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Democracy, as has been said of Christianity, has never really been tried.

 

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Democracy means not "I am as good as you are" but "You are as good as I am."

 

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I know of no safe repository of the ultimate power of society but people. And if we think them not enlightened enough, the remedy is not to take the power from them, but to inform them by education.

 

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A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.

 

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Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.

 

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I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master.

 

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The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.

 

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[C]reative ability and personal responsibility are strongest when the mind is free from supernatural belief and operates in an atmosphere of freedom and democracy.

 

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Individual commitment to a group effort -- that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.

 

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So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.



Walt Whitman:

 

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Did you, too, O friend, suppose democracy was only for elections, for politics, and for a party name? I say democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruit in manners, in the highest forms of interaction between [people], and their beliefs -- in religion, literature, colleges and schools -- democracy in all public and private life....

 

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The purpose of democracy -- supplanting old belief in the necessary absoluteness of establish'd dynastic rulership, temporal, ecclesiastical, and scholastic, as furnishing the only security against chaos, crime, and ignorance -- is, through many transmigrations, and amid endless ridicules, arguments, and ostensible failures,

 

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I think it is absolutely essential in a democracy to have competition in the media, a lot of competition, and we seem to be moving away from that.

 

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Governments exist to protect the rights of minorities. The loved and the rich need no protection: they have many friends and few enemies.

 

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Elections are a good deal like marriages. There's no accounting for anyone's taste. Every time we see a bridegroom we wonder why she ever picked him, and it's the same with public officials.

 

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Democracy is not being, it is becoming. It is easily lost, but never finally won.

 

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America's support for human rights and democracy is our noblest export to the world.

 

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All men have a sweetness in their life. That is what helps them go on. It is towards that they turn when they feel too worn

 

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In the middle of every

 

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Anyone who proposes to do good must not expect people to roll stones out of his way, but must accept his lot calmly if they even roll a few more upon it.



Anne Bradstreet: