c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
In America, the materio-economic conditions relate to a societal, multi-group existence in a way never before know in world history. American Negro nationalism can never create its own values, find its revolutionary significance, define its political and economic goals, until Negro intellectuals take up the cudgels against the cultural imperialism practiced in all of its manifold ramifications on the Negro within American culture. But this kind of revolution would have to be predicated on the recognition that the cultural and artistic originality of the American nation is founded, historically, on the ingredients of a black aesthetic and artistic base.
— Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership
As much as I say that market economy is a more aggressive, expansile form of command economy, I say now that democracy is a more aggressive, expansile form of dictatorship. The sin of democracy and any types of -cracy is their numbers.
— Andreas Laurencius, Genesis
All my years campaigning have given me one clear message: Voting isn't the most we can do, but it is the least. To have a democracy, you have to want one. Still, I realize this fully only by looking back.
— Gloria Steinem
We want the will of the people, not the votes of the people; and to give a man a vote against his will is to make voting more important than the democracy it declares.
— G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World
Elections are supposed to be political occasions. In fact the opposite is true. The last thing politicians want to talk about at election-time is politics. What they want to talk about is votes. And the less you talk about politics, the more votes you're likely to win - otherwise you might offend someone.
— Alex Callinicos, The Revolutionary Road To Socialism
The hushing of the criticism of honest opponents is a dangerous thing. It leads some of the best of the critics to unfortunate silence and paralysis of effort, and others to burst into speech so passionately and intemperately as to lose listeners. Honest and earnest criticism from those whose interests are most nearly touched,—criticism of writers by readers, of government by those governed, of leaders by those led,—this is the soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern society.
— W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
Democracy cannot function or survive without a sufficient medium by which citizens remain informed and engaged in public policy debates.
— Nancy Snow, Propaganda, Inc.: Selling America's Culture to the World
The great Bonaventure said that the wise must enhance conceptual clarity with the truth implicit in the actions of the simple....""Like the chapter of Perugia and the learned memories of Ubertino, which transform into theological decisions the summons of the simple to poverty." I said."Yes, but as you have seen, this happens too late, and when it happens, the truth of the simple has already been transformed into the truth of the powerful, more useful for the Emperor Louis than for a Friar of the Poor Life.
— Umberto Eco
The majority is by no means omniscient just because it is the majority. In fact, I've found that the line which divides majority opinion from mass hysteria is often so fine as to be virtually invisible.
— J. Paul Getty, How to Be Rich
Current public diplomacy and foreign policy making reduces the role of American citizens to mere spectators. The USIA's model of democracy and the free market is promoted as the superpower version of economic globalization, packaged and ready for shipping to clients throughout the world. In this version, foreign capital flows freely while the movement of people, particularly the world's poor, is strictly controlled. Such a commercial package speaks first and foremost for government 'partners,' the Fortune 500 corporations, which are the primary beneficiaries as well as the bankrollers of the American political process. This is a packaged story of America that is incomplete and undemocratic. Where do workers and communities fit into the story? How do private citizens play a part in building dialogue across cultures?
— Nancy Snow, Propaganda, Inc.: Selling America's Culture to the World
The United States is democratic because its people live in conformity. It is the perfect country for mice.
— Warren Eyster, The Goblins of Eros
These self-styled liberals and progressives are honestly convinced that they are true democrats. But their notion of democracy is just the opposite of that of the nineteenth century. They confuse democracy with socialism. They not only do not see that socialism and democracy are incompatible but they believe that socialism alone means real democracy. Entangled in this error, they consider the Soviet system a variety of popular government.
— Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government
Americans deify democracy in a way that allows for a dim awareness that they have, from time to time, stood in defiance of their God. But democracy is a forgiving God and America's heresies—torture, theft, enslavement—are so common among individuals and nations that none can declare themselves immune.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
when the democrats choose not to be democratic, democracy fails to be democratic.
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
The conservative does not defend the Old Regime; he speaks on behalf of old regimes—in the family, the factory, the field. There, ordinary men, and sometimes women, get to play the part of little lords and ladies, supervising their underlings as if they all belong to a feudal estate . . . The task of this type of conservatism---democratic feudalism—-becomes clear: surround these old regimes with fences and gates, protect them from meddlesome intruders like the state or a social movement, while descanting on mobility and innovation, freedom and the future.
— Corey Robin
This points to a central tension in our very idea and practice of democracy – it is not a simple appeal to the rule of the majority. It is also about respecting that the power of the people is limited by what’s fair to minorities, what’s reasonable, and by what’s legal and constitutional.
— Bob Rae, What's Happened to Politics?
The principle of equality, which is at the core of democratic values, has very little meaning in a world in which global oligarchy is taking over.
— bell hooks
the library is the last free space for the gathering and sharing of knowledge: “Our attention cannot be bought and sold in a library.” As a tradition barely a century and a half old in the United States, it gives physical form to the principle that public access to knowledge is the foundation of democracy ["What Libraries Can (Still) Do," The New York Review Daily, October 26, 2015].
— James Gleick
If democracy is the voice of the people, then the AP is its stenographer.
— Peter Arnett, Flash! The Associated Press Covers the World
Trust in families and in neighborhoods and individuals to make sense of the important question, 'What is education for?' If some of them answer differently from what you might prefer, that's really not your business, and it shouldn't be your problem. Our type of schooling has deliberately concealed the fact that such a question must be framed and not taken for granted if anything beyond a mockery of democracy is to be nurtured. It is illegitimate to have an expert answer that question for you.
— John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Education
The appeal by twentieth-century pluralists to scientiﬁc method was also ideologically—and even messianically—driven. It ignored scientiﬁc data that interfered with environmentalist assumptions and misrepresented socialist faith as “scientiﬁc planning.
— Paul Edward Gottfried
The problem of finding a collection of “wise” men and leaving the government to them is thus an insoluble one. That is the ultimate reason for democracy.
— Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy
Democracy is a cry of war; it is the ﬂag of the party of numbers placed below raised against those above. A ﬂag sometimes raised in the name of the rights of men, but sometimes in the name of crude passions; sometimes raised against the most iniquitous usurpations but also sometimes against legitimate superiority.
— François Guizot
The substance of what I have to say to the disadvantage of the theory and practice of universal suffrage is that it tends to invert what I should have regarded as the true and natural relation between wisdom and folly. I think that wise and good men ought to rule those who are foolish and bad. To say that the sole function of the wise and good is to preach to their neighbors, and that everyone indiscriminately should be left to do what he likes, should be provided with a ratable share of the sovereign power in the shape of the vote, and that the result of this will be the direction of power by wisdom, seems to me the wildest romance that ever got possession of any considerable number of minds.
— James Fitzjames Stephen
...obscurantist feature in social scientists trying to combine pluralism with environmentalism. They are so preoccupied with the role of prejudice in creating hostile environments that they perpetually deny the obvious, that stereotypes are rough generalizations about groups derived from long-term observation. Such generalizations are usually correct in describing group tendencies and in predicting certain collective actions, even if they do not adequately account for differences among individuals. Nonetheless, as Goldberg explains, the self-described pluralist and prominent psychologist Gordon Allport went out of his way in The Nature of Prejudice (1954) to reject stereotypes as factually inaccurate as well as socially harmful. For Allport and a great many other social Scientists, nothing is intuitively correct unless it is politically so.
— Paul Edward Gottfried, After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State
Platitude or not, the crowd erupted into applause, and by acclamation, Kuni Garu became the Duke of Zudi. A few pointed out that titles of nobility really couldn't be handed out in such a democratic fashion, but these killjoys were ignored.
— Ken Liu, The Grace of Kings
Today pluralism operates as a court religion, while having less and less intellectual credibility. Betraying the plastic terminology in which its directives are framed are the additions to the “Human Rights Code” passed in the Canadian province of Ontario in 1994. The Code cites “human dignity” to justify the criminalization of “conduct or communication [that] promotes the superiority or inferiority of a person or class because of race, class, or sexual orientation.” The law has already been applied to prosecute scholars making hereditarian arguments about social behavior, and its proponents defend this muzzling as necessary for “human dignity.” But never are we told whence that dignity is derived. It is certainly not the one to which the Bible, a text that unequivocally condemns certain “sexual orientations,” refers. Nor are we speaking here about the dignity of nonengineered academic discourse, an act that the supporters of the Ontario Human Rights Code consider to be criminal if judged insensitive. Yet the pluralist advocates of human rights codes that now operate in Canada, Australia, England, and on the European continent assume there is a human dignity. Indeed this dignity is so widely and passionately accepted, or so it is asserted, that we must criminalize unkind communication. In the name of that supposedly axiomatic dignity, we are called upon to suppress scholarship and even to imprison its authors.
— Paul Edward Gottfried, After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State
What made such a plan seem workable was that for the early pluralists and their multicultural descendants society would have fewer and fewer traditional groups. The kind of pluralist society that Dewey and Kallen envisaged would go beyond rooted ethnic communities. It would become the evolving creation of “free” individual participants, setting goals under scientiﬁc direction and having their material interests monitored by a “conductor state.” The world as conceived by pluralists was there to be managed and to be made culturally safe for its framers: Eastern and Central European Jews fearful of traditional Gentile mores and the uprooted descendants of New England Calvinists looking for the New Jerusalem under scientiﬁc management.
— Paul Edward Gottfried, After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State
I think it is dangerous to confuse the idea of democracy with elections. Just because you have elections doesn't mean you're a democratic country. They're a very vitally important part of a democracy. But there are other things that ought to function as checks and balances. If elections are the only thing that matter, then people are going to resort to anything to win that election.
— Arundhati Roy, The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy
The Greeks who rhapsodized about democracy in their rhetoric rarely created democratic institutions. A few cities such as Athens occasionally attempted a system vaguely akin to democracy for a few years. These cities functioned as slave societies and were certainly not egalitarian or democratic in the Indian sense.
— Jack Weatherford, Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World
What happens if fully rational politicians compete for the support of irrational voters — specifically, voters with irrational beliefs about the effects of various policies? It is a recipe for mendacity.
— Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies
Talk about corporate greed and everything is really crucially beside the point, in my view, and really should be recognized as a very big regression from what working people, and a lot of others, understood very well a century ago. Talk about corporate greed is nonsense. Corporations are greedy by their nature. They’re nothing else – they are instruments for interfering with markets to maximize profit, and wealth and market control. You can’t make them more or less greedy; I mean maybe you can sort of force them, but it’s like taking a totalitarian state and saying “Be less brutal!” Well yeah, maybe you can get a totalitarian state to be less brutal, but that’s not the point – the point is not to get a tyranny to be less brutal, but to get rid of it. Now 150 years ago, that was understood. If you read the labour press – there was a very lively labour press, right around here [Massachusetts] ; Lowell and Lawrence and places like that, around the mid nineteenth century, run by artisans and what they called factory girls; young women from the farms who were working there – they weren’t asking the autocracy to be less brutal, they were saying get rid of it. And in fact that makes perfect sense; these are human institutions, there’s nothing graven in stone about them. They [corporations] were created early in this century with their present powers, they come from the same intellectual roots as the other modern forms of totalitarianism – namely Stalinism and Fascism – and they have no more legitimacy than they do. I mean yeah, let’s try and make the autocracy less brutal if that’s the short term possibility – but we should have the sophistication of, say, factory girls in Lowell 150 years ago and recognize that this is just degrading and intolerable and that, as they put it “those who work in the mills should own them ” And on to everything else, and that’s democracy – if you don’t have that, you don’t have democracy.
— Noam Chomsky, Free Market Fantasies: Capitalism in the Real World
Hamilton wanted to lead the electorate and provide expert opinion instead of consulting popular opinion. He took tough, uncompromising stands and gloried in abstruse ideas in a political culture that pined for greater simplicity. Alexander Hamilton triumphed as a doer and thinker, not as a leader of the average voter. He was simply too unashamedly brainy to appeal to the masses. Fisher Ames observed of Hamilton that the common people don't want leaders 'whom they see elevated by nature and education so far above their heads.
— Ron Chernow
What does it mean to call for a “democratic” solution if you don’t have a conflict-resolution mechanism in mind?I think it means that you have said the word “democracy,” so the audience is supposed to cheer. It’s not so much a propositional statement, as the equivalent of the “Applause” light that tells a studio audience when to clap.
— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationality: From AI to Zombies
…majority rule gives the ruthless strong man plenty of elbow room to oppress his fellows.
— Robert A. Heinlein
Democracy is eternal and human. It dignifies the human being
—  it respects humanity.
ultimately, the long-term goal is to have a critically informed public vote out of office representatives that are sacrificing children to the corporate bottom line with prepackaged teacher-proof curricula, standardized tests, and accountability schemes.
— Pepi Leistyna
Democracy is in conflict with individual freedom.
— Bruno Leoni, Freedom and the Law
I always contended that we as a race must not seek to rise from a position of disadvantage to one of advantage, but to create a moral balance in society where democracy and brotherhood would be reality for all men.
— Martin Luther King Jr., The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Q. How soon do you expect Argentina to be returned to democratic government?A. We believe we are already within a democratic system. Some factors are still missing, like the expression of the people's will, but nevertheless we still think we are within a democracy.
— Roberto Eduardo Viola
In an age of widespread communication and accountability, people expect political participation and accountability much more than they did in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. The only way the demand for meaningful political participation and choice can be suppressed is to constrain liberty - Larry Diamond, Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), Chapter 1 (‘Defining and Developing Democracy’). p. 4
— Larry Diamond, The Global Divergence of Democracies
Du Bois didn’t fully understand democracy. It seemed pointless to give people the right to self-determination when so few had any interest in it. Now that humanity had reached a certain level of comfort and people didn’t really seem to want to think for themselves, he believed it was better that they just did what they were told. Then everyone would be happy.
— Gavin G. Smith, The Age of Scorpio
The hushing of the criticism of honest opponents is a dangerous thing. It leads some of the best of the critics to unfortunate silence and paralysis of effort, and others to burst into speech so passionately and intemperately as to lose listeners.
— W.E.B. Du Bois
The problem with the politicians of both parties in the US is that neither of them have a real agenda except to feather their own nests. They both have their hands deep in corporate pockets. All the rest is sleight of hand and distraction to keep the public occupied with trivia, divided against each other, and thinking their vote matters.
— Michael Hogan
There are many causes for the increasing concentration of wealth in a shrinking elite, but let us throw one more into the mix: the ever more aggressive appropriations of the attentional commons that we have allowed to take place.I think we need to sharpen the conceptually murky right to privacy by supplementing it with a right not to be addressed. This would apply not, of course, to those who address me face to face as individuals, but to those who never show their faces, and treat my mind as a resource to be harvested.
— Matthew B. Crawford
One less desirable aspect of democracy is that it seems to require serious demonization of the enemy if the nation and public opinion are to be galvanized sufficiently to pay a serious price in blood or treasure at war.
— Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam
As a Republic governed through the utilization of a democratic process, elections are necessary in order to give every United States citizen a voice in the governing of this great nation.
— Byron Goines, The 2014 Midterm Elections
While the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its identity as a living thing. As long as it endures, it struggles to use surrounding energies in its own behalf. It uses light, air, moisture, and the material of soil. To say that it uses them is to say that it turns them into means of its own conservation. As long as it is growing, the energy it expends in thus turning the environment to account is more than compensated for by the return it gets: it grows.
— John Dewey, Democracy and Education
Privacy, self-reliance, choice -- all these can and must remina core American values. Yet so too must we remember that other core American value, the value of community. And we must redefine community more broadly to include not just our street or our tract, but our town, our metropolis, our region.
— William Fulton, The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles
I was thinking about honour. It's a thing that changes doesn't it? I mean, a hundred and fifty years ago we would have had to fight if challenged. Now we'd laugh. There must have been a time when it was rather an awkward question.""Yes. Moral theologians were never able to stop dueling -- it took democracy to do that.""And in the next war, when we are completely democratic, I expect that it will be quite honourable for officers to leave their men behind. It'll be laid down in King's Regulations as their duty-- to keep a cadre going to train new men to take the place of prisoners.""Perhaps men wouldn't take too kindly to being trained by deserters.""Don't you think that they'd respect them more for being fly? I reckon our trouble is that we're in the awkward stage -- like a man challenged to a duel a hundred years ago.
— Evelyn Waugh
Democracy is the worst insult to any society that is increasingly secular and growing in incivility for there it is more abused than used.
— Newton G Kibiringi
DAD (Decide-Announce-Defend) remains the order of the day, with only a few inspiring models of EDD (Engage-Deliberate-Decide) available to us to demonstrate how very different things could be.
— Johnathon Porritt
Democracy will be a reality when people will be rightly heard and valued. When in all policy making, in all big or small works, when state and government institutions will be accountable to people by keeping people in focus all the time who represented their power and empowered them. Democracy will be a reality when people will be valued more than flags, constitution, nationalism, patriotism and other symbolism.
— William Gomes
As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.
— Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln on Democracy
We are not educated well enough to perform the necessary act of intelligently selecting our leaders.
— Walter Cronkite
The right of dissent, or, if you prefer, the right to be wrong, is surely fundamental to the existence of a democratic society. That’s the right that went first in every nation that stumbled down the trail toward totalitarianism.
— Edward R. Murrow
The "democratization of education" is everyone's fight, everyone's right.
— Sharad Vivek Sagar
One has to understand that equality ends up by infiltrating the world of politics as it does everywhere else. It would be impossible to imagine men forever unequal in one respect, yet equal in others; they must, in the end, come to be equal in all.Now, I am aware of only two means of establishing equality in the world of politics: rights have to be granted to every citizen or to none.
— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
... you can't start with a democracy. You have to work up through stuff like tyranny and monarchy first. That way people are so relived when they get to democracy that they hang on to it.
— John Steinbeck
Democracy requires citizens to see things from one another's point of view, but instead were more and more enclosed in our own bubbles. Democracy requires a reliance on shared facts; instead were being offered parallel but separate universes.
— Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You
Democracy, religion, education and terrorism have all become practicable norms all over the world – thanks to globalization
— Tony Osborg, Can Nigeria Bake Her Own Bread?
The very principle of democracy is founded on the possibility of making alternative choices. There is no longer a need for democracy, since ideology made the idea that "there is no alternative" acceptable. Adherence to a meta-social principle of superior rationality allows for the elimination of the necessity and possibility of choosing. The so-called principle of the rationality of "markets" exactly fills this function in the ideology of obsolescent capitalism. Democratic practice is thus emptied of all content in the way is open to what I have called "low-intensity democracy" - that is, to electoral buffooneries where parades of majorettes take the place of programs, to the society of the spectacle. Delegitimized by these practices, politics is undone, begins to drift and loses its potential power to give meaning and coherence to alternative societal projects.
— Samir Amin
Rather than signalling the aspiration for system of checks and balances against absolute power, democracy become a euphemism for majority rule.
— Peter Mansfield
This is why we apply the LCD Principle or Lowest Common Democracy. In short, this is social interaction based not on the best possible good, but on the least possible offense. Without saying so, the parties involved have entered into the following arrangement: What is the least we can all agree on and still get along? Of course, you can see this means no one is pleased.
— Geoffrey Wood
Men in western governments who were themselves are often modern men, did not understand that freedom without chaos is not a magic formula which can be implanted anywhere. Rather, being modern men, it was their view that, because human race had evolved to a certain level by some such year as 1950, democracy could be planted anywhere from the outside. They had carefully closed their eyes to the fact that freedom without chaos had come forth from a Christian base. They did not understand that freedom without chaos could not be separated from its roots. (…) Many countries where democracy has been imposed from the outside or from top downward, authoritarianism has increasingly become the rule of the day
— Francis A. Schaeffer
When trouble arise among faraway people, we remain tempted to hide behind the principle of national sovereignty, to "mind our own business" when it is convenient, and to think of democracy as a suit to be worn in fine weather but felt in the closet when clouds threaten.
— Madeleine K. Albright, Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948
Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn't trust the evidence of one's eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice.
— Edward Said, Orientalism
Any government's condemnation of terrorism is only credible if it shows itself to be responsive to persistent, reasonable, closely argued, non-violent dissent. And yet, what's happening is just the opposite. The world over, non-violent resistance movements are being crushed and broken. If we do not respect and honour them, by default we privilege those who turn to violent means.
— Arundhati Roy
Democratic ideas cannot exist without the public spheres that make them possible.
— Henry A. Giroux, Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism
But when the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people. If any of them should happen to propose a scheme of liberty, soberly limited, and defined with proper qualifications, he will be immediately outbid by his competitors, who will produce something more splendidly popular. Suspicions will be raised of his fidelity to his cause. Moderation will be stigmatized as the virtue of cowards; and compromise as the prudence of traitors; until, in hopes of preserving the credit which may enable him to temper, and moderate, on some occasions, the popular leader is obliged to become active in propagating doctrines, and establishing powers, that will afterwards defeat any sober purpose at which he ultimately might have aimed.
— Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
We live in a time that demands a discourse of both critique and possibility, one that recognizes that without an informed citizenry, collective struggle, and viable social movements, democracy will slip out of our reach and we will arrive at a new stage of history marked by the birth of an authoritarianism that not only disdains all vestiges of democracy but is more than willing to relegate it to a distant memory.
— Henry A. Giroux, Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism
The foremost, or indeed the sole condition, which is required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community, is to love equality, or to get men to believe you love it. Thus, the science of despotism, which was once so complex, is simplified, and reduced, as it were, to a single principle.
— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
New Englanders began the Revolution not to institute reforms and changes in the order of things, but to save the institutions and customs that already had become old and venerable with them; and were new only to a few stupid Englishmen a hundred and fifty years behind the times.
— Edward Pearson Pressey, History of Montague; A Typical Puritan Town
Now, these eager and apprehensive men of small property constitute the class which is constantly increased by the equality of conditions. Hence, in democratic communities, the majority of the people do not clearly see what they have to gain by a revolution, but they continually and in a thousand ways feel that they might lose by one.
— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
People keep saying someone should fix the system, the system is corrupt. What they don’t get is; they are the system. It’s just like how people hate McDonald’s and Coca Cola. People say they are evil corporations, terrorists and ruining the health of the future but then, how are these brands live and running all over the world, making billions of dollars of profit every day? People still buy it, that’s how. The majority of the world is people who know something is bad for them but keep consuming it. If it’s so bad for you, why buy it? If the system is so bad, why do they vote for it? It’s the people who need to change not the leaders.
— Thisuri Wanniarachchi, The Terrorist's Daughter
We may still contrive to raise three cheers for democracy, although at present she only deserves two.
— E.M. Forster
What makes the Arabs suitable candidates for democracy is their heritage as human beings, not their specific cultural or historical antecedents.
— Gwynne Dyer
In my opinion the main evil of the present democratic institutions of the United States does not arise, as is often asserted in Europe, from their weakness, but from their overpowering strength; and I am not so much alarmed at the excessive liberty which reigns in that country as at the very inadequate securities which exist against tyranny.
— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America Volume 1
The nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal; but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or to wretchedness.
— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
i believe in the freedom of state where every people have to right develop their culture and maintain the democracy while two things are very essential justice and equality - Long Live Pakistan and Happy Independence Day
— Avinash Advani
Internal democracy in schools is as important in order to ensure the true democratization of education.
— Sharad Vivek Sagar
Globally, democracies have also acted in ways that suggest an outright renunciation of their principles at home.
— Nayef Al-Rodhan
The sheriff listened uneasily to a sound, very uncommon at elections, of the populace expressing an opinion contrary to that of the lord of the soil.
— Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, John Halifax, Gentleman
We have been gradually finding out that there is more democracy in letting a committee or representative ten to details than in making everybody's business nobody's business.
— Edward Pearson Pressey, History of Montague; A Typical Puritan Town
Men being, as has been said, by nature, all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent.
— John Locke, Second Treatise of Government
The more I see of the representatives of the people, the more I admire my dogs.
— Alphonse de Lamartine
[A]s 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 meaningful.
— Noam Chomsky, On Anarchism
In 1951 Dec 20th, Nehru, while campaigning for the first democratic elections in India, took a short break to address a UNESCO symposium in Delhi. Although he believed democracy was the best form of governance, while speaking at the symposium he wondered loud... the quality of men who are selected by these modern democratic methods of adult franchise gradually deteriorates because of lack of thinking and the noise of propaganda....He[the voter] reacts to sound and to the din, he reacts to repetition and he produces either a dictator or a dumb politician who is insensitive. Such a politician can stand all the din in the world and still remain standing on his two feet and, therefore, he gets selected in the end because the others have collapsed because of the din.-Quoted from India After Gandhi, page 157.
— Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy
The real triumph of the state occurs when its subjects refer to it as “we,” like football fans talking about the home team.
— Joseph Sobran
International politics is never about democracy and human rights. It's about the interests of states. Remember that, no matter what you are told in history lessons.
— Egon Bahr
Usury is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon's knife of fascism can cut out of the life of the nations.
— Ezra Pound, What is Money For?
It's an election year. We would prefer that voters didn't use common sense.
— Aaron Sorkin, The West Wing Script Book
For the minority, what else is democracy than dictatorship?
— Anna Jae
The absolute value of being neutral is zero.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
Democracy is not a good by itself. It is completely dependent upon the nature of the people, both for its efficacy and for its survival. One can say that a “democratic” people, if placed under a dictatorship, would be more “democratically” ruled than a “dictatorship” people placed under a democracy and one can expect that both would very soon revert to the system that suited them. The system works for us, and it works extremely well, but to think that therefore a government should be judged by the measure of its “democracy” is sheer nonsense.
— G.M. Mes, Now-Men And Tomorrow-Men: Why We Are Not Equal?
In almost every detail, when one examines it closely, it is not Democracy which makes the system work, but the Individual democrats who, in it, use their powers correctly and in the way that they were intended to be used. If those in power were not essentially democrats, the whole situation would collapse. Its strength is not in itself, but in its members. Any “say” that the citizen has in ruling himself is due to the goodwill and the honesty of those to whom he has entrusted the power to rule him.
— G.M. Mes, Now-Men And Tomorrow-Men: Why We Are Not Equal?
When bad news sells, money politics buys.
— Toba Beta
It looks as if British democracy died a few years ago, and nobody noticed.
— Steve Merrick
The health of democracy, not its hate, is its best propaganda.
— Judith C. Waller, Radio: The Fifth Estate
Antidemocracy, executive predominance, and elite rule are basic elements of inverted totalitarianism. Antidemocracy does not take the form of overt attacks upon the idea of government by the people. Instead, politically it means encouraging what I have earlier dubbed “civic demobilization,” conditioning an electorate to being aroused for a brief spell, controlling its attention span, and then encouraging distraction or apathy. The intense pace of work and the extended working day, combined with job insecurity, is a formula for political demobilization, for privatizing the citizenry. It works indirectly. Citizens are encouraged to distrust their government and politicians; to concentrate upon their own interests; to begrudge their taxes; and to exchange active involvement for symbolic gratifications of patriotism, collective self-righteousness, and military prowess. Above all, depoliticization is promoted through society’s being enveloped in an atmosphere of collective fear and of individual powerlessness: fear of terrorists, loss of jobs, the uncertainties of pension plans, soaring health costs, and rising educational expenses.
— Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism
Democracy is a kingless regime infested by many kings who are sometimes more exclusive, tyrannical and destructive than one, even if he be a tyrant.
— Benito Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism
I am a patriot. I have always sought to serve my country, in theory a Republic. Learning that secrecy was evil rather than good was my first step. From there it was a steady march toward open-source everything. Now I see all the evil that secrecy enables in a corrupt Congress, a corrupt Executive, a corrupt economy, and a corrupt society. I see that the greatest service I or any other person can render to the Republic is to march firmly, non-violently, toward open-source everything.
— Robert David Steele, The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, and Trust
In order for us to live within this finely balanced constellation of complex systems, in order for the Earth to show resilience and last for centuries into the future as an environment of human life, we have to embody three things: a respect for Earth systems and their details in balance; a commitment to discovering and sharing the truth and only the truth at all times about all things; and a commitment to doing no harm.
— Robert David Steele, The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, and Trust
Our concept of truth becomes more universal as we reach higher levels of consciousness and awareness, taking in a wider spectrum of information and possibility. As we adapt a more expanded perspective on our reality, our concept of what is true and meaningful changes--from local to regional, regional to global, beyond global to the galaxy, and then to the cosmos.
— Robert David Steele, The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, and Trust
When we relate and share knowledge authentically, this places us in a state of grace, a state of 'win-win' harmony with all others, and establishes trust among all.
— Robert David Steele, The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, and Trust
Put in the bluntest possible terms, what I discovered was that the U.S. secret intelligence community was collecting only information it considered secret, while ignoring the eighty to ninety percent of the information in the world, in all languages, that was not secret.
— Robert David Steele, The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, and Trust
The bottom line is that our government is not intelligent about how it pursues the public interest, because its decisions are not informed decisions (and its interest is generally not the public's).
— Robert David Steele, The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, and Trust
I am personally optimistic. I share the widespread view that we are entering a new epoch during which we can achieve conscious evolution and the elevation of humanity to a constructive steward of the Earth.
— Robert David Steele, The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, and Trust
There is nothing wrong with the United States--or the world at large--that cannot be stabilized and reconstructed by restoring the intelligence and integrity of all our organizations across the eight communities (academic, civil society, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, non-governmental/non-profit).
— Robert David Steele, The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, and Trust
Integrity, in my view, starts with the individual human being and grows in a compounded manner from there. The citizen must be an 'intelligence minuteman.
— Robert David Steele, The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, and Trust
Complexity demands resilience, and that's what panarchy offers. Resilience in the face of complexity is a challenge even when you apply rigorous intelligence and integrity to develop a coherent and flexible strategy.
— Robert David Steele, The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, and Trust
As our technological capacities continue to increase and our environment becomes ever more fragile and endangered, we find that changes to the Earth that used to take ten thousand years now take a fraction of that.
— Robert David Steele, The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, and Trust
This lack of accurate, trustworthy information about the true cost of any given policy, product, service, or behavior is paralyzing all action.
— Robert David Steele, The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, and Trust
I, too, like yourself was a good party man: my party was that of the Church; I was ultramontane. Your party system is one of your thefts from our Church; your National Convention is our Ecunemic Council; you abdicate reason, as we do, before its decisions; and you yourself Mr. Ratcliffe, you are a Cardinal.
— Henry Adams, Democracy: An American Novel
Democracy can't work. Mathematicians, peasants, and animals, that's all there is-- so democracy, a theory based on the assumption that mathematicians and peasants are equal, can never work. Wisdom is not additive; its maximum is that of the wisest man in a given group.
— Robert A. Heinlein
No one wants to be poor. In my view, and the view of many authors who have focused on poverty and practical solutions to it, we need to move beyond the industrial-era paradigm of giving them fish, or even the information-era paradigm of teaching them how to fish, and instead move closer to the cosmic paradigm of giving them the tools with which to create their own ingenious means of addressing their problems in their cultural context and their time, while drawing--at their convenience, not ours--on our dispersed knowledge.
— Robert David Steele, The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, and Trust
Open Everything' is everything--it is our mind, our heart, our soul, our destiny.
— Robert David Steele, The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, and Trust
The Impression that Pakistan being an Islamic State is thereby a Theocratic State is being sedulously fostered in certain quarters with the sole object of discrediting her in the eyes of the world. To anyone conversant with the basic principles of Islam, it should be obvious that in the fields of civics, Islam has always stood on complete social democracy and social justice, as the history of the early Caliphs will show, and has not sanctioned government by a sacerdotal class deriving its authority from God. The ruler and the ruled alike are #equal before Islamic Law, and the ruler, far from being a vicegerent of God on earth, is but a representative of people who have chosen him to serve them...Islam has not recognized any distinction between man and man based on sex, race or worldly possessions..." ---Fazul Rahman, First Education Minister of Pakistan, All Pakistan Educational Conference, Karachi, Nov 1947
— Fazul Rahman
Americans became so thoroughly democratic that much of the period's political activity, beginning with the Constitution, was diverted to finding means and devices to tame that democracy.
— Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815
You want Change, today we'll show you Change!Here's your democracy, your human rights, eat it, eat eat eat!
— NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names
Literate, affluent, self-confident people do not like living under either dictatorship or chaos. As more nations move into modernity and find themselves populated with educated, competent citizens, leaders will find it harder to govern those citizens without providing them the democratic rights that they are going to insist on anyway.
— Oliver H. Woshinsky, Explaining Politics: Culture, Institutions, and Political Behavior
Antidemocracy, executive predominance, and elite rule are basic elements of inverted totalitarianism. Antidemocracy does not take the form of overt attacks upon the idea of government by the people. Instead, politically it means encouraging what I have earlier dubbed“civic demobilization,” conditioning an electorate to being aroused for a brief spell, controlling its attention span, and then encouraging distraction or apathy. The intense pace of work and the extended working day, combined with job insecurity, is a formula for political demobilization, for privatizing the citizenry. It works indirectly. Citizens are encouraged to distrust their government and politicians; to concentrate upon their own interests; to begrudge their taxes; and to exchange active involvement for symbolic gratifications of patriotism, collective self-righteousness, and military prowess. Above all, depoliticization is promoted through society’s being enveloped in an atmosphere of collective fear and of individual powerlessness: fear of terrorists, loss of jobs, the uncertainties of pension plans, soaring health costs, and rising educational expenses.
— Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism
When you consider time and change, you realize that a people does not originate when individuals merge into a bigger thing. Instead, a people arises when many actions and movements combine into novel patterns of change. For a people is always in the making or unmaking.
— Paulina Ochoa Espejo, The Time of Popular Sovereignty: Process and the Democratic State
Americans talked about voters the same way Russians talked about Stalin. They had to be obeyed.
— Ken Follett, Winter of the World