George Bernard Shaw Quotes

Carry out the republican principle of universal suffrage, or strike it from your banners and substitute 'Freedom and Power to one half of society, and Submission and Slavery to the other.'

Take the US. Women were not even able to vote until 90 ago, at about the same time they gained the right in Afghanistan. Rights of former slaves were very limited until the 1960s, and in some ways still are. In these and other domains there has been progress in democracy, though still seriously flawed. In other dimensions - the control of concentrated wealth over the political process, for example, things have gotten much worse in recent years. And there is much more, in both directions.

Elections are when you have to make a choice. Perfection not often attainable!

The elections are the greatest symbol of participation and political reform.

Popular suffrage is in itself no guarantee of freedom. People can vote themselves into slavery.

One way we exercise political freedom is to vote for the candidate of our choice. Another way is to use our money to try to persuade other voters to make a similar choice - that is, to contribute to our candidate's campaign. If either of these freedoms is violated, the consequences are very grave not only for the individual voter and contributor, but for the society whose free political processes depend on a wide distribution of political power.

I have never voted in my life... I have always known and understood that the idiots are in a majority so it's certain they will win.

Voting in this country has essentially been relegated to a very fledging group of election officials, who receive no training and operate on shoestring budgets on one hand, and political consultants whose job is to get their candidates elected on the other. And when you have that kind of scenario, it's really hard to describe yourself as a vibrant democracy. It's an embarrassment.

If everybody voted, then it would completely change the political map in this country.

Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man. How's that again? I missed something.

The protesters have called into question whether there is a real democracy. Real democracy is more than the right to vote once every two or four years. The choices have to be meaningful. But increasingly, and especially in the US, it seems that the political system is more akin to "one dollar one vote" than to "one person one vote". Rather than correcting the market failures, the political system was reinforcing them.

Take it from me: Elections matter.

Is not the very beginning of privilege, monopoly and industrial slavery this erecting of the ballot-box above the individual?

I want to tell you that Israel is a democracy and every citizen is automatically registered to vote. There's a commitment in our declaration of independence, guaranteed under Israel's law, that all our citizens, Arab and Jews, alike, have the right to vote.

They're rights that should be endemic to any democracy. The right to a free quality education, from elementary school right through higher education. The right to have a decent social wage. The right to a decent job. Political rights; the right to vote. These are all parts of the social contract, from the New Deal onwards, that never went far enough.

With all its faults, the American political system is the freest and most democratic in the world.

I'll always push for what I believe in. That's what you're supposed to do. If you're an American, you're supposed to be part of the political process, especially if you've been denied it.

My critics always forget to mention that I was democratically elected, the others were not. Everyone in Uganda can challenge me, everyone can vote, the elections are free. Not many countries have achieved what we did.

Investment that only goes to enrich an already wealthy elite bent on monopolizing both economic and political power cannot contribute toward égalité and justice - the foundation stones for a sound democracy.

If we remain grotesquely unequal, we shall lose all sense of fraternity: and fraternity, for all its fatuity as a political objective, turns out to be the necessary condition of politics itself.

You can’t have meaningful political democracy without functioning economic democracy.

I think what it was about was the people's right to vote and have those votes counted. And if you think back through our history, an awful lot of what we've fought over, struggled for, is the right of people to vote. That's what the civil-rights movement was, at its bottom, about. At the fundamental level, democracy means a government in which the people vote.

Standing in a two-hour line makes people worry that they're not living in a democratic nation. People stand in line for two houres and they go over the edge.