Democratic Institutions Quotes

We enter parliament in order to supply ourselves, in the arsenal of democracy, with its own weapons…. If democracy is so stupid as to give us free tickets and salaries for this … work, that is its affair.

The function of a newspaper in a democracy is to stand as a sort of chronic opposition to the reigning quacks.

I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty, or civilization, or both….

If there’s not a good feedback loop from the people to the government, and if you have rule of the bureaucrat — if the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have? If the people cannot vote and have their will be decided by their elected representatives in the form of the president and the Senate and the House, then we don’t live in a democracy. We live in a bureaucracy.

Our libraries are not cloisters for an elite. They are for the people, and if they are not used, the fault belongs to those who do not take advantage of their wealth.

Democracy is morose, and runs to anarchy, but in the state, and in the schools, it is indispensable to resist the consolidation ofall men into a few men.

Not only our future economic soundness but the very soundness of our democratic institutions depends on the determination of our government to give employment to idle men.

The fight for education and justice is inseparable from the struggle for economic equality, human dignity and security, and the challenge of developing American institutions along genuinely democratic lines.

The real fight isn't left or right but between forces of democracy across the spectrum and the forces of tyranny.

Do I think that American democracy ends if Trump is president? No! I think, there are plenty of checks and balances in place. I think he would do some damage to the country but we would recover. The office of the presidency and American democratic institutions are a lot stronger than one person. So if he wins, our job is just to keep the office strong, right? And hope he'll be replaced by something better!

It is tragic that so few young people in Western democracies vote. They have forgotten that their ancestors fought for the right to choose and change their leaders. They don't realise that their votes are more important than their tweets or Facebook posts.

If the presidency is the head of the American body politic, Congress is its gastrointestinal tract. Its vast and convoluted inner workings may be mysterious and unpleasant, but in the end they excrete a great deal of material whose successful passage is crucial to our nation's survival.

All the more reason we need to stand up for our democracy now. If we're going to solve the crises that are barreling down on us, we need democracy, and our democracy needs to start with an open and inclusive debate. That doesn't mean 20 candidates. There are four candidates who are on the ballot for just about every voter in America.

Economic developments made modern democracy possible.

Trump was so different - in a bad way - that I thought the best thing I could do was to resist him. And that's because he was attacking the institutions of our democracy, from the First Amendment and the free press to the judiciary. He was stifling internal dissent, and then he was making false and misleading statements routinely. And to me, that's what takes us down the road to authoritarianism and that's why I decided to start resisting him.

Populists feed on democratic dysfunction. As long as democratic elites and institutions in advanced industrial democracies remain unable or unwilling to tackle the myriad challenges facing their societies, we should expect populism to remain an attractive political option.

What Tunisia urgently needs, is freedom and the building of a real democracy.

A free press is the cornerstone of democracy; there is no question about that.

From literature to ecology, from the escape velocity of galaxies to the greenhouse effect, from garbage disposal methods to traffic jams, everything is discussed in our world. But the democratic system, as if it were a given fact, untouchable by nature until the end of time, we don't discuss that.

We need to get a stable Afghanistan that can ensure the security of Americans, Europeans, and others on the one hand, but more fundamentally our own democratic rights and institutions.

Democratic societies with established institutions must help those societies that do not yet have established institutions.

We have throughout our history been tested when it comes to the institutions of our democracy. And thank God our forefathers were smart enough to establish a government of checks and balances to make sure that power cannot be centralized in any one branch of government. And those institutions have proven themselves.

If you look at the architecture of Washington, D.C., it is not by mistake that the dome over the Capitol is the very center of the federal city. The White House and the Supreme Court are set about us, satellites to the supreme power of the people expressed in the legislative authority of Congress.

Congress and elected bodies always tend to react. As public bodies we are behind the people.

Democracy is our commitment. It is our great legacy, a legacy we simply cannot compromise. Democracy is in our DNA. I have seen the strength of democracy. If there were no democracy then someone like me, Modi, a child born in a poor family, how would he sit here? This is the strength of democracy.