Heather Cox Richardson Quotes

Our country's founders cherished liberty, not democracy.

Two hundred years ago, our Founding Fathers gave us a democracy. It was based upon the simple, yet noble, idea that government derives its validity from the consent of the governed.

I think it's obvious that democracy is something that is contagious, and it always has been.

Democracy is an open wound that the East has been carrying for centuries.

The colonists were struggling not only against the armies of a great nation, but against the settled opinions of mankind; for the world did not then believe that the supreme authority of government could be safely entrusted to the guardianship of the people themselves.

The Americans are the first people whom heaven has favored with an opportunity of deliberating upon and choosing forms of government under which they should live.

I believe that sovereignty is the twin sister of democracy. If there's no sovereignty, there's no democracy.

Free government is the most difficult of all government. But it is everlastingly true that the plain people will make fewer mistakes than any other group of men, no matter how powerful.

There are a lot of benefits representative of government and it is far better than any type of dictatorial system and it is far better than a one-man rule situation.

The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind.

There is too much government today. We've got to remember the government should be by the people, of the people, and for the people.

Here, sir, the people govern; here they act by their immediate representatives.

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.

In nation after nation, democracy has taken the place of autocracy.

Our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here, the people rule.

Democracy passes into despotism.

All the forms of civil polity have been tried by mankind, except one, and that seems to have been reserved in Providence to be realized in America.

Our nation is built on the bedrock principle that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.

As I understand the American Founders, the most brilliant and daring idea they had was that it's possible to create a free society that could stay free forever.

I prefer, in a word, the republican system, because it comes up more nearly to God's system.

The birth of democracy in Iraq is one of the great positive changes of our era.

I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.

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 is an extraordinary adventure. It's difficult, full of daring and risk and danger. But it's the greatest gift we have.

Democracy is good. I say this because other systems are worse.