Sameh Ashour Quotes

I take the debate on the method of promoting democracy seriously.

A democratic crisis can only be settled by more democracy.

In this situation [perestroika] problems and difficulties are unavoidable. For it involves far-reaching changes in everything—in the way of life, the attitude toward work and civic duty. We have chosen, definitively and irrevocably, the route leading to new forms of life: democratizing our society in all spheres.

We believe the way social change occurs in the United States, over the last 200 years, is the democratic process.

Democracy is an objective. Democratization is a process. Democratization serves the cause of peace because it offers the possibility of justice and of progressive change without force.

The Russian people deserve free and fair elections. They deserve to have a democracy.

Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy.

All the more reason we need to stand up for our democracy now. If we're going to solve the crises that are barreling down on us, we need democracy, and our democracy needs to start with an open and inclusive debate. That doesn't mean 20 candidates. There are four candidates who are on the ballot for just about every voter in America.

From literature to ecology, from the escape velocity of galaxies to the greenhouse effect, from garbage disposal methods to traffic jams, everything is discussed in our world. But the democratic system, as if it were a given fact, untouchable by nature until the end of time, we don't discuss that.

So yes in theory there is a kind of a formal democracy and in many ways these were achievements and an improvement over the feudal system and more advanced than anything else in the world, but nothing that we ought to call democracy.

Journalism still, in a democracy, is the essential force to get the public educated and mobilized to take action on behalf of our ancient ideals.

Democracy, it appears, is a bit chancy. But its chances also depend on what we do ourselves.

If we are to build grassroots respect for the institutions and processes that constitute democracy, the state must treat its citizens as real citizens rather than as subjects.

My message is that Democracy is not an alien invention. It is a way of solving problems in our society.

When women are pessimistic about their political strength and feel hopeless about changing the conditions of their lives, it is almost as if they do not believe that democracy means the country belongs to them. But it's true.

Democracy means not merely, I had almost said not so much, the rights of the whole people, as the duties of the whole people.

This is one of the finest expressions of U. S. democracy at work.

Our democracy must be not only the envy of the world but the engine of our own renewal.

People’s Constitution

All of us today are learning democracy. We are only now forming a political culture.

Africa must develop a genuine culture of alternation and opposition, without which democracy in any country, including the West, cannot exist.

Democracy cannot be created out of thin air

Democracy is not a result. Democracy is a process.

The development of democracy is very much a matter of education and of progressing step by step.

We Indians … are so good at respecting outward forms while ignoring the substance. We took the forms of parliamentary democracy, preserved them, put them on pedestal and paid them due obeisance. But we ignored the basic fact that parliamentary democracy can only work if those who run it are constantly responsive to needs of the people and if parliamentarians are qualified enough to legislate. Neither condition was fulfilled in India for long.