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Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
WINSTON CHURCHILL, speech, Nov. 11, 1947
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!
Although our interests as citizens vary, each one is an artery to the heart that pumps life through the body politic, and each is important to the health of democracy.
BILL MOYERS, The Nation, Jan. 22, 2007
The sides are being divided now. It’s very obvious. So if you’re on the other side of the fence, you’re suddenly anti-American. Its breeding fear of being on the wrong side. Democracy’s a very fragile thing. You have to take care of democracy. As soon as you stop being responsible to it and allow it to turn into scare tactics, it’s no longer democracy, is it? It’s something else. It may be an inch away from totalitarianism.
SAM SHEPARD, The Village Voice, Nov. 12, 2004
Democracy works when people claim it as their own.
BILL MOYERS, The Nation, Jan. 22, 2007
Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what you think it is you want to hear.
Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.
OSCAR WILDE, The Soul of Man Under Socialism
There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship.
A democracy, that is, a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people; of course, a government after the principles of eternal justice, the unchanging law of God; for shortness sake, I will call it the idea of freedom.
THEODORE PARKER, speech, May 29, 1850
It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.
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.
The ballot is stronger than the bullet.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN, speech, May 19, 1856
The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.
Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, Maxims for Revolutionists
It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny.
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER, The American Democrat
Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.
In every well-governed state, wealth is a sacred thing; in democracies it is the only sacred thing.
ANATOLE FRANCE, Penguin Island
The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.
We should be more modest in our belief that we can impose democracy on a country through military force. In the past, it has been movements for freedom from within tyrannical regimes that have led to flourishing democracies; movements that continue today. This doesn’t mean abandoning our values and ideals; wherever we can, it’s in our interest to help foster democracy through the diplomatic and economic resources at our disposal. But even as we provide such help, we should be clear that the institutions of democracy – free markets, a free press, a strong civil society – cannot be built overnight, and they cannot be built at the end of a barrel of a gun. And so we must realize that the freedoms FDR once spoke of – especially freedom from want and freedom from fear – do not just come from deposing a tyrant and handing out ballots; they are only realized once the personal and material security of a people is ensured as well.
BARACK OBAMA, speech, Nov. 20, 2006
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time.
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.
Democracy is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequal alike.
Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.
Democracy is the road to socialism.
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