Quotes about Democracy

Citizens United opened a door that's frustrated anyone who's looking.

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.

As a nation, then, we are not very religious and not very democratic, and that is why we have been destroying the family farm for the last forty years—along with other small local economic enterprises of all kinds. We have been willing for millions of people to be condemned to failure and dispossession by the workings of an economy utterly indifferent to any claims they may have had either as children of God or as citizens of a democracy.

Until democracy in effective enthusiastic action fills the vacuum created by the power of modern inventions, we may expect the fascists to increase in power after the war both in the United States and in the world.

This dullness of vision regarding the importance of the general welfare to the individual is the measure of the failure of our schools and churches to teach the spiritual significance of genuine democracy.

Perhaps no word is more overworked nowadays than the word "democracy," and those who shout loudest about it, I think, as a rule, want it least. I am always suspicious of men who speak glibly of democracy.

Free speech is to a great people what winds are to oceans and malarial regions, which waft away the germs of disease, and bring new elements of health.

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

Freedom means the right of people to assemble, organize, and debate openly.

I have a political philosophy by which I judge political events. It's called socialism, which at its core is about achieving equality, justice and peace through democracy.

Our democracy poses problems and these problems must and shall be solved by courageous leadership.

If one could enumerate all the essentials which a sound educational program consider, I would say that the techniques of communication, which make for literacy, are our first obligation, and more so in a cemocracy than in any other kind of society, because it depends on a literate electorate.