Julian Assange Quotes

The circumstances of the world are continually changing, and the opinions of man change also; and as government is for the living, and not for the dead, it is the living only that has any right in it.

The people have spoken. Their decision is sovereign. We all respect it... I wish good luck to those who will now govern France.

Useless knowledge can be made directly contributory to a force of sound and disinterested public opinion.

The democratic process is only as great as the people who participate in it.

I have always believed governments must adapt to the needs of the people, not the other way around.

Although elections are not perfect tools for democracy, they reinforce the relationship between the people and their leaders, empowering citizens to remove and replace their governments in a peaceful and orderly manner. The only basis for a peaceful society is providing people with the opportunity to express their opinions and their will, and elections are instrumental in doing so.

The government is just the people acting together.

Democracy is about aggregating the collective power of citizens to speak in their behalf.

The voice of the people is the voice of God.

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.

Public opinion has become the public law

Roosevelt understood that democracy requires persuasion and consent

Our democracy works because the parties air and debate their differences in public.

We don't go against the will of the people.

We the people tell the government what to do, it doesn't tell us.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere.

Political authorities should lead the way and not lag behind [public opinion].

The vitality of democracy depends on popular knowledge of complex questions.

He [Bismarck] left a nation totally without political education … totally beret of political will. It had grown accustomed to submit patiently and fatalistically to whatever was decided for it in the name of monarchical government.

A deliberative assembly should be formed, and all measures be decided by public opinion.

The people must come first. Where they do not, sooner or later, they will overthrow their governments.

In referendums in 2005, the Dutch and the French electorates rejected the European Constitution, which aimed to turn the E.U. into a genuine state. But Brussels refused to take no for an answer. It went ahead with its plans for a constitutional treaty, notwithstanding the people's opposition. Brussels thinks it knows better than the people.

Part of what's great about America, and Canada as well, is that we can talk about our political leaders in public.

I will never forget that it is the people who speak directly through the constitution they have adopted.

American democracy depends on the public's ability to remain accurately informed on our state of affairs.