James Russell Lowell Quotes

The government and people are inseparable under our system. We could not separate the government from the people if we would, and we would not if we could. This unity is the strength of our political structure.

While democracy in the long run is the most stable form of government, in the short run, it is among the most fragile.

Majority rule rests on numbers; democracy rests on the well-grounded assumption that society is neither a collection of units nor an organism but a network of human relations.

Democracy is good, provided the government can function.

The democratic element has a fortunate effect in the political sphere when it is balanced by another force. We have this advantage over our neighbors, the Americans, who have extreme democracy.

American democracy is at its best in its talent for the transfer for power.

Two great parties are forming in all nations. For one there is a right of government to be exercised by one or several persons over the mass of the people .... This is opposed by the new system which admits no right of government except that arising from the free consent of those who submit to it.

If France’s first democratic experiment failed, it nevertheless made a profound contribution to the eventual formation of a stable liberal democracy.

The framers of the American Constitution were far from wishing or intending to found a democracy in the strict sense of the word, though, as was inevitable, every expansion of the scheme of government they elaborated has been in a democratical direction. But this has been generally the slow result of growth, and not the sudden innovation of theory…

No democracy pretends to be a tyranny. Most tyrannies pretend they are democracies. Democracy remains the definition of political legitimacy.

I was never convinced that war was the best system to bring democracy to the country.

History proves that all dictatorships, all authoritarian forms of government are transient. Only democratic systems are not transient. Whatever the shortcomings, mankind has not devised anything superior.

Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.

In Canada, nobody is ever overthrown because nobody gives a damn.

The primary social contract between the people of the United States and their government - quaint though it might seem to even mention it at this point - is that ours is to be a government 'of the people, by the people, for the people.'

Only basic agreement on the major objectives of the state can provide a society with a firm basis for democracy.

Democracy is only tolerable because no other system is.

Democracy takes time. Dictatorship is quicker, but too many people get shot.

A democracy, when put to the strain, grows weak; and it is supplanted by oligarchy [rule by the few].

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

Whatever faults modern democracies may have committed ..., the faults chargeable on monarchs and oligarchies have been less pardonable and more harmful to the peace and progress of mankind.

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.

My political ideal is democracy.

We need a strong state but we need a democratic one.

America's experiment with government of the people, by the people, and for the people depends not only on constitutional structure and organization, but also on the commitment, person to person, that we make to each other.