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

We cannot use a double standard for measuring our own and other people's policies. Our demands for democratic practices in other lands will be no more effective than the guarantees of those practiced in our own country.

- Hubert H. Humphrey

The best safeguard against fascism is to establish social justice to the maximum extent possible.

- Arnold Toynbee

The most important political office is that of the private citizen.

- Louis D. Brandeis

There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.

- Marshall McLuhan

Intellect does not attain its full force unless it attacks power.

- Madame de Stael

A community is democratic only when the humblest and weakest person can enjoy the highest civil, economic, and social rights that the biggest and most powerful possess.

- A. Philip Randolph

The educator with a democratic vision or posture cannot avoid in his teaching praxis insisting on the critical capacity, curiosity, and autonomy of the learner.

- Paulo Freire

Don't ever dare to take your college as a matter of course -- because, like democracy and freedom, many people you'll never know have broken their hearts to get it for you.

- Alice Miller

The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be propagated.

- William Ellery Channing

The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don't agree with.

- Eleanor Holmes Norton

I have spent many years of my life in opposition and I rather like the role.

- Eleanor Roosevelt

The discrepancy between American ideals and American practice creates a dry rot which eats away at the foundations of our democratic faith.

- Helen Gahagan Douglas

Interactivity has the virtue of democracy, conferring upon everyone with access to a computer the right and opportunity to be heard, but it's also saddled with democracy's vice -- a tendency to assume that everyone who has a right to be heard has something to say that's worth hearing.

- Wendy Kaminer

The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.

- Franklin D. Roosevelt

When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free.

- Charles Evan Hughes



Democracy is being allowed to vote for the candidate you dislike least.

- Robert Byrne



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



Democracy is not something that happens, you know, just at election time, and it's not something that happens just with one event. It's an ongoing building process. But it also ought to be a part of our culture, a part of our lives.

- Jim Hightower



Democracy is this -- to hold
That all who wander down the pike
In cart or car, on foot or bike,
Or male or female, young or old,
Are much alike -- are much alike.

- Alice Duer Miller



At every turn when there has been an imbalance of power, the truth questioned, or our beliefs and values distorted, the change required to restore our nation has always come from the bottom up from our people.

- Howard Dean



The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.

- Woodrow Wilson



It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive.

- Thomas Mann



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 or democracy?

- Mohandas K. Gandhi



Corruption and hypocrisy ought not to be inevitable products of democracy, as they undoubtedly are today.

- Mohandas K. Gandhi



Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate, and where no opportunity for the forming of opinions exists, there may be moods -- moods of the masses and moods of individuals, the latter no less fickle and unreliable than the former -- but no opinion.

- Hannah Arendt



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

- Reinhold Niebuhr



If you don't speak out now when it matters, when would it matter for you to speak out?

- Jim Hightower



It seems to me that whereas power usually means power-over, the power of some person or group over some other person or group, it is possible to develop the conception of power-with, a jointly developed power, a co-active, not a coercive power.

- Mary Parker Follett



Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness.

- Thomas Mann



The earth is ready, the time is ripe, for the authoritative expression of the feminine as well as the masculine interpretation of that common social consensus which is slowly writing justice in the State and fraternity in the social order.

- Anna Garlin Spencer



Representative government is closer to democracy than monarchy, and for this reason it has been hailed as one of the great political advances of modern times; yet, it is only a step in the direction of democracy, at its best.

- Howard Zinn



The essence of democracy is its assurance that every human being should so respect himself and should be so respected in his own personality that he should have opportunity equal to that of every other human being to show what he was meant to become.

- Anna Garlin Spencer



The right to live one's life, in privacy and freedom, in whatever way one wants, so long as others are not harmed, should be a sacred principle in a democracy.

- Howard Zinn



Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.

- Howard Zinn



The great danger for American democracy is not from the protesters. That democracy is too poorly realized for us to consider critics -- even rebels -- as the chief problem. Its fulfillment requires us all, living in an ossified system which sustains too much killing and too much selfishness, to join the protest.

- Howard Zinn



Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed.

- Barry Goldwater



A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.

- Aldous Huxley



The survival of democracy depends on the renunciation of violence and the development of nonviolent means to combat evil and advance the good.

- A. J. Muste



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

- William Hastie



Citizenship is what makes a republic -- monarchies can get along without it.

- Mark Twain



We preach the virtues of democracy abroad. We must practice its duties here at home. Voting is the first duty of democracy.

- Lyndon B. Johnson



Decision by democratic majority vote is a fine form of government, but it's a stinking way to create.

- Lillian Hellman



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.

- Will Rogers



A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won't cross the street to vote in a national election.

- Bill Vaughan