Madeleine Albright Quotes

Democracy is slow moving in the short run, … but if it has the backing of the people, it proves to be more durable.

Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

Democracy is very powerful but very fragile.

Democracy is nothing more than an experiment in government, more likely to succeed in a new soil, but likely to be tried in all soils, which must stand or fall on its own merits as others have done before it. For there is no trick of perpetual motion in politics any more than in mechanics.

No democracy pretends to be a tyranny. Most tyrannies pretend they are democracies. Democracy remains the definition of political legitimacy.

Democracy is an interesting, even laudable, notion and there is no question but that when compared to Communism, which is too dull, or Fascism, which is too exciting, it emerges as the most palatable form of government.

[O]ur sages in the great [constitutional] convention... intended our government should be a republic which differs more widely from a democracy than a democracy from a despotism. The rigours of a despotism often... oppress only a few, but it is the very essence and nature of a democracy, for a faction claiming to oppress a minority, and that minority the chief owners of the property and truest lovers of their country.

Well, you know, too much democracy is a sort of sad thing.

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.

Democracy is a good client.

Democracy is only an experiment in government, and it has the obvious disadvantage of merely counting votes instead of weighing them.

Sometimes it's better to have a benign dictator than a dumb democracy, to be honest.

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.

Democracy, loudly upheld as a cure for much of the ailing world, has proved no guarantor of political wisdom, even if it remains the least bad form of government.

Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.

Democracy is good. I say this because other systems are worse.

Democracy... is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder; and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.

Democracy is an imperfect way of steering between the violence of anarchy and the violence of tyranny, with the least violence you can get away with.

Our system of government is protected from the cabal of the few and the confusion of the multitude.

Democracy is good, provided the government can function.

Democracy is only tolerable because no other system is.

Democracy is the form of government in which the free are rulers.

Democracy is not an easy form of government, because it is never final; it is a living, changing organism, with a continuous shifting and adjusting of balance between individual freedom and general order.

American democracy is at its best in its talent for the transfer for power.

This is a democracy, not a dictatorship. Polls give candidates a method to find out what voters want.