Tony Cardenas Quotes

Democracy passes into despotism.

Let's not pretend we have too much of a democracy here, because we don't.

Concentration of executive power, unless it's very temporary and for specific circumstances, let's say fighting world war two, it's an assault on democracy.

I've made the comment that democracies work slower than dictatorships. That's a true thing.

Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy.

Democracy is alive, and like any other living thing it either flourishes and grows or withers and dies. There is no in-between. It is freedom and life or dictatorship and death.

It is an essential tenet of our whole representative form of government, the idea that there should not be some tyranny which makes it so nobody can even have a chance to vote.

We have to implant democracies where there are now dictatorships.

The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting.

Anywhere, anytime ordinary people are given the chance to choose, the choice is the same: freedom, not tyranny; democracy, not dictatorship; the rule of law, not the rule of the secret police.

For me every ruler is alien that defies public opinion.

One is actually the democracy here, you know, people are, people assume that this election means that there is democracy in Pakistan. There is no democracy.

The known propensity of a democracy is to licentiousness which the ambitious call, and the ignorant believe to be liberty.

Be assured, fellow citizens, that in a democracy it is the laws that guard the person of the citizen and the constitution of the state, whereas the despot and the oligarch find their protection in suspicion and in armed guards.

Freedom's skeptics must understand that the democracy that hates you is less dangerous than the dictator who loves you.

Democracy is slow … A king can always outrun a congressman.

We shall determine all matters of state by public discussion, after assemblies have been convoked far and wide.

The difference between being out of step with a dictator and being out of step with the democratic majority is practically negligible. The important thing is to be in step.

Where annual elections end, there tyranny begins..

Any president we choose becomes a czar in Russia. I don't want czars anymore. I don't want to be a czar myself. I want to be a democratic leader.

The idea that if governments open up and become more democratic they will fall is a false dilemma.

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

Government of the people by the people and for the people cannot be conducted at the bidding of one man, however great he may be.

I lived in countries that had no democracy... so I don't find myself in the same luxury as you do. You grew up in freedom, and you can spit on freedom because you don't know what it is not to have freedom.

Democracy is the opposite of totalitarianism, communism, fascism, or mobocracy.