Democracy Quotes - Page 25

• Money will cease to be master and become the servant of humanity. Democracy will rise superior to the money power.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Humanity, Money Power, Masters

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• No politician can praise unemployment or inflation, and there is no way of combining high employment with stable prices that does not involve some control of income and prices. Otherwise the struggle for more consumption and more income to sustain it-a struggle that modern corporations, modern unions and modern democracy all facilitate and encourage-will drive up prices. Only heavy unemployment will then temper this upward thrust. Not many wish to confront the truth that the modern economy gives a choice only between inflation, unemployment, or controls.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Struggle, Giving, Choices

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• The ideal of a perfectly functioning democracy is one person, one vote; the ideal of a perfectly functioning market is one dollar, one vote.It's a hoary superstition that democratically elected governments invariably function as instruments of the collective will.A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Government, Order, Dollars

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• The capitalist system of production is an economic democracy in which every penny gives a right to vote. The consumers are the sovereign people. The capitalists, the entrepreneurs, and the farmers are the people's mandatories. If they do not obey, if they fail to produce, at the lowest possible cost, what

  Ludwig von Mises

  People, Giving, Entrepreneur

  Ludwig Von Mises (1944). “Bureaucracy”

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• The genius of capitalism consists precisely in its lack of morality. Unless he is rich enough to hire his own choir, a capitalist is a fellow who, by definition, can ill afford to believe in anything other than the doctrine of the bottom line. Deprive a capitalist of his God-given right to lie and cheat and steal, and the poor sap stands a better than even chance of becoming one of the abominable wards of the state from whose grimy fingers the Reagan Administration hopes to snatch the ark of democracy.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  War, Lying, Believe

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• If democracy is justified in governing the state,then it must also be justified in governing economic enterprises, and to say that it is not justified in governing economic enterprises is to imply that it is not justified in governing the state.

  Robert A. Dahl

  Justified, Economic, States

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• From the viewpoint of economic democracy, the capitalism-socialism debate was a debate between private and state capitalism (i.e., the private or public employment system), and the debate was as misframed as would be a debate between the private or public ownership of slaves.

  David P. Ellerman

  Would Be, Employment, Viewpoints

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• Americans are a very backward people, with all the real virtues of a backward people; the patriarchal simplicity and human dignity of a democracy, and a respect for labor uncorrupted by cynicism.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Respect, Real, People

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• The proper goal of an economic democracy agenda is to replace the global suicide economy ruled by rapacious and unaccountable global corporations with a planetary system of local living economies comprised of human-scale enterprise rooted in the communities they serve and locally owned by the people whose wellbeing depends on them.

  David Korten

  Suicide, Goal, People

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• We must add our voices to those who cry out that there is a standard below which we will not allow human beings to live, and that that standard is not at the freezing nor starving point....In a democracy all are responsible.

  Hannah G. Solomon

  Responsibility, Voice, Add

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• The spread of democracy is a wonderful thing-it is a necessary foundation for peace-and it can happen. But it cannot be advanced by force, and still less by the creation of a new empire, an idea that is as unworkable as it morally mistaken. Empire, the embodiment of force, violates equity on a global scale. No lover of freedom can give it support. It is especially contrary to the founding principles of the United States.

  Jonathan Schell

  Ideas, Giving, Support

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• Politics and morality are inseparable. And as morality's foundation is religion, religion and politics are necessarily related. We need religion as a guide. We need it because we are imperfect, and our government needs the church, because only those humble enough to admit they're sinners can bring to democracy the tolerance it requires in order to survive.

  Ronald Reagan

  Humble, Government, Order

  Remarks at a Dallas Ecumenical Prayer Breakfast, delivered 23 August 1984 at Reunion Arena, Dallas, TX

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• It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history . . . . [It is] the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history, as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.

  Ronald Reagan

  Running, Self, Expression

  Address to British Parliament, delivered 8 June 1982, Royal Gallery at the Palace of Westminster, London

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• In fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost if not quite one and the same. They both rest at bottom upon the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members. Men as communities are supreme over men as individuals. Limits of wisdom and convenience to the public control there may be: limits of principle there are, upon strict analysis, none.

  Woodrow Wilson

  Destiny, Men, Rights

  Woodrow Wilson, Arthur Stanley Link, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, Princeton University (1968). “The papers of Woodrow Wilson”

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• What kind of victory is it when someone is left defeated? What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy. What is a war criminal? Was not war itself a crime against God and humanity, and, therefore, were not all those who sanctioned, engineered and conducted wars, war criminals? The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong. Non-cooperation with evil is a sacred duty.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Strong, War, Differences

  Non-Violence in Peace and War (1942) vol. 1, ch. 142

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• It is part of the moral tragedy with which we are dealing that words like 'democracy,' 'freedom,' 'rights,' 'justice,' which have so often inspired heroism and have led men to give their lives for things which make life worthwhile, can also become a trap, the means of destroying the very things men desire to uphold.

  Norman Angell

  War, Mean, Men

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• Every one of the aristocratic conspirators and would-be murderers claims to be an arch-patriot; every one of them insists that the war is being waged to make the world safe for democracy. What humbug! What rot! What false pretense! These... tyrants, these red-handed robbers and murderers, the "patriots," while the men who have the courage to stand face to face with them, speak the truth, and fight for their exploited victims - they are [called] the disloyalists and traitors. If this be true, I want to take my place side by side with the traitors in this fight.

  Eugene V. Debs

  War, Fighting, Men

  Eugene V. Debs' speech he gave across the street from a jail, where he had just visited three socialists who were in prison for opposing the draft, June 1918.

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• Acts of terror have never brought down liberal democracies. Acts of parliament have closed a few.

  William Eldridge Odom

  War, Parliament, Terror

  "The Mythical End to the Politics of Fear" by Norman Solomon, www.huffingtonpost.com. August 24, 2006.

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• Foreign policy of a pluralistic democracy like the United States should be based on bipartisanship because bipartisanship is the means and the framework for formulating policies based on moderation and on the recognition of the complexity of the human condition. That has been the tradition since the days of Truman and Vandenberg all the way until recent times.

  Zbigniew Brzezinski

  Mean, United States, Way

  Address to the New American Strategies Conference, October 28, 2003.

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• Good citizenship and defending democracy means living up to the ideals and values that make this country great.

  Ronald Reagan

  Country, Character, Mean

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• In democratic centuries, on the contrary, when the duties of each individual toward the species are much clearer, devotion toward one man becomes rarer: the bond of human affections is extended and loosened.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Men, Affection, Devotion

  Alexis de Tocqueville (2012). “Democracy in America”, p.483, University of Chicago Press

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• It may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more constant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves.

  James Madison

  Voice, People, May

  "Federalist No. 10. The Same Subject Continued: The Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection" by James Madison, www.congress.gov. November 23, 1787.

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• If it be true that democracy is based upon the assumption that every man shall serve his fellow man, the organization of democracy should be gradually adapted to that assumption.

  Herbert Croly

  Men, Organization, Fellow Man

  Herbert Croly (2005). “The Promise of American Life”, p.418, Cosimo, Inc.

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• The majority of men cannot be made disinterested for life by exhortation, by religious services, by any expenditure of subsidized works, or even by grave and manifest public need. They can be made permanently unselfish only by being helped to become disinterested in their individual purposes. In the complete democracy a man must in some way be made to serve the nation in the very act of contributing to his own individual fulfillment. Not until his personal action is dictated by disinterested motives can there be any such harmony between private and public interests.

  Herbert Croly

  Religious, Men, Majority

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• I am not concerned with dodging the odium of the word. The proposed definition of democracy is socialistic . . . (democracy) should be characterized not so much socialistic, as unscrupulously and loyally nationalistic.

  Herbert Croly

  Definitions, Should, Concerned

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