Democratic Society Quotes

Let us not despair but act. Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past – let us accept our own responsibility for the future.

It is both a right and a responsibility of a democratic society to manage immigration so that it serves the national interest.

Ensuring the access of all citizens to government information and to essential information for human development is a must for every democratic society.

Of course, most luxury goods in China are for corrupted officials and their relatives. And that made China become the biggest luxury-goods market. In this kind of dictatorship, in this kind of totalitarian society, it is easy to make deals that you cannot make in a democratic society.

The role of the teacher remains the highest calling of a free people. To the teacher, America entrusts her most precious resource, her children; and asks that they be prepared … to face the rigors of individual participation in a democratic society.

It is incorrect to say there have been no reforms at all in Burma; there have of course been reforms, but we still need to do more for the people. To become a democratic society we have to continually be reforming.

Privacy is a right, but as in any democratic society, it is not an absolute right.

As a democratic society, Malawi has a moral obligation to ensure that each and every injustice, whether through acts of commission or omission, is met with deliberate and tangible action.

Thoughtful criticism and close scrutiny of all government officials by the press and the public are an important part of our democratic society.

Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society.

Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.

Democracy has always been in crisis: democracy is all about practicing the art of bearable dissatisfaction. In democratic societies, people often complain about their leaders and their institutions. The gap between the ideal democracy and the existing one cannot be bridged.

Democratic societies can’t force people. Therefore they have to control what they think.

Still, corruption and oppression are far too common threats to the democratic society.

The solution to women’s issues can only be achieved in a free and democratic society in which human energy is liberated, the energy of both women and men together. Our civilization is called human civilization and is not attributed only to men or women.

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.

In its current form, globalization cannot be sustained. Democratic societies will not support it. Authoritarian leaders will fear to impose it.

In pluralistic, democratic societies, there is the freedom to adopt the religion of your choice. This is good. This lets curious people like you run around on the loose!

There is danger that totalitarian governments, not subject to vigorous popular debate, will underestimate the will and unity of democratic societies where vital interests are concerned.

We live in a democratic society that allows me to fight the revolution in the corridors of power.

[Students for a Democratic Society] it’s a social democratic program.

What is invaluable about Angela Davis work is that she does not limit her politics to issues removed from broader social considerations, but connects every aspect of her scholarship and public interventions to what the contours of a truly democratic society might look like.

It transmitted because on the campuses, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was recruiting, was organizing. Students for a Democratic Society was founded at Michigan just a couple years before I got there. So, there was a kind of a churning of political awareness. It was just beginning.

That’s the place we’re in right now: we think we have the capability to get every piece of information, and we don’t. We don’t know what’s going on behind the closed curtain. If we want to say we live in a free democratic society, we should be able to find out whatever we want to.

Many of the contradictions in Postmodern art come from the fact that we’re trying to be artists in a democratic society. This is because in a democracy, the ideal is compromise. In art, it isn’t.

We have a responsibility to give people opportunities to do what they can do. It’s a fundamental tenet of democratic society. Libertarians who believe in a completely minimalist state, and don’t feel we have that responsibility, are harming humanity.

With Taiwan, it took about 40 years to go from an authoritarian to a democratic society.

Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making.

Setting aside labels, I am somebody who believes that government in a democratic society should be representing the needs of the vast majority of the people who are middle-class and working families.

That’s where we all kind of were in the mid-1960s. Students for a Democratic Society grew from a small group of socialists at the university of Michigan into a national organization, and in many ways, its growth was driven by the Vietnam War.

I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.

The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.

The solution to women’s issues can only be achieved in a free and democratic society in which human energy is liberated, the energy of both women and men together. Our civilization is called human civilization and is not attributed only to men or women.

I was resolved to sustain and preserve in my college the bite of the mind, the chance to stand face to face with truth, the good life lived in a small, various, highly articulate and democratic society.

In a democratic society, the only treason is silence.

I believe that a guarantee of public access to government information is indispensable in the long run for any democratic society…. if officials make public only what they want citizens to know, then publicity becomes a sham and accountability meaningless.

I don’t see anything immoral, unethical or illegal for a person in a democratic society to be able to spend their own money on the health care of themself or a loved one.

Now teach-ins are fairly common or they become common place. But in 1965, the Students for Democratic Society in Ann Harbor organized the first teach-in. The way it happened was that we were advocating for a strike that we advocated that the faculty should strike in solidarity with the Vietnamese struggle.

It’s tremendously undemocratic in a democratic society when you deliberately disenfranchise thousands of people.

Each American must remember and help America remember that the fellowship of human beings is more important than the fellowship of race and class and gender in a democratic society.

Even in democratic society, we don’t have good answers how to balance the need for security on one hand and the protection of free speech on the other in our digital networks.

Politics in a democratic society should not be treated like a baseball game, a game show or a soap opera. The times are too serious for that.

I have tremendous confidence in the capacity of the poor to transform not only their own lives but also to build a just, humane, and democratic society.

One needs to know what the hierarchy of values are from which one takes inspiration, and in a democratic society this is the subject of continuous democratic debate.

The justice system is a foundation of our existence as a democratic society. I will not be the one to soften its bite. But I will also not allow it to eat away at the legal authority of the legislative and executive branches. We must find the formula for the right balance between the branches.

No one needs to tell me about the importance of the free press in a democratic society or about the essential role a newspaper can play in its community.

I came to the United States because I valued living as a free person, one who is able to advocate in a democratic society. Unfortunately, the U.S. has been turning into a less free society, a police and surveillance state, especially after 9/11.

The bulk of the totalitarian-minded in the democratic societies are men and women who are attracted to this destructive way of life for inner emotional reasons unknown to themselves.

Since a democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority, it must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these can be created only by education.

[Felix Frankfurter] said courts are not representative bodies. They’re not designed to be a good reflex of a democratic society. Their judgment is best informed and, therefore, most dependable within narrow limits.

We must build a trickle-up media that reflects the true character of this country and its people. A democratic media serving a democratic society.

Essentially, social education is moral education, and moral education is preparation for citizenship… When Jefferson and others advocated public education, it was to prepare for citizenship in a new, constitutional, democratic society.

I think violence is counter-productive and it is bad in democratic societies.

Students for a Democratic Society was also affiliated with the civil rights movement everywhere.

There may be some difficulties, some interruptions, but as a nation and as a people, we are going to build a truly multiracial, democratic society that maybe can emerge as a model for the rest of the world.

Party politics in modern democratic society means pandering to a wide variety of different groups and sympathizing with their often quite base motives, such as revenge, power, booty, and spoils, to maintain the necessary level of support.

What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority.

A free and democratic society is not the norm. When you look to the history books, world history was not based on great democratic societies but on imperialism, absolute rule, kings, queens, monarchs, dictators.

This very concept of police assault is a colonialist notion and it holds no significance in a modern, democratic society.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 laid the foundation for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but it also addressed nearly every other aspect of daily life in a would-be free democratic society.

It matters enormously to a successful democratic society like ours that we have three branches of government, each with some independence and some control over the other two. Thats set out in the Constitution.

It’s for scientists to lay out the data and lay out what they think, and then it’s for the public to make up its own mind. We don’t live in a priesthood where some small group imposes its views on other people – that’s not the way that science works, and it’s not the way a democratic society should work.

The chief safeguard of personal freedom in a democratic society is the anarchy and disorder of capitalist individualism.

Democracy in itself does not define or guarantee a free society. History has told many stories of democratic societies that have degenerated into corruption, plunder, and tyranny.

The average man’s love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth… It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty – and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.

I believe that the will of the people is resolved by a strong leadership. Even in a democratic society, events depend on a strong leadership with a strong power of persuasion, and not on the opinion of the masses.

People realise that if Labour is to fulfil its founding goal of transforming our economic and political system into a more equal, free and truly democratic society, which provides security and life-changing opportunities to the British people, then there is no going back.

Healthy debate has been replaced by automatic sensors that eliminate the need for actual talking during a filibuster – a la ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.’ Robust debate is necessary in a democratic society. Instead, our discourse has been relegated to media spin by expert entertainers.

Our democratic societies are in danger. In allowing ourselves to be infiltrated by fear, to be blinded by the passion of identity, we are entertaining the most serious illusions about our freedom.

The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens.

In our democratic society, the library stands for hope, for learning, for progress, for literacy, for self-improvement and for civic engagement. The library is a symbol of opportunity, citizenship, equality, freedom of speech and freedom of thought, and hence, is a symbol for democracy itself.

The completion of the Iraqi cabinet with the appointment of three critical ministers is also confirmation of continued movement toward a just and democratic society in Iraq.

The role of the teacher remains the highest calling of a free people. To the teacher, America entrusts her most precious resource, her children; and asks that they be prepared… to face the rigors of individual participation in a democratic society.

What I said was that in a democratic society, people must be permitted to make their choices and that the choices of women should not be subordinate to the choices of men, otherwise women are less than equal, are second-class citizens.

Generally speaking, the less privileged groups in democratic society, as they become aware of their interests and their political power, will be found to press for ever more state intervention in practically all fields.

Diversity in media is something that is intrinsic to a democratic society. We do not want the whole media owned by one person.

In a democratic society, we politicians have to accept criticism, especially when it is founded.

I remember the Soviet Union and when the Iron Curtain fell down in 1991. I was just 20 years old, and everybody had a dream to live in a modern democratic society, in a modern country. More than 15 years passed, and nothing changed. There’s a saying I like very much: if you want a thing done well, do it by yourself.

Good, healthy democratic societies are built on three pillars: there’s peace and stability, economic development, and respect for rule of law and human rights. And where all three are present, you stand a very good chance of making a go of it.

The end of Students for a Democratic Society is viewed by me and a lot of other people as a terrible sorry in many ways, tragic event even though I participated in it and played some role in it. But I regret a lot of that.

I stand for simple justice, equal opportunity and human rights. The indispensable elements in a democratic society – and well worth fighting for.

We must face the ultimate contradiction that our free and democratic society was made possible by massive slave labor.

Bombs know no ism but barbarism. The laws that successfully govern a peaceful and democratic society do not interfere with the only law bombs know, which is the law of gravity.

Someone who does an act. In a democratic society, you’re supposed to be an activist; that is, you participate. It could be a letter written to an editor.

I grew up in a dictatorship, so I really appreciate democracy. I think democracy isn’t just a random thing that’s around – a democratic society needs the involvement of everybody.

Sweden is still a very peaceful country to live in. I think that people in Britain have created this mythology about Sweden, that it’s a perfect democratic society full of erotically charged girls.

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