The worldwide, agelong struggle between fascism and democracy will not stop when the fighting ends in Germany and Japan.
Henry A. Wallace

Too many people expect wonders from democracy, when the most wonderful thing of all is just having it.
Walter Winchell

My thinking tends to be libertarian. That is, I oppose intrusions of the state into the private realm - as in abortion, sodomy, prostitution, pornography, drug use, or suicide, all of which I would strongly defend as matters of free choice in a representative democracy.
Camille Paglia

But democracy isn't a state of perfection. It has to be improved, and that means constant vigilance.
Antonio Tabucchi

Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.
James Russell Lowell

I have always been of the mind that in a democracy manners are the only effective weapons against the bowie-knife.
James Russell Lowell

Democracy is the form of government that gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.
James Russell Lowell

It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive.
Thomas Mann

Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness.
Thomas Mann

As the tension eases, we must look in the direction of agriculture, industry and education as our final goals, and toward democracy under Mr Mubarak.
Naguib Mahfouz

In Egypt today most people are concerned with getting bread to eat. Only some of the educated understand how democracy works.
Naguib Mahfouz

We have a war dictator who was not elected, he snuck in. so he punishes people that threaten him in any way, or even say something he doesn't like. It has no resemblance to democracy.
Joni Mitchell

The fate of every democracy, of every government based on the sovereignty of the people, depends on the choices it makes between these opposite principles, absolute power on the one hand, and on the other the restraints of legality and the authority of tradition.
John Acton

Far from being the product of a democratic revolution and of an opposition to English institutions, the constitution of the United States was the result of a powerful reaction against democracy, and in favor of the traditions of the mother country.
John Acton

A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.
Emile M. Cioran

I think clearly the United States, as well as other western nations, should stand by their commitments to human rights and democracy and should try to influence other countries to move in that direction.
Samuel P. Huntington

Democracy is a political method, that is to say, a certain type of institutional arrangement for arriving at political - legislative and administrative - decisions and hence incapable of being an end in itself.
Joseph A. Schumpeter

Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it.
Joseph A. Schumpeter

Christianity is the root of all democracy, the highest fact in the rights of men.
Novalis

We're not perfect, but we do have democracy.
Hugo Chavez