Democracy | Some revealing quotes

"The more I see, hear, and think in Europe, the more I wish for every measure that can ensure to the United States dignity, power, and public confidence." Lafayette

"Popular government has not yet been proved to guarantee, always and everywhere, good government." Walter Lippmann

"The internet could be a very positive step towards education, organisation and participation in a meaningful society." Noam Chomsky

"The only motive that can keep politics pure is the motive of doing good for one's country and its people." Henry Ford

"That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there." George Orwell

"To teach our kids how to run our country, before they are called upon to run our country... if we don't, someone else will run our country." Richard Dreyfuss

"The state is therefore everyone; the rules within the state are laws which safeguard the welfare of all and which must originate from the welfare of all." Georg Büchner

"Politics is a romantic search for the good and the true and the beautiful." James M. Buchanan

"The broadening of the economic order which came to be seated in the individual property owner... dramatized by Jefferson's purchase of the Louisiana Territory... "The supremacy of corporate economic power... consolidated by the Supreme Court decision of 1886 which declared that the Fourteenth Amendment protected the corporation... [the New Deal, leading to], within the political arena, as well as in the corporate world itself, competing centers of power that challenged those of the corporate directors." Charles Wright Mills

"I had very good support from Democrats and Republicans all throughout my administration. I had a very high batting average. We added more jobs per year in my four years than any other president since the Second World War." Jimmy Carter

"Body: A cell state in which every cell is a citizen." Rudolf Virchow

"Let each citizen remember at the moment he is offering his vote...that he is executing one of the most solemn trusts in human society for which he is accountable to God and his country." Samuel Adams

"In the midst of these pleasing ideas we should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections." Samuel Adams

"By asserting the unity of the human race, we also oppose every unpleasant assumption of higher and lower human races. There are more teachable, more highly educated, spiritually cultivated, refined peoples, but no nobler tribes. All are equally destined for freedom; freedom, which in more primitive states belongs to the individual, and in state life, with the enjoyment of political institutions, belongs to the community as a right." Alexander von Humboldt