Zephyr Teachout Quotes

We need to get better at voting and be a voice for the people who do not have one.

You need to remind people that you vote, you matter, and that they can’t succeed without your help.

This is also something I've learned from experience. Didn't they perhaps give us the vote because we went too far?

We do have some people that have never voted before.

Your vote is your voice.

I don't want to tell anybody who to vote for; I'd rather people just do their homework and make sure they vote for the person that they feel like is best to run our country.

The very act of voting is a political act.

Whatever changes a common man wants to bring in the country, he can bring it through the process of voting.

Telling or encouraging people to vote for a party would be an insult to peoples' intellect.

Democracy is a system where people are counted not weighed.

The question of education has nothing to do with the question of the vote. On numerous occasions it has been proved in history that people can enjoy the vote even if they have no education.

What you need to do is protect the structures and dynamics that are helping the people choose. The only thing that we can do is to respect the will of the people when it comes to majority processes. It is not for us to impose a model, it is not for us to impose answers to some critical questions.

The people have to have the power: it belongs to the people.

We need to be asking for the vote in the most powerful way possible, which is to have people asking for the vote who are comfortable and look like and sound like the people that we're asking for the vote from.

The rational and peaceable instrument of reform, the suffrage of the people.

Where is democratic process or popular sovereignty for the endangered population? It cannot be "given" or "allocated" by some other power without that same power claiming the right to withdraw what it gives.

Elections should be about making the people a part of the development journey. That is when India will move ahead.

Well, it all began with Democracy. Before we had the vote all the power was in the hands of rich people. If you had money you could get health care, education, look after yourself when you were old, and what democracy did was to give the poor the vote and it moved power from the marketplace to the polling station, from the wallet...to the ballot.

Should people be mere "interested spectators of action," not "participants," restricted to lending their weight periodically to one or another sector of the "responsible men," as advocates of "manufacture of consent" have recommended? Or should their rights transcend these highly restricted bounds?

I say from time to time that the vote is precious. It's almost sacred. It is the most powerful nonviolent tool or instrument that we have in a democratic society. And we must use it.

I think that the voters should choose the elected officials, not the elected officials choose the voters.

Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.

Politics is about the participation and engagement of the wider citizenry - to miss that point would doom us to irrelevance.

Let the people decide whom to vote for, who has more authority. And only people, only our citizens, are able to place the final emphasis, voting for this or that person or political force, or rejecting it. That's democracy.

Improved turnout will give parliament and government the appearance of being more legitimate.