When Bush says democracy, I often wonder what he's referring to.
Angela Davis

Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.
Sydney J. Harris

Our democracy, our constitutional framework is really a kind of software for harnessing the creativity and political imagination for all of our people. The American democratic system was an early political version of Napster.
Al Gore

The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.
Lord Acton

I don't have any formula for ousting a dictator or building democracy. All I can suggest is to forget about yourself and just think of your people. It's always the people who make things happen.
Corazon Aquino

Freedom of expression - in particular, freedom of the press - guarantees popular participation in the decisions and actions of government, and popular participation is the essence of our democracy.
Corazon Aquino

It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.
Corazon Aquino

Nobody and nothing will stop Russia on the road to strengthening democracy and ensuring human rights and freedoms.
Vladimir Putin

Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking.
Clement Attlee

We urge all democratic nations and the United Nations to answer the Iraqi Governing Council's call for support for the people of Iraq in making the transition to democracy.
Dick Cheney

The ship of democracy, which has weathered all storms, may sink through the mutiny of those on board.
Grover Cleveland

In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!
Simone Weil

Advertising is the very essence of democracy.
Anton Chekhov

And that is my definition of democracy, the right to be in a minority and not be suppressed.
Lee Harvey Oswald

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
E. B. White

The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy.
Charles de Montesquieu

Democracy divides people into workers and loafers. It makes no provision for those who have no time to work.
Karl Kraus

Democracy means the opportunity to be everyone's slave.
Karl Kraus

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

Democracy and socialism are means to an end, not the end itself.
Jawaharlal Nehru