We have accepted the principle of democracy and we are committed to respect the popular verdict and the result of that national consultation.
Mahmoud Abbas

Deliberation and debate is the way you stir the soul of our democracy.
Jesse Jackson

We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.
Louis D. Brandeis

To say that most of us today are purely expansive is only another way of saying that most of us continue to be more concerned with the quantity than with the quality of our democracy.
Irving Babbitt

The struggle for democracy and human rights in Burma is a struggle for life and dignity. It is a struggle that encompasses our political, social and economic aspirations.
Aung San Suu Kyi

A democracy, the realistic observer is forced to conclude, is likely to be idealistic in its feelings about itself, but imperialistic about its practice.
Irving Babbitt

Democracy is now going forth on a crusade against imperialism.
Irving Babbitt

If a man went simply by what he saw, he might be tempted to affirm that the essence of democracy is melodrama.
Irving Babbitt

The democracy process provides for political and social change without violence.
Aung San Suu Kyi

Democracy is an abuse of statistics.
Jorge Luis Borges

The first and continuing argument for the curtailment of working hours and the raising of the minimum age was that education was necessary in a democracy and working children could not attend school.
Grace Abbott

No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.
Walter Lippmann

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
Gustave Flaubert

You have to stand guard over the development and maintenance of Islamic democracy, Islamic social justice and the equality of manhood in your own native soil.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah

Democracy is not something you put away for ten years, and then in the 11th year you wake up and start practicing again. We have to begin to learn to rule ourselves again.
Chinua Achebe

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.
Norman Mailer

I'm not overly alarmist about it, but I do think there are some worrying signs, like the growing accumulation of wealth by a very small proportion of the population, plus elections in the US are much more dominated by money than anywhere else calling itself a democracy.
Peter Singer

It means that, in fact, it's - whether fascist is the right word I don't know - more of a plutocracy than anything resembling a democracy; it has become a nation controlled by a very small, very wealthy elite.
Peter Singer

Education is a human right with immense power to transform. On its foundation rest the cornerstones of freedom, democracy and sustainable human development.
Kofi Annan

If information and knowledge are central to democracy, they are the conditions for development.
Kofi Annan