Robert A. Heinlein Quotes

I am a firm believer in the importance of democracy, not only as the ultimate goal, but also as an essential part of the process.

I think democracy is the most revolutionary thing in the world, because if you have power you use it to meet the needs of you and your community.

Democracy is a problem and we don't want to get rid of it.

Democracy is "government of, by and for the people".

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.

All free governments are managed by the combined wisdom and folly of the people.

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.

You can't run this nation like a town meeting.

And the principle which distinguishes democracy from all other forms of government is that in a democracy the opposition not only is tolerated as constitutional but must be maintained because it is in fact indispensable.

Democracy is always frustrating.

I've always lived in a democratic society.

One of the benefits of a properly functioning democracy is minority rights and majority rule.

When we define democracy now it must still be as a thing hoped for but not seen.

One of the central assumptions of the concept of democracy, perhaps its most central assumption, is that by and large human beings are better judges of their own interests.... The operating maxim of the democratic ideology is, "Whoever wears the shoe knows best where it pinches.

Democracy is the right choice and is the greatest form of government ever created.

Democracy must be a sound scheme at bottom, else it would not survive such cruel strains.

Democracy is good. I say this because other systems are worse. So we are forced to accept democracy. It has good points and also bad. But merely saying that democracy will solve all problems is utterly wrong. Problems are solved by intelligence and hard work.

Part of the reason we like democracy is it's the portfolio of decades, which is to say you don't also get the disastrous dictator who completely destroys a society, engages you in wars and so forth.

For me democracy is the only way of life. The opposite is dictatorship or anarchy.

Democracy is perhaps the most promiscuous word in the world of public affairs.

Modern life means democracy, democracy means freeing intelligence for independent effectivenessthe emancipation of mind as an individual organ to do its own work. We naturally associate democracy, to be sure, with freedom of action, but freedom of action without freed capacity of thought behind it is only chaos.

Democracy is premised, in some measure, on majority rule, and democracy is difficult in a situation of concentrated inequalities in which a large, impoverished majority confronts a small, wealthy oligarchy.

Elected representatives are so embedded in the basic notion of what constitutes a democratic nation that it has become indistinguishable from any other form of democratic governance.

Democracy is a daring concept - a hope that we'll be best governed if all of us participate in the act of government. It is meant to be a conversation, a place where the intelligence and local knowledge of the electorate sums together to arrive at actions that reflect the participation of the largest possible number of people.

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