George Bernard Shaw Quotes

Democracy doesn't mean electing a dictator every five years.

What is democracy?—an aristocracy of blackguards.

Democracy is politics.

The king, in possession of the throne, was the sole representative of sovereignty, the sole representative of power. Not so in a Republic … Here we have no sole representative of power. The ballot box is the instrumentality through which the sovereign power is exercised.

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

Democracy is a good client.

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

Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what you think it is you want to hear.

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.

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

Democracy means decision by those concerned.

Democracy is only tolerable because no other system is.

If we could, somehow, get a vote of the people of Tennessee and have it result properly, it would be worth more to us than a battle gained. How long before we can get such a vote?

Democracy is a relatively new form of government.

American capitalism is predatory, and American politics are corrupt: The same thing is true in England and the same in France; but in all these three countries the dominating fact is that whatever the people get ready to change the government, they can change it. The same thing is not true of Germany

What the world of the twenty-first century calls democracy is in fact the fusion of two distinct political traditions. One is liberty—that is individual freedom. The other is popular sovereignty: rule by the people.

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

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

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.

The ballot box is the surest arbiter of disputes among free men.

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

The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity.

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

One is actually the democracy here, you know, people are, people assume that this election means that there is democracy in Pakistan. There is no democracy.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.