Hosni Mubarak Quotes
Don't expect that we can have democracy overnight ... democracy should be taken on a gradual basis until the people understand each step.
Hosni Mubarak, President of Egypt, Interview, PBS MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, September 27, 1993
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
He warned that if there were quick elections, the Islamists being the only organized civil and political organizations were bound to win and then it would be very hard to create civic democratic institutions which would not only be competition for the Islamists but would likely be secular—their worst fear. He generally turned out to be right as Lewis was the Western World’s greatest Islamic Historian,
After the many years of the Cold War attacking of Democracy, for many Russians the word conveys a bad image of their old enemy. For others, using the word reminds them that the Soviet Union collapsed and the Russians lost the cold war—an unpleasant memory. Yet many of the leaders of the Russian Federation very much wanted to democratize Russia. Bushmin had this very practical, albeit humorous, solution.
A major problem of new and emerging democracies is that many people believe that majority rule per se is democracy. In Egypt for example, Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood won the election. They then assumed that they had the right to do anything including exempting the government from judicial review or deciding the role of women in society or denying freedom of religion to non-Muslim citizens. Democracy is not a serial autocracy with each new autocrat being selected by a free and fair election.
The University Presidents had written to the American Public arguing that the German aggression was the result of the militarists in the German society dominating the people and pushing them to war. They argued that most German people were not really responsible. Lamprecht took exception and argued that the German policy was the democratic will of the majority of the German people. He claimed that Germany at the time was more of a de facto democracy than America—as the Untied States did not have a Voting Rights Act or any way of de facto ensuring that all citizens could vote—particularly Negroes in the South. While he was accurate about the voting aspects of a democracy, Germany neither had the Constitution nor a judiciary that was independent and co-equal to the executive and legislature, but Germany did not have the institutions with democratic traditions. The greatest embarrassment to modern Germans is that Adolf Hitler was actually elected by a majority of Germans and was very popular until things in Germany started to go poorly. This quotation is very important in that it shows the importance of a Constitution to limit the powers of even a popularly elected government.
Muhammad Hosni El Sayed Mubarak was an Egyptian military and political leader who served as the fourth president of Egypt from 1981 to 2011.
