"EU didn't advance our [Eastern Europe] democracy by a single millimeter."
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Democracy quotes
Democracy
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Democracy quotes (page 22 of 129)
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"He that accepts protection, stipulates obedience."
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"Everything is generated through your own will power. You don't have to do anything you don't want to do. This is a democracy. You go where you want to go and do what you want to do."
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"Democracy is messy. It is messy whether you've been doing it since 1789 or whether you're going to do it for the first time in 2005. The trouble with Democracy is, you hold elections. The trouble with dictatorships is...you don't."
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"In a democracy, every ordinary citizen is effectively a king--but a king in a constitutional democracy, a monarch who decides only formally, whose function is merely to sign off on measures proposed by an executive administration. This is why the problem with democratic rituals is homologous to the great problem of constitutional monarchy: how to protect the dignity of the king? How to maintain the appearance that the king effectively makes decisions, when we all know this not to be true?"
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"The Athenian democracy suffered much from that narrowness of patriotism which is the ruin of all nations."
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"Democracy may become frenzied, but it has feelings and can be moved. As for aristocracy, it is always cold and never forgives."
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"What is really needed to make democracy function is not knowledge of facts, but right education."
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"The force generated by nonviolence is infinitely greater than the force of all the arms created by man's ingenuity."
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"I want people to learn what democracy means."
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"But the moment the politicians start saying they are in denial of what the scientists are telling them, of what the consensus of scientific experiments demonstrates, that is the beginning of the end of an informed democracy."
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"All attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail. It must be business as usual."
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"Democracy is like blowing your nose. You may not do it well, but it's something you ought to do yourself."
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"In the 1960s, various parts of the population became energized and began to enter the public arena to call for the rights of women, students, young people, old people, farmers and workers. What are called "special interests" - meaning the whole population - they began to press to enter the public arena. And they said that puts too much pressure on the state and therefore we have to have more moderation in democracy and they should go back and be quiet and obedient."
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"Bolivia is a striking example. The mostly white, Europeanized elite, which is a minority, happens to be sitting on most of the hydrocarbon reserves. For the first time Bolivia is becoming democratic. So it's therefore bitterly hated by the West, which despises democracy, because it's much too dangerous."
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"Anarcho-syndic alism took for granted that working people ought to control their own work, its conditions, the enterprises in which they work, along with communities, so they should be associated with one another in free associations, and democracy of that kind should be the foundational elements of a more general free society."
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"No democracy is born perfect, and none ever gets to be perfect. Yet democracy is superior to authoritarian and totalitarian regimes because, unlike them, democracy is perfectible."
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"A strange age of the world this, when empires, kingdoms, and republics come a-begging to a private man's door, and utter their complaints at his elbow! I cannot take up a newspaper but I find that some wretched government or other, hard pushed and on its last legs, is interceding with me, the reader, to vote for it."
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"Every one is degraded, whether aware of it or not, when other people, without consulting him, take upon themselves unlimited power to regulate his destiny."
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"Democracy means free television, not good television, but free."
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