democracy

The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.

When you fight, you don't fight for abstract values like the flag, or the nation, or democracy. You fight for your buddy. You fight to keep him alive, and he fights to keep you alive, and you go on that way, day after day, battle after battle. And when one of your buddies dies, something inside you dies as well. But you go on. You fight, so that his death isn't meaningless, his sacrifice isn't for nothing.

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.

The antithesis of democracy is class dictatorship, whether by groups of bankers, investors, managers, politicians, lawyers or union members. Over a considerable part of the world the unspeakable doctrine is being preached that the ideal of a democratic State is a snare and a delusion. A politician if he denies the existence of the essentials of democracy and denies it in such a way as to create class feeling, is not working in the interest of democracy even though he protests to the high heavens that that is his objective.

Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.

Our Creator has put in us hungers that this earth can- not satisfy. We cannot be completely self-contained on earth. Physical sense cannot give us a full life, nor can knowledge alone. No life is full unless it is linked to some- thing that goes on after we are dead.... If we have nothing more to live for than just to get ahead in a competitive system, then democracy will go down before other philosophies.

There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship.

The imposition of stigma is the most common form of violence used in democratic societies.

Democracy, which is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.

Democracy passes into despotism.