The dream of democracy has long been enshrined in the hearts of the Egyptian people. It only needed awakening.
Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.
The idea of democracy has been stripped of it moral imperatives and come to denote hollowness and hypocrisy.
Of the people, by the people, for the people.
A spurious democracy has influenced both our research methods (I am sometimes tempted to define "validity" as part of the context of an experiment demanding so little in the way of esoteric gift that any number can play at it, provided they have taken a certain number of courses) and our research subjects (it would be deemed snobbish to investigate only the best people).
Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy.
Lincoln -- they used to talk about him almost as bad as they talk about me. So democracy has never been for the faint of heart.
The paradox of American democracy has been that its slogan of equal opportunity has meant, often, equal opportunity to get power over your fellows.
Fascism and communism have not entirely disappeared but have been sidelined certainly, and liberal democracy has come to be accepted, in theory at least, around the world, if not always in practice.
The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.
There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship.
Democracy has always been in crisis: democracy is all about practicing the art of bearable dissatisfaction. In democratic societies, people often complain about their leaders and their institutions. The gap between the ideal democracy and the existing one cannot be bridged.
Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.
Down to the present day the luminous image of democracy has often served as a pretext for the most undemocratic actions.
So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.
Laws provide against injury from others; but not from ourselves.
Everyone living under the social contract we call democracy has a duty to act responsibly, to obey the laws, and to abandon certain types of self-interested behaviors that conflict with the general good.
Capitalism under democracy has a further advantage: its enemies, even when it is attacked, are scattered and weak, and it is usually easily able to array one half of them against the other half, and thus dispose of both.
That government is best which governs least.
Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.