Democracy does not have to be a bloodsport, it can be an honorable enterprise that advances the public interest.
A day will come when our children and grandchildren will look back and they'll ask one of two questions. Either they will ask: "what in God's name were they doing?" or they may look back and say: "how did they find the uncommon moral courage to rise above politics and redeem the promise of American democracy?"
It scares me when the Europeans demand more and more democracy. It sounds like times past, when people here demanded more and more socialism.
For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct. It is the only serious book most people read. It is the only book they read every day.
Jeffersonian Democracy simply meant the possession of the federal government by the agrarian masses led by an aristocracy of slave-owning masses.
Democracy as a system has evolved into something that Thomas Jefferson didn't anticipate.
Democracies can't handle austerity measures very well.
If we could shut down all sport hunting in a moment, we would. [. . . ] Only 7% of Americans are hunters. That means there are more of us than there are of them. It is simply a matter of democracy. The majority rules in a democracy. We are going to use the ballot box and the democratic process to stop all hunting in the United States. . . We will take it species by species until all hunting is stopped in California. Then we will take it state by state.
Democracy doesn't recognize east or west and democracy is simply people's will. Therefore, I do not acknowledge that there are various models of democracy; there is just democracy itself.
Liberty is the soul's right to breathe.
One of my beliefs very strongly is that any democracy depends on a free, healthy press.
Even at legal brothels, sex workers have very little power and control over their workplace. They might have power with their customers on a case-by-case basis in terms of what they want to do and not do, but they don't necessarily have a lot of power in how that business operates. There's this presumption that sex workers are broken people, so how could they engage in something like workplace democracy? How could they even have demands?
Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.
Where some people are very wealthy and others have nothing, the result will be either extreme democracy or absolute oligarchy, or despotism will come from either of those excesses.
Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
As you have fewer and fewer voices in a democracy, in a free society, it's not good to limit the number of voices.
A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
In a democracy, the most important office is the office of citizen
In a normal democracy, you protect the individual from the excessive power of the state. In Turkey, power elites try to protect the state - as if this state were fragile and needed protection - when in fact, it's too powerful already.
The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.