Jurgen Habermas Quotes

I cannot believe that a republic could subsist if the influence of the lawyers in public business did not increase in proportion to the power of the people.

If in a democratic country nothing can be permanently achieved save through the masses of the people, it will be impossible to establish a higher political life than the people themselves crave.

You can't afford to hate politics. The politics of this country is democracy. Democracy is by the people, of the people and for the people. The day people stop taking active part in the politics of this country, democracy will not survive.

These days there are not enough of such intermediary groups, between the state and the individual, with the result that political leaders are often unduly guided by opinion polls.

Pakistan's future viability, stability and security lie in empowering its people and building political institutions. My goal is to prove that the fundamental battle for the hearts and minds of a generation can be accomplished only under democracy.

Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking.

I take the debate on the method of promoting democracy seriously.

In a Democracy, look how many … many powerful Orators there are with the people.

Roosevelt understood that democracy requires persuasion and consent

The trouble with the social-democratic state is that, when government does too much, nobody else does much of anything.

There is always the risk in advocating for democracy that the first people to wake up might not be your team, but that is a risk worth taking. I would rather have citizens I don't agree with organized and active than an oligarchy of people that I agree with.

I hate to create cynicism about politicians. We just need to invade. Regular people need to run for office and keep their balls and ovaries intact.

Democracy can be sustained and developed only by people who understand its essence.

Educated people can make their own choices about their governments. And certainly for women, an education allows you to understand your rights.

the qualifications for self-government in society are not innate. they are the result of habit and long training.

The stakes ... are too high for government to be a spectator sport.

No government can continue good but under the control of the people; and . . . . their minds are to be informed by education what is right and what wrong; to be encouraged in habits of virtue and to be deterred from those of vice . . . . These are the inculcations necessary to render the people a sure basis for the structure and order of government.

The ultimate victory of tomorrow is democracy, and through democracy with education, for no people in all the world can be kept eternally ignorant or eternally enslaved.

You said, 'How is it possible for democracy to work with an illiterate people who are dying of hunger?' But with that people we made a democracy work.

If once the people become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions.

Democracy means far more than the right to vote every five years. It means the right to participate in every aspect of national and community life. The people must believe that they can take part.

The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information.

Most people turn things like elections into a fetish and think it's the only way to go: if we just keep giving people the vote, that'll solve all our problems. In the end, that's just a silly, infantile notion.

Democracy is not a good that people can enjoy without trouble. It is, on the contrary, a treasure that must be daily defended and conquered anew by strenuous effort.

Democracy in the contemporary world demands, among other things, an educated and informed people.