Quotes about democracy

No one stuck up their hands and there was no voting, but she thought, I wonder if it was like this in ancient Athens? This is pure democracy. People don’t just get a vote; they have a say.

If citizenship is a matter of shared beliefs, then I believe in the democracy of species. If citizenship means an oath of loyalty to a leader, then I choose the leader of the trees. If good citizens agree to uphold the laws of the nation, then I choose natural law, the law of reciprocity, of regeneration, of mutual flourishing.

That's the wonderful thing about democracy: you can hold public office legitimately while still being despised by 49.9 percent of the suspicious eyes on the street.

Democracy in crime was turning out no different from democracies everywhere: a sublime idea in theory, soiled by the reality that deep down nobody really believes that all men are created equal.

They can extinguish awareness by dumbing down education, owning TV stations, paying "guest fees" to leader writers, or just buying the media up. The media—and not just The Washington Post—is where democracies conduct their civil wars.

The finest design for society will not be one worked up by specialists but a design created by the people themselves to fit their needs.

"Public opinion wouldn’t stand for it,” Gómez replied. “This is a democracy. It’s not a dictatorship and it never will be.” “We always think things like that only happen elsewhere,” said Miguel, “until they happen to us too.” (p367)

[E]mancipation cannot be so easily detached from union (which is another way of saying that racial justice and liberal democracy rise or fall with each other).

[N]o democracy worth its name could continue to drag the burden of slavery around after it.

Democracies that are under threat of destruction face the impossible dilemma of either yielding to that threat by insisting on preserving the democratic niceties, or violating their own principles by curtailing democratic rights.

"[E]ternal vigilance is the price of liberty,"...We see ourselves as a city on the hill, a stronghold for democracy, looking for threats from abroad. But the sense of the saying was entirely different: that human nature is such that American democracy must be defended from Americans who would exploit its freedoms to bring about its end.

When we lack the ability to talk back to entities that are culturally and politically powerful, the very foundations of free speech and democratic society are called into question.