Larisa Alexandrovna Quotes

I'm a patriot, and I think democracy is the best system available. It's very flawed, but it works better than anything else.

As an American I am of course fundamentally opposed to democracy and to anyone advocating or defending democracy, which in theory and practice is the basis of socialism.

It is democracy I am really suffering from as much as I am suffering from the opposition.

Democracy the domination of unreflective and timorous men, moved in vast herds by mob conditions.

Democracy is reproached with saying that the majority is always right. But progress says that the minority is always right.

This is regrettable indeed for a nation that aspires to teach democracy to other nations, because, as Burke said: "Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other."

A perfect democracy is therefore the most shameless thing in the world.

India has remained a full, functioning democracy.

Lycurgus being asked why he, who in other respects appeared to be so zealous for the equal rights of men, did not make his government democratical rather than oligarchical, "Go you," replied the legislator, "and try a democracy in your own house.

Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.… You ask for votes for women. What good can votes do when ten-elevenths of the land of Great Britain belongs to 200,000 and only one-eleventh to the rest of the 40,000,000? Have your men with their millions of votes freed themselves from this injustice?

I’m not intellectually convinced that one-man, one-vote is the best. We practise it because that’s what the British bequeathed us

We are inclined to confuse freedom and democracy, which we regard as moral principles, with the way in which they are practiced in America with capitalism, federalism, and the two-party system, which are not moral principles but simply the preferred and accepted practices of the American people.

When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself.

Democracy is the suggestion box for slaves.

Whenever all men are...hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.

No good government but what is republican... the very definition of a republic is 'an empire of laws, and not of men.'

I am not a person of the left. But one of the things, the central idea of democracy is that you have a bigger investment in the system as a whole than you do in any particular outcome.

Democracy is a word all public men use and none understand.

Democracy is based on the majority principle. This is especially true in a country such as ours where the vast majority have been systematically denied their rights. At the same time, democracy also requires that the rights of political and other minorities be safeguarded.

The question in brief, is whether democracy and freedom are values to be preserved or threats to be avoided . . . democracy and freedom are more than values to be treasured; they may well be essential to survival.

Democracy, republics: What do these words signify?

I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.

As for democracy, the men of sense among us knew what it was, and I perhaps as well as any, as I have more cause to complain of it; but there is nothing new to be said of a patent absurdity-meanwhile we did not think it safe to alter it under the pressure of your hostility.

Russia has made its choice in favor of democracy. Fourteen years ago, independently, without any pressure from outside, it made that decision in the interests of itself and interests of its people - of its citizens. This is our final choice, and we have no way back. There can be no return to what we used to have before.

Mr Jefferson meant that the American system should be a democracy, and he would rather have let the whole world perish than that this principle, which to him represented all that man was worth, should fail. Mr Hamilton considered democracy a fatal curse, and meant to stop its progress.