Quotes about Democracy

Democracy requires us to recognize others' rights even when we fundamentally disagree with them.

Tocqueville delivered his dispassionate and penetrating judgment of the American experiment in his great work Democracy in America. No one, before or since, has written about the United States with such insight.

America was always a religious country, and it remains the most religious of industrialized Western democracies. America derived its strength from religion, not secularism.

Identity without democracy is totalitarian; democracy without identity is weak and self-betraying.

The moment for which I had waited so long came and I folded my ballot paper and cast my vote. Wow! I shouted, 'Yippee!' It was giddy stuff. It was like falling in love. The sky looked blue and more beautiful. I saw the people in a new light. They were beautiful, they were transfigured. I too was transfigured. It was dreamlike.

I remembered seeing the lines of people who had waited for hours and hours to vote in the first democratic election in South Africa in 1994. The lines snaked on for miles. I remember wondering at the time, as U.S. voter turnout was hovering under forty percent, how long that sense of joy and appreciation for the right to vote would last and whether there was any way to revive it in America among those who have never been denied the right to vote.

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.

I believe we are trying to understand kingdom principles with a democratic mindset. It is programmed into our core thinking and reasoning. God is a dictator. Thankfully he is a benevolent one. but he has the final say in all aspects of life…..If we are going to try and follow God, we simply cannot use democratic reasoning in the way we respond to his leadership.

It's not the hand that signs the laws that holds the destiny of America. It's the hand that casts the ballot.

There is no dignity in wickedness, whether in purple or rags; and hell is a democracy of devils, where all are equals.

Americans are a very backward people, with all the real virtues of a backward people; the patriarchal simplicity and human dignity of a democracy, and a respect for labor uncorrupted by cynicism.

The basic proposal of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be 'undemocratic.