American democracy must be a failure because it places the supreme authority in the hands of the poorest and most ignorant part of the society. – Thomas Babington Macaulay
Liberal democracy – as you know, in the old days, we were saying we want socialism with a human face. Today’s left effectively offers global capitalism with a human face, more tolerance, more rights and so on. So the question is, is this enough or not? Here I remain a Marxist: I think not. – Slavoj Zizek
In 1940, President Roosevelt called on American industry to become the ‘great arsenal of democracy.’ Automotive manufacturers in Michigan responded and converted their assembly lines from cars to tanks and helped America win World War II. – Sander Levin
Taiwan is a budding democracy, and the people have participated in multi-party democratic elections since 1996. – Todd Akin
I might be popular, but that is not sufficient in a parliamentary democracy set-up. One has to assess every chief minister, his success and rating in terms of how far he has succeeded in developing his colleagues. – Sharad Pawar
No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people. – Walter Lippmann
Nelson Mandela went to jail believing in violence, and 27 years later he and his colleagues had slowly and carefully honed the skills, the incredible skills, that they needed to turn one of the most vicious governments the world has known into a democracy. And they did it in a total devotion to non-violence. – Scilla Elworthy
On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does. – Will Rogers
We always hear about the rights of democracy, but the major responsibility of it is participation. – Wynton Marsalis
I was never convinced that war was the best system to bring democracy to the country. – Silvio Berlusconi
The Internet was crucial for our success. It is a great thing. It is a big democracy because people can choose what they like. – Stjepan Hauser
We cannot afford the creeping paralysis that destroys the effective will of democracy – the paralysis carried by hate and rancor, between class and class, person and person, party and party, as plague is carried through the streets of a town. – Stephen Vincent Benet
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. – Winston Churchill
I think it is very important for any U.S. administration to be clear that America stands on the side of freedom and democracy and respect for individual rights. – Stephen Hadley
As the world’s finest democracy, we do not do guillotines. But there are other less bloody rituals of humiliation, designed to reassure the populace that order is restored, the Republic cleansed. – William Greider
It’s not up to one individual to decide, ‘I’m going to dictate the outcome of what’s going to happen legislatively.’ That is not a democracy; it’s an atrocity. – Tony Cardenas
I think it’s obvious that democracy is something that is contagious, and it always has been. – Steve Earle
Too many people expect wonders from democracy, when the most wonderful thing of all is just having it. – Walter Winchell
It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried. – Winston Churchill
Communism seemed to be an ideal experiment in trying to achieve a state where all persons have greater democracy. I might add, like other persons here and elsewhere, I found myself concerned with the problem of increasing need for greater economic and political democracy for greater numbers of people. – Sidney Buchman
As even a democracy like the United States has shown, waging war can benefit a leader in several ways: it can rally citizens around the flag, it can distract them from bleak economic times, and it can enrich a country’s elites. – Samantha Power
China more than two milleniums ago had already considered the idea of democracy, but at that time she could not put it into operation. – Sun Yat-sen
A central claim of the Bush administration’s foreign policy is that the spread of democracy in the Middle East is the cure for terrorism. – Timothy Garton Ash
I think that the worst form of naivete can be extreme cynicism. If you think that nobody comes to Washington to do any good whatsoever, that is almost as bad as being starry-eyed and thinking that they are all here to advance democracy. – Thomas Mallon
We have these old fashioned ideas. For instance, here in America, we talk about democracy – but we don’t have a democracy. There are elements of a democracy. – Wadada Leo Smith
Western enthusiasm for democracy stops when those opposed to its policies are elected to office. – Tariq Ali