John Bellamy Foster Quotes

I think Russians today have a distorted picture of capitalism, liberal democracy and market economy.

For not only every democracy, but certainly every republic, bears within itself the seeds of its own destruction.

We are actually experiencing a dismantling of democracy. I didn’t think this was possible.

We can conceive of various kinds of democracy.

Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all societies eventually will.

When democracies don't deliver growth, alternatives seem more attractive.

Obviously, Turkey is not a typical authoritarian regime, and obviously it's very important that there are free elections. But it's also obvious that this is not a liberal, mature democracy. This is why I call Turkey a wobbly democracy. At any time, it can tip over and fall down.

The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.

We can speak of the triumph of capitalism in the world, but we cannot yet speak about the triumph of democracy. There is a serious mismatch between the political and the economic conditions that prevail in the world today.

If you do not force political freedom, economic freedom will be stymied sooner or later.

If dictatorship is the concentration of power, freedom consists in its diffusion.

We're a little bit low in the 1970s, right, post-Vietnam, Watergate era, malaise, all that, but this is more like the 1930s where the very notion of liberal democracy is being questioned, and that is disturbing.

An informed public democracy means rule of the people. A media system is absolutely essential to that process, if people are going to be political equals, they to have to have the information and tools so they can actually be participants. That's liberal democracy 101.

[Vladimir] Putin is an enemy of political dissent. The U.S. celebrates political dissent and the right for people to argue free from violence about places where our ideas are in conflict.

That is, I think that what I do, that democracy in Venezuela hasn't really worked well since the [Ugo] Chávez era and that it has gotten even worse since the last elections, in which the Maduro government lost control of the House, of the country's legislature.

In Europe democracy is a falsehood. I do not know where it will end, but it cannot end in a quiet old age.

The world was never more unsafe for democracy then it is today.

It's this mingling of the economic and political elite which is really destroying our democracy.

You can't have a democracy with an armed political party willing to bomb its neighbor without the consent of its government or, you know, just deciding, "Well, let's create enough chaos and discord by lobbing rockets. And so the reality is in order for Lebanon to succeed and we want Lebanon's democracy to succeed the process is going to the Lebanese government's eventually going to have to deal with Hezbollah.

You can have economic freedom without political freedom, but you cannot have political freedom without economic freedom.

Less and less is the question being asked as to whether developments are taking place in a democratic and free way. Europe is in a phase in which this output is no longer sufficiently visible or tangible. Youth unemployment is still far too high, we still haven't solved our currency problem and living conditions in Europe are drifting apart. That is one reason why critics say that our Europe is based on yesteryear's model.

Excessive partisanship is the problem. There has never been a democracy in the history of the world in a polity of any size where you didn't have political parties. Even sometimes over the objections of the people who started it.

I venture to say that every man who is not presumably incapacitated by some consideration of personal unfitness or of political danger is morally entitled to come within the pale of the Constitution.

Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the state was to make men free to develop their faculties... They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty... that public discussion is a political duty; and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government.

The only way change happens is when people become more significantly involved in the political process. We have to increase voter turnout and citizen participation so that people know what's going on and demand a government that works for everybody and not just the one percent.