Under observation, we act less free, which means we effectively are less free.

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.

Authority is not a power, it is a responsibility.

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....

In politics as in philosophy, my tenets are few and simple. The leading one of which, and indeed that which embraces most others, is to be honest and just ourselves and to exact it from...

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along paying heavy taxes for which they...

we,” like football fans talking about the home team.

We feel you are a stain on our democracy.

My parents were of the generation who thought they were the children of a free Czechoslovakia, the only democracy in central Europe.

Slogans seem to be dead; this world is now busy chanting fears of lost democracy

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.

The rejection of Western democracy derives from the same rejection of secularism but was further sharpened by the Saudi Arabian establishment’s aversion to democracy’s subversive streak and the threat it posed to the Saudi monarchy...

[The Internet] affects democracy… As more and more citizens express what they think, and defend it in writing, that will change the way people understand public issues. It is easy to be wrong and misguided...

[…] there can be no a priori moral framework in a modern democracy […]

We Chileans have to be able to understand that in a democracy institutions must function freely and with sovereignty.

It’s healthy in a democracy to have several candidates in a primary. We’re promoting democracy abroad, and we should be practicing it here.

If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for … but there are certain to be ones you want...

A funny thing happened to the First Amendment on its way to the public forum. According to the Supreme Court, money is now speech and corporations are now people. But when real people without money...

Democracy is not a fragile flower; still it needs cultivating.

I believe in a relatively equal society, supported by institutions that limit extremes of wealth and poverty. I believe in democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law. That makes me a liberal, and I’m...

People use democracy as a free-floating abstraction disconnected from reality. Democracy in and of itself is not necessarily good. Gang rape, after all, is democracy in action.All men have the right to live their own...

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;...

What is the most important for democracy is not that great fortunes should not exist, but that great fortunes should not remain in the same hands. In that way there are rich men, but they...

Over the course of my life, I have made many transitions – most of them taking me further away from my Somali roots and steadily toward the enlightened mentality of Western democracy.

In our fight to recover democracy in Peru, we will not put all our eggs in the basket of the Organization of American States.

When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that, in our democracy, government is us.

Every actual democracy rests on the principle that not only are equals equal but unequals will not be treated equally. Democracy requires, therefore, first homogeneity and second—if the need arises elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.

It’s not unpatriotic to denounce an injustice committed on our behalf, perhaps it’s the most patriotic thing we can do.

I want to see my kids grow up in a world that I grew up in, which was it had imagination and it had hope. And all of a sudden, I see that being dissolved,...

The resources we commit must empower developing countries to strengthen security, to consolidate democracy, to increase trade and investment, and to improve the lives of their people.

I don’t have any formula for ousting a dictator or building democracy. All I can suggest is to forget about yourself and just think of your people. It’s always the people who make things happen.

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...

He’s the President—it’s the responsibility of every citizen to criticize aggressively when they think it’s warranted.

Our forefathers were not only brave. I believe they were right. I believe that what they meant was that every man born had equal right to grow from scratch by way of his own power...

They shouldnt teach their immigrants’ kids all about democracy unless they mean to let them have a little bit of it, it ony makes for trouble. Me and the United States is dissociating our alliance...

No, young man. What you see is hell with the lid taken off.” — Mother Jones

Wir sind das Volk!”Dieser Satz hat uns gelehrt, dass wir, wenn wir unserer Sehnsucht glauben und ihr vertrauen, die Angst verlieren können. Eine Angst, die willfährige Dienerin jeder Art von nicht legitimierter Herrschaft ist, die...

Nothing—not even the US Army—more threatens the future of a democratic, pluralistic and (dare we wish, secular) Iraq than the political ascendancy of Islamic fascists like Al Sadr.

persons” with constitutional rights and freedoms of their own, but legal fictions that we created and must therefore control.

If voting made any difference they wouldn’t let us do it.

And is Saudi Arabia a democracy, or Kuwait?

Here’s what we’re not taught [about the Declaration and Constitution]: Those words at the time they were written were blazingly, electrifyingly subversive. If you understand them truly now, they still are. You are not taught...

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the major international question was the relation between Islam and democracy.

Inflation is bringing us true democracy. For the first time in history, luxuries and necessities are selling at the same price.

In a democracy, someone who fails to get elected to office can always console himself with the thought that there was something not quite fair about it.

The candidates also know we have experience of democracy, those of us who live here. We know what to listen for. We know if anything they’re saying makes sense. So they come here and they...

We expected that with electoral democracy there would be a trickle down of positive effects. That did not happen.

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...