Quotes about Democracy

Make no mistake, here in our time, it's more important than ever that we show up to vote, not just this year, but every year and in every election. Every voice must be heard and every vote must be counted.

The right to vote is the crown jewel of American liberties, and we will not see its luster diminished.

I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.

Our political institutions work remarkably well. They are designed to clang against each other. The noise is democracy at work.

The working men are the basis of all governments, for the plain reason that they are the most numerous.

As citizens of the United States, we are stewards of this magnificent thing called democracy.

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.