Henry David Thoreau Quotes

A clueless electorate is a corruptible one …

How shall those who practice election frauds recover that respect for the sanctity of the ballot which is the first condition and obligation of good citizenship? The man who has come to regard the ballot box as a juggler's hat has renounced his allegiance.

Abstention is a dereliction of citizenship: always cast a vote, if only to cast stones at the most hated.

The politicians... needed the rural people and used them as ruthlessly as Negroes were used when they were needed. They needed to play voter against voter and all of them against "the Negro" -- and they needed the poor whites' approval of acts which the dominant group's more informed minds could not wholly approve. They needed poor whites to be their yes-men, moral henchmen quieting their leaders' uneasy consciences.

The apathy of the modern voter is the confusion of the modern reformer.

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises?

We find that fraud in election is an old ulcer … it is too old, it is too malignant, to warrant any generous surgery. We have got to cut it out if healthy flesh comes with it. If we do disfranchise now and then an honest elector it is really for his own benefit and the benefit of his own State and county.

2018 is an incredibly important election year, not just with the important midterms here in the U.S., but you just had the Mexican elections. You have Brazil. You have India coming up at the beginning of next year. There's an assortment of elections around the EU. We're very serious about this. We know that we need to get this right.

Voting is completely important. People in America think democracy is a given. I think of it as an ecosystem, and what gets in the way of it is politicians and apathy.

You can't just vote for yourself. All the time, you're thinking what sort of country, what world, what future?

Voters have a responsibility to make a judgment with whatever facts are available on Election Day.

I like to bring my kids to the voting booth to show them how it works. I'll let them draw their own conclusions as to how worthwhile it is.

I want to say it's important that you vote, that you get out there.

If you know something damaging about a major political figure, then, in a democracy, it is surely your duty to tell the voters before they go to the polls.

Voting for a candidate solely because of that candidate's support for abortion or against him or her solely on the basis of his or her race is to promote an intrinsic evil. To do so consciously is indeed sinful. That is behavior incompatible with being a Christian.

Mail-in voting is a proven and significant threat to election integrity.

The call now is for each of us to ask ourselves: are we doing all we can to help build the country of our dreams?

Some people think elections are a game: who's up or who's down. It's about our country. It's about our kids' future. It's about all of us together. Some of us put ourselves out there and do this against some difficult odds. We do it, each one of us, against difficult odds. We do it because we care about our country. Some of us are right, and some of us are not. Some of us are ready, and some of us are not. Some of us know what we will do on day one, and some of us haven't thought that through.

United States could be a great country. It needs to be a great country. It's our responsibility as citizens to make that happen, every single one of us.

We are making politics a spectator sport in which our only duty is to vote somebody into office and then retire to the grandstands.

We must face the bitter fact that we have forsaken our great dream of a life of, for, and by the people; that the burning passions and ideals of the American dream lie congealed by cold cynicism. Great parts of the masses of our people no longer believe that they have a voice or a hand in shaping the destiny of this nation. They have not forsaken democracy because of any desire or positive action of their own; they have been driven down into the depths of a great despair born of frustration, hopelessness, and apathy. A democracy lacking in popular participation dies of paralysis.

October 6, 1774 I met those of our society who had votes in the ensuing election, and advised them 1. To vote, without fee or reward, for the person they judged most worthy 2. To speak no evil of the person they voted against, and 3. To take care their spirits were not sharpened against those that voted on the other side.

I think it's very important for everyone in America to realize right now the state of our country, not just on this issue but on a lot of issues, that it is time to get active again. People have just sat back and just sort of said, oh, let somebody else do it for a long time, and we're seeing what's happening to the country, even freedom of speech. It's not going well. So I think this is a real opportunity for people to see, yes, if you do get out and you do get active, there are other people there. You just have to seek them out.

Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into--what else?--another piece of news. Thus we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.