Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

“We cannot play ostrich. Democracy just cannot flourish amid fear. Liberty cannot bloom amid hate. Justice cannot take root amid rage. America must get to work. In the chill climate in which we live, we must go against the prevailing wind. We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred and the mistrust. We must dissent from a nation that has buried its head in the sand, waiting in vain for the needs of its poor, its elderly, and its sick to disappear and just blow away. We must dissent from a government that has left its young without jobs, education or hope. We must dissent from the poverty of vision and the absence of moral leadership. We must dissent because America can do better, because America has no choice but to do better.”
― Thurgood Marshall

“The government you elect is the government you deserve.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“Darwin did not know what a bitter satire he wrote on mankind ... when he showed that free competition, the struggle for existence, which the economists celebrate as the highest historical achievement, is the normal state of the animal kingdom. Only conscious organization of social production, in which production and distribution are carried on in a planned way, can lift mankind above the rest of the animal.”
― Friedrich Engels

“A Radical is a man with both feet firmly planted--in the air. A Conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward. A Reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards. A Liberal is a man who uses his legs and his hands at the behest--at the command--of his head.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt

“Democracy is reproached with saying that the majority is always right. But progress says that the minority is always right.”
― G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America

“Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.”
― Aristotle

“The aspirations of democracy are based on the notion of an informed citizenry, capable of making wise decisions. The choices we are asked to make become increasingly complex. They require the longer-term thinking and greater tolerance for ambiguity that science fosters. The new economy is predicated on a continuous pipeline of scientific and technological innovation. It can not exist without workers and consumers who are mathematically and scientifically literate. ”
― Ann Druyan

“Illiteracy does not impede the practice of democracy, as witnessed by the success of democracy in India despite the high illiteracy rate. One doesn't need a university diploma to realize that the ruler is oppressive and corrupt. On the other hand, to eradicate illiteracy requires that we elect a fair and efficient political regime.”
― Alaa Al Aswany, شيكاجو

“When a stupid government is elected in a democratic country, the best thing about this is that you learn the number of stupid people in that country!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“But you can live in the most democratic country on earth, and if you're lazy, obtuse or servile within yourself, you're not free.”
― Ignazio Silone, Bread and Wine

“In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself.”
― Henry Wallace

“Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in Don’t Shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half the people are right more than half the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.”
― E. B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters

“Our forefathers were heroes. But why were they heroes? Because they fought for democracy. They fought for the life and liberty of the Filipino people. They fought for our independence, our freedom. They fought against tyranny, totalitarianism, and dictatorship. They fought for us and that is something we must be grateful for.”
― Yanan Melo, Naaalala Niyo Ba Ang Noli Me Tangere?

“Democracy is a poor system; the only thing that can be said for it is that it's eight times as good as any other method.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“Democracy is always an unfinished experiment, testing the capacity of each generation to live freedom nobly.”
― George Weigel

“The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.”
― Alfred E. Smith

“Socialism, Puritanism, Philistinism, Christianityâ€�he saw them all as allotropic forms of democracy, as variations upon the endless struggle of quantity against quality, of the weak and timorous against the strong and enterprising, of the botched against the fit.”
― H.L. Mencken, Mencken and Nietzsche

“Throughout history, pandemics have led to an expansion of the power of the state: at times when people fear death, they go along with measures that they believe, rightly or wrongly, will save them—even if that means a loss of freedom.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“Both groups [of pundits] were critics, and that is the heart of the problem. ”
― Jeffrey A. Miller

“But a democracy is bound in the end to be obscene, for it is composed of myriad disunited fragments, each fragment assuming to itself a false wholeness, a false individuality. Modern democracy is made up of millions of frictional parts all asserting their own wholeness.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Apocalypse

“-I got the conch!" --Piggy (in Lord of the Flies), attempting Democracy”
― William Golding

“In the large sense, I have to disagree with Bakunin, one thing austerity rhetoric has suggested is that when the people are being beaten with a stick, they are much happier if the media call it the People’s Democratic Stick.”
― Bruno De Oliveira

“The crucial lesson of Brexit and of Trump's victory, is that leaders who are seen as representing the failed neoliberal status quo are no match for the demagogues and neo-fascists. Only a bold and genuinely redistributive progressive agenda can offer real answers to inequality and the crises in democracy...We need to remember this the next time we're asked to back a party or candidate in an election. In this destabilized era, status-quo politicians often cannot get the job done. On the other hand, the choice that may at first seem radical, maybe even a little risky, may well be the most pragmatic one in this volatile era...radical political and economic change is our only hope of avoiding radical change to our physical world.”
― Naomi Klein

“To me, the ultimate proof of freedom in the West was that there seemed to be so many people there attacking the West and praising China. Almost every other day the front page of Reference, the newspaper which carded foreign press items, would feature some eulogy of Mao and the Cultural Revolution.  At first I was angered by these, but they soon made me see how tolerant another society could be.  I realized that this was the kind of society I wanted to live in: where people were allowed to hold different, even outrageous views.  I began to see that it was the very tolerance of oppositions, of protesters, that kept the West progressing.”
― Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

“If you distance yourself from reality and just cling to cliches about democracy find yourself a different job than analyzing politics”
― Hany Ghoraba

“I am a congenital optimist about America, but I worry that American democracy is exhibiting fatal symptoms. DC has become an acronym for Dysfunctional Capital: a swamp in which partisanship has grown poisonous, relations between the White House and Congress have paralyzed basic functions like budgets and foreign agreements, and public trust in government has all but disappeared. These symptoms are rooted in the decline of a public ethic, legalized and institutionalized corruption, a poorly educated and attention-deficit-driven electorate, and a 'gotcha' press - all exacerbated by digital devices and platforms that reward sensationalism and degrade deliberation. Without stronger and more determined leadership from the president and a recovery of a sense of civic responsibility among the governing class, the United States may follow Europe down the road of decline.”
― Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?

“I regret that I am now to die in the belief, that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be, that I live not to weep over it.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“More broadly, it is vital for leaders to work across international boundaries to minimize the number of people who feel the need to leave their home countries in the first place. That requires building healthy democracies, fostering peace, and generating prosperity from the ground up. However, success in that endeavor demands a way of looking at the world that recognizes the humanity we share with one another, and the interests that nations have in common. Those who are content to look inward, and who see no higher purpose than to shield themselves from the different, the new, and the unknown, will be of no help.”
― Madeleine K. Albright, Fascism: A Warning

“[A] history of disintegration can be a guide to repair. Erosion reveals what resists, what can be reinforced, what can be reconstructed, and what must be reconceived.”
― Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America