Hunter S. Thompson Quotes

The United States is dangerously close to becoming a democracy instead of a republic.

I cannot too often repeat that Democracy is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawakened, notwithstanding the resonance and the many angry tempests out of which its syllables have come, from pen or tongue. It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten because that history has yet to be enacted.

To take an analogy: if we say that a democratic government is the best kind of government, we mean that it most completely fulfills the highest function of a government - the realisation of the will of the people.

Democracy is not about one party dominating.

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.

Democracy is an imperfect way of steering between the violence of anarchy and the violence of tyranny, with the least violence you can get away with.

Democracy is not an easy form of government, because it is never final; it is a living, changing organism, with a continuous shifting and adjusting of balance between individual freedom and general order.

Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

Democracy is politics.

Once confined to a handful of wealthy countries, it [democracy] became, in a short period of time, the most popular political system in the world. In 1900, only 10 countries were democracies. By mid-century, the number had increased to 30…. By 2005 fully 119 of the world’s 190 countries had become democracies.

Democracy is not a serial autocracy with each new autocrat being selected by a free and fair election.

I have a negative approach to democracy. I think it should be primarily a mechanism by which people can remove a bad leader.

When the body of the people is possessed of the supreme power, it is called a democracy.

Democracy is a good client.

Our country is blessed with a democratic political system that is sensitive to the wishes of our people.

Democracy is only an experiment in government, and it has the obvious disadvantage of merely counting votes instead of weighing them.

There is an idea of democracy produced by one-sided thinking.

The principle of democracy is all about delegation of power by the vast majority of citizens through a few chosen representatives chosen on merit and competence.

Democracy, loudly upheld as a cure for much of the ailing world, has proved no guarantor of political wisdom, even if it remains the least bad form of government.

Democracy may mean something more than a theoretically absolute popular government, but it assuredly cannot mean anything less.

America was founded on majority rule, not supermajority rule. Somehow, over the years, this has morphed into supermajority rule, and that changes things.

The genius of democracies is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced but even more in the new ideas they express.

Democracy... is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder; and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.

She had got to the bottom of this business of democratic government and found out that it was nothing more than government of any other kind.

Democracy is the form of government in which the free are rulers.