Lisa Ling Quotes

We all learn in school that the judicial, legislative and executive branches of government must check and balance each other. But other non state institutions must participate in this important system of checks and balances as well. These checking institutions include the academy, the media, religious institutions and NGOs.

There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship.

Oppositions clean and purify those in office and we in the opposition are in fact the detergents of democracy.

I think it's the height of patriotism to continue to exercise your right as a citizen and to hold your government to account. Isn't that what the very essence of democracy is about?

Our democracy... is only as good as the American people demand it should be.

Democracy is the most demanding of all forms of government in terms of the energy, imagination, and public spirit required of the individual.

Bernard Shaw remains the only model we have of what the citizen of a democracy should be: an informed participant in all things we deem important to the society and the individual.

What should be targeted is a concept of organic, and not just mechanic, democracy that preserves the rule of law, separation of powers, and that is participatory and pluralistic.

Dishonesty in government is the business of every citizen. It is not enough to do your own job. There's no particular virtue in that. Democracy isn't a gift. It's a responsibility.

We are in a democratic society. It's our job to question.

To find ways of practicing democracy, not ways of orating about it, is our great problem.

You should always be questioning your government, but do not become cynical.

In a democracy, supposedly we hold power by what we do at the ballot box, so therefore the more we know about political power the better our choices should be and the better, in theory, our democracy should be.

I call on people to be 'obsessed citizens,' forever questioning and asking for accountability. That's the only chance we have today of a healthy and happy life.

My dream of politics all my life has been that it is the common business, that it is something we owe to each other to understand and discuss with absolute frankness.

We are not perfect. Democracy is a messy business … Democracy depends on people getting and keeping involved … In our democracy, the government is not them; it is us.

The first line of the U. S. Constitution is “We the people” … in thriving democracies any time that any player takes a key decision that ignores or evades “We the people” he violates the spirit of democracy and condemns himself to illegitimacy.

Africa must develop a genuine culture of alternation and opposition, without which democracy in any country, including the West, cannot exist.

The people want to exercise power but what on earth would they do with it if it were given to them?

… the people as the fourth branch of government

... the even more fundamental task that lies before the leader of a democracy is to bring to the people the realization that true democracy is the effort of the people individually to carry their share of the burden of government.

Authoritarian regimes in countries with weak, uninformed, or repressed civil societies will be less susceptible to transparency’s pressures.

Democracy, of course, requires strong demands from the public.

A government of, by, and for the people requires that people talk to people, that we can agree to disagree but do so in civility. If we let the politicians and those who report dictate our discourse, then our course will be dictated.

What my parents taught me was that the hallmark of a thriving democracy was an effective and respectful police force.