Authority is not a power, it is a responsibility.

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.

It’s an election year. We would prefer that voters didn’t use common sense.

India had a very long independence movement. It started in 1886, [with] the first generation of Western-educated Indians. They were all liberals. They followed the Liberal Party in Britain, and they were very proud of...

Here we introduce the nation’s first great communications monopolist, whose reign provides history’s first lesson in the power and peril of concentrated control over the flow of information. Western Union’s man was one Rutherford B....

If ideas and beliefs are to be denied validity outside the geographical and cultural bounds of their origin, Buddhism would be confined to north India, Christianity to a narrow tract in the Middle East and...

I’ve handed life and death back to the people who do the living and the dying.

Democracy don’t rule the world, You’d better get that in your head; This world is ruled by violence, But I guess that’s better left unsaid.

In the world at large we seldom vote for a principle or a given state of affairs. We vote for a man who pretends to believe in that principle or promises to achieve that state....

It will take years to bring Iraq the democracy it deserves.

We don’t vote for people because they are the exact embodiment of our values, but because they are likely to be the most responsive to them.

…Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust...

When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of...

Imposing democracy through force is a roll of the dice.

The Sandinistas are dedicated Communists, and if they are going to make a compromise with democracy, it’s going to be under pressure.

This is why it is so fundamental for us right now to grab hold of this idea of power and to democratize it. One of the things that is so profoundly exciting and challenging about...

And every historic effort to forge a democratic project has been undermined by two fundamental realities: poverty and paranoia. The persistence of poverty generates levels of despair that deepen social conflict the escalation of paranoia...

If he is going to go to war in a nation whose history shows it has never had a democracy — it has rival tribes, it has minorities that often are antagonistic — how we’re...

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...

We must push for international configuration of multi-polarity and democracy in international relations,

I pray for the day when working men and women are able to earn a fair share of the wealth they produce in a capitalist system, a day when all Americans are able to enjoy...

every cook can govern” to speak to the concept that there should be no hierarchies of power between those who lead and their constituencies. This idea is related to Antonio Gramsci’s argument that the goal...

To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.

I think it’s hard to learn democracy when we make children prisoners until they’re nineteen years old.

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty or democracy?

Everything is argued over in this world. Apart from only one thing that is not argued over. Nobody argues about democracy. Democracy is there as if it was some sort of saint in the altar...

Attempts to thwart or muzzle the media continued as well. At a conservative caucus meeting in Charlottetown in August 2007, journalists assembled in the lobby of the hotel, as they usually do at such gatherings,...

A call to embrace democracy is the worst insult to a society that is still alien to civilisation. It is like being asked to dance to the tune of mob justice.

When bad news sells, money politics buys.

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is...

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...

[Doubt] is not a new idea; this is the idea of the age of reason. This is the philosophy that guided the men who made the democracy that we live under. The idea that no...

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...

New technologies and resources offer exciting opportunities. They democratise access to information.

But collective thinking is usually short-lived. We’re fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a great gift for self-destruction.

The poor man retains the prejudices of his forefathers without their faith, and their ignorance without their virtues; he has adopted the doctrine of self-interest as the rule of his actions, without understanding the science...

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.

Journalism is what maintains democracy. It’s the force for progressive social change.

To declare the Cold War over, and declare democracy has won out over totalitarianism, is a measure of arrogance and wrong-headedness.

Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking.

Remember one thing about democracy. We can have anything we want and at the same time, we always end up with exactly what we deserve.

I pray that this council, which will probably be too late to save Iraq, will do what it can, which will be immeasurably strong in what it does in trying to save our democracy.

There will be a road to democracy in Belarus, … the last dictatorship in the center of Europe.

Governments represent their citizens in the same way as parasites represent their hosts.

Um dem Terrorismus kein weiteres Terrain zu überlassen, ist der Staat von vornherein gezwungen, feste, von keiner Seite überschreitbare Grenzlinien des rechtsstaatlich Möglichen zu ziehen.

We hold there is no worse enemy to a state than he who keeps the law in his own hands.

In Iran the whole reform and democracy movement has been based on the emerging free press.

I was astonished, bewildered. This was America, a country where, whatever its faults, people could speak, write, assemble, demonstrate without fear. It was in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. We were a democracy…But I...

You have the army of mediocrities followed by the multitude of fools. As the mediocrities and the fools always form the immense majority, it is impossible for them to elect an intelligent government.

You have to remember one thing about the will of the people: it wasn’t that long ago that we were swept away by the Macarena.