraction of the population, such as America and Europe, the government provides large subsidies for agriculture. But in countries where the farming population is relatively large, such as China and India, the subsidies go the other way. Farmers are forced to sell their crops at below-market prices so that urban dwellers can get basic food items cheaply. In the one case, farmers get political favors; in the other, they must pay for them. What makes these examples logically consistent is that in both cases the large group subsidizes the smaller group.In politics, the tail can wag the dog. This can have profound effects on the economy.
— Charles Wheelan, Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science
In a world in which the common rule which binds and regulates what the general masses feel is undermined, what the general masses feel tend to become the common rule.
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
oh, what a democracy MY PRIME MINISTER IS CORRUPT
— Abdul'Rauf Hashmi
It may be that only when xenophobia stops working as an election winner will the way be cleared for a return to bipartisanship
— Donald Horne, 10 Steps to a More Tolerant Australia
We are in a prison of our own minds holding our own chains around us. We create our oligarchs and fight for their right to oppress us.
— Heather  Marsh, Binding Chaos
The greatest threats to Democracy are comfort and apathy.
— T. Rafael Cimino, A Battle of Angels
The effects of lack of democracy and the rule of law is a problem that does not discriminate, whether you are a corporation or a start-up, rich or poor, educated or illiterate, employed or unemployed.
— Allan Amanyire
The single greatest tool for making moral people commit atrocities is group affiliation. The single greatest tool for promoting global human rights and equality is to end group affiliation.
— Heather  Marsh, Binding Chaos
Democracy is a western term for a dictatorship that hasn't come out of the closet.
— Anthony Corlisatra
I sat at a lunch table with a professor of premonotheistic spirituality, plus several women from some of the tribes in this state that has more Native Americans than any other. All agreed that the paradigm of human organization had been the circle, not the pyramid or hierarchy—and it could be again. I’d never known there was a paradigm that linked instead of ranked. It was as if I’d been assuming opposition—and suddenly found myself in a welcoming world; like putting one’s foot down for a steep stair and discovering level ground. Still, when a Laguna law student from New Mexico complained that her courses didn’t cite the Iroquois Confederacy as the model for the U.S. Constitution—or explain that this still existing Confederacy was the oldest continuing democracy in the world—I thought she was being romantic. But I read about the Constitutional Convention and discovered that Benjamin Franklin had indeed cited the Iroquois Confederacy as a model. He was well aware of its success in unifying vast areas of the United States and Canada by bringing together Native nations for mutual decisions but also allowing autonomy in local ones. He hoped the Constitution could do the same for the thirteen states. That’s why he invited two Iroquois men to Philadelphia as advisers. Among their first questions was said to be: Where are the women?
— Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road
While a democratic process is morally desirable for arriving at a decision, it doesn’t necessarily produce the best outcomes.
— Pawan Mishra, Coinman: An Untold Conspiracy
We are now at risk of having a zombie democracy roaming around a one-party state.
— Jeremy Corbyn
Democracy, liberalism--those are just words on a signpost, she was right about that. But the reality is more like the microflora in your guts. In the West, all your microbes balance each other out, it's taken centuries for you to reach that stage. They all quietly get on with generating hydrogen sulphide and keep their mouths shut. Everything's fine-tuned, like a watch, the total balance and self-regulation of the digestive system, and above it--the corporate media, moistening it all with fresh saliva every day. That kind of organism is called the open society--why the hell should it close down, it can close down anyone else it wants with a couple of air strikes. The question is, how do you arrive at this condition? What they taught us to do was to swallow salmonella with no antibodies to fight it, or other microbes to keep it in check at all. Not surprisingly we developed such a bad case of diarrhea that three hundred billion bucks had drained out before we even began to understand what was going on.
— Victor Pelevin, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf
...[T]he United States is the land of formal democratic enclosure...
— Fred Moten
Democracy is even more important for what it prevents than for what it provides.
— Clive James