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“Being democratic is not enough, a majority cannot turn what is wrong into right. In order to be considered truly free, countries must also have a deep love of liberty and an abiding respect for the rule of law.”
― Margaret Thatcher

“We live in a system that espouses merit, equality, and a level playing field, but exalts those with wealth, power, and celebrity, however gained.”
― Derrick Bell, Ethical Ambition: Living a Life of Meaning and Worth

“The truth is, one who seeks to achieve freedom by petitioning those in power to give it to him has already failed, regardless of the response.
To beg for the blessing of “authorityâ€� is to accept that the choice is the master’s alone to make, which means that the person is already, by definition, a slave.”
― Larken Rose

“Remember something, if you will, about voting: Voting is not a horse race, you're not going there thinking "Gee, I gotta pick the winner so I can brag to my friends 'Oh, I picked so-and-so and he or she won'". Voting is voting your heart and voting your conscience and when you've done that, don't ever, EVER let a Democrat or Republican tell you that you've wasted your vote because the fact is, if you DON'T vote your heart and conscience then you HAVE wasted your vote.”
― Jesse Ventura

“I really am a pessimist. I've always felt that fascism is a more natural governmental condition than democracy. Democracy is a grace. It's something essentially splendid because it's not at all routine or automatic. Fascism goes back to our infancy and childhood, where we were always told how to live. We were told, Yes, you may do this; no, you may not do that. So the secret of fascism is that it has this appeal to people whose later lives are not satisfactory.”
― Norman Mailer

“The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
--as quoted in THE RIVER OF WINGED DREAMS”
― Abraham Lincoln

“Representative government is artifice, a political myth, designed to conceal from the masses the dominance of a self-selected, self-perpetuating, and self-serving traditional ruling class.”
― Giuseppe Prezzolini

“When enough people understand reality, tyrants can literally be ignored out of existence. They can't ever be voted out of existence.”
― Larken Rose

“You don't spread democracy with a barrel of a gun.”
― Helen Thomas

“Those in power must spend a lot of their time laughing at us.”
― Alice Walker

“The principle of democracy is a recognition of the sovereign, inalienable rights of man as a gift from God, the Source of law.”
― Fulton J. Sheen

“I have an unshaken conviction that democracy can never be undermined if we maintain our library resources and a national intelligence capable of utilizing them."

[Letter to Herbert Putnam; in: Waters, Edward N.: Herbert Putnam: the tallest little man in the world; Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 33:2 (April 1976), p. 171]”
― Franklin Delano Roosevelt

“There is nothing virtuous or noble about being "tolerant" of people whose attitudes and behaviors you approve of. If you don't defend the freedom of even those individuals whose attitudes and behaviors you find disgusting, narrow-minded and offensive, then you are not tolerant. To "tolerate" doesn't mean you like it or approve of it; it means only that you ALLOW it to EXIST--i.e., you refrain from violently interfering. The people who look to "government" to FORCE people to be "nice" are not tolerant.”
― Larken Rose

“It is difficult for the ordinary voter to come to grips with the notion that a truly evil man, a truthless monster with the brains of a king rat and the soul of a cockroach, is about to be sworn in as the president of the United States for the next four years. . . . And he will bring his gang in with him, a mean network of lawyers and salesmen and pimps who will loot the national treasury, warp the laws, mock the rules and stay awake 22 hours a day looking for at least one reason to declare war, officially, on some hapless tribe in the Sahara or heathen fanatic like the Ayatollah Khomeini.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.”
― W.H. Auden

“I realize that what happened in Bosnia could happen anywhere in the world, particularly in places that are diverse and have a history of conflict. It only takes bad leadership for a country to go up in flames, for people of different ethnicity, color, or religion to kill each other as if they had nothing in common whatsoever. Having a democratic constitution, laws that secure human rights, police that maintain order, a judicial system, and freedom of speech don't ultimately guarantee long lasting peace. If greedy or bloodthirsty leaders come to power, it can all go down. It happened to us. It can happen to you.”
― Savo Heleta, Not My Turn to Die: Memoirs of a Broken Childhood in Bosnia

“Every four years we go through the same cycle of hope and disillusionment.”
― Sheri Holman, The Mammoth Cheese

“When a library is open, no matter its size or shape, democracy is open, too.”
― Bill Moyers

“I gather you yellow-skinned men, despite your triumphs in sewage, drinking water, and Olympic gold medals, still don't have democracy. Some politician on the radio was saying that that's why we Indian are going to beat you: we may not have sewage, drinking water, and Olympic gold medals, but we do have democracy.
If I were making a country, I'd get the sewage pipes first, then the democracy, then I'd go about giving pamphlets and statues of Gandhi to other people, but what do I know? I am just a murderer!”
― Aravind Adiga

“Constitutional democracy, you see, is no romantic notion. It's our defense against ourselves, the one foe who might defeat us.”
― Bill Moyers

“Our democracy is threatened whenever we take it for granted.”
― Barack Obama

“The secret of the demagogue is to appear as dumb as his audience so that these people can believe themselves as smart as he is.”
― Harry Zohn, Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half Truths: Selected Aphorisms

“Americans need to continue to develop broad-based movements that reject the established political parties and rethink the social formations necessary to bring about a radical democracy. We see this in the Black Lives Matter movement as well as in a range of other movements that are resisting corporate money in politics, the widespread destruction of the environment, nuclear war and the mass incarceration state.”
― Henry A. Giroux, America at War with Itself

“The real purpose of the opposition is to minimize the amount of money the ruling party will have stolen from the people at the end of its term.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“In a society where the majority choose charisma over character, democracy does more harm than good to the actual progress of that society”
― Abhijit Naskar

“To be a member of such a crowd ... is not much to be far removed from solitude; the freedom of everyone is assured by the freedom to which everyone else lays claim. ”
― Remy de Gourmont

“Freedom is not having the right to speak, Freedom is having the right to decide if yeu want to speak or not”
― Sandesh Hukpachongbang

“Serving my country does not mean blindly following others.”
― Pénélope Bagieu, Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World

“What if good institutions were in fact the product of good intentions? What if the cynicism that is supposed to be rigor and the acquisitiveness that is supposed to be realism are making us forget the origins of the greatness we lay claim to - power and wealth as secondary consequences of the progress of freedom, or, as Whitman would prefer, Democracy?”
― Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books

“An important sign of the collapse of the rule of law is the rise of a paramilitary and its merger with government power.”
― Timothy Snyder , The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America