Democratic Government Quotes

I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war on liberty, and that the democratic government is at least as bad as any of the other forms.

The revolution has no time for elections. There is no more democratic government in Latin America than the revolutionary government.

The president who is most slandered as Hitler will probably prove to be the most zealous advocate of democratic government abroad, the staunchest friend of beleaguered Israel, and the greatest promoter of global individual freedom in our recent memory.

Popular and democratic government is the only constitution which suits France, and all those who are worthy of the name of men.

If you can't even manage to to force your own presumably democratic governments to allow you to do good things for yourselves, then you probably deserve to become extinct.

There is no more democratic government than a revolutionary government.

Democratic governments are not suited to the publication of the thunderous revelations I am in the habit of making. The unpublished parts will appear later... when Europe will have restored its traditional monarchies.

One of the challenges of a democratic government is making sure that even in the midst of emergencies and passions, we make sure that rule of law and the basic precepts of justice and liberty prevail.

A democratic government in South Africa is not a threat to white people.

When you can't do any housecleaning because everything that goes on is a damned secret, then we're on our way to something the Founding Fathers didn't have in mind. Secrecy and a free, democratic government don't mix.

Without commonly shared and widely entrenched moral values and obligations, neither the law, nor democratic government, nor even the market economy will function properly.

Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism.

Unemployment is a reproach to a democratic government.

The natural proclivity of democratic governments is to pursue public policies which concentrate benefits on the well-organized and well-informed, and disperse the costs on the unorganized and ill-informed.

...governments, including free and democratic governments, are not really friendly to freedom and democracy. They abhor any rule of law that limits their powers and penchant for social engineering.

Secrecy and a free, democratic government don't mix.

A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it.

It is possible for a dictator to govern in a liberal way. And it is also possible for a democracy to govern with a total lack of liberalism. Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism.

Democratic governments are not delivering on their promises, which is partly due to the fact that governments are less powerful than they were after the Second World War. There were fewer governments then, but they actually had more political power.

There is a democratic deficit. In Latin America in particular there is real concern that democratic governments are not delivering and that is leading to experimenting with different models that are much less democratic. But even in Western Europe the deficit is a problem.

I hunted far enough to suspect that the Fathers of the Republic who wrote our Sacred Constitution of the United States not only did not, but did not want to, establish a democratic government.

I believe I have demonstrated that the voters are characteristically ill-informed when voting on reducing social costs. Furthermore, their primary concern is with wealth transferred to themselves, rather than with social cost efficiency. Logically, this would mean that democratic government would be inefficient in reducing social costs.

As the Iraqi people better understand that Saddam Hussein and his regime are history, it is my hope that they will get behind the coalition effort to help them create a democratic government and rebuild their country.

I have not the smallest doubt that, if we had a purely democratic government here, the effect would be the same. Either the poor would plunder the rich, and civilisation would perish; or order and property would be saved by a strong military government, and liberty would perish.

If when I die, I am still a dictator, I will certainly go down into the oblivion of all dictators. If, on the other hand, I succeed in establishing a truly stable foundation for a democratic government, I will live forever in every home in China.

As long-term institutions, I am totally against dictatorships. But a dictatorship may be a necessary system for a transitional period... Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism. My personal impression - and this is valid for South America - is that in Chile, for example, we will witness a transition from a dictatorial government to a liberal government.

Democracy is essentially a means, a utilitarian device for safeguarding internal peace and individual freedom. As such it is by no means infallible or certain. Nor must we forget that there has often been much more cultural and spiritual freedom under an autocratic rule than under some democracies and it is at least conceivable that under the government of a very homogeneous and doctrinaire majority democratic government might be as oppressive as the worst dictatorship.

When people treat corruption as a routine part of the process, you have something far worse than wrongdoing or moral failing. You have a political cancer that breeds cynicism about democratic government and infects all of society.

When democratic governments create economic calamity, free markets get the blame.

The tow pillars of democratic government are the primacy of the law and the budget.

Governments are based pincipally on force and deception. Democratic governments are based chiefly on deception, other governments on force. And democratic governments, if you get too uppity, give up on the deception and resort to brute force, as a lot of us found out in the sixites. Those who didn't find out in the sixites will find out in the near future because we're going to have a rerun.

Famines are easy to prevent if there is a serious effort to do so, and a democratic government, facing elections and criticisms from opposition parties and independent newspapers, cannot help but make such an effort. Not surprisingly, while India continued to have famines under British rule right up to independence... they disappeared suddenly with the establishment of a multiparty democracy and... a free press and an active political opposition constitute the best early-warning system a country threaten by famines can have.

A democratic government that respects no limits on its power is a ticking time bomb, waiting to destroy the rights it was created to protect.

The big problem for a democratic government - democrat with a small "d" - is how to hold down government spending.

The reason societies with democratic governments are better places to live in than their alternatives isn't because of some goodness intrinsic to democracy, but because its hopeless inefficiency helps blunt the basic potential for evil.

The theory of democratic government is not that the will of the people is always right, but rather that normal human beings of average intelligence will, if given a chance, learn the right and best course by bitter experience.

My entire life was dedicated to defeating communism. I felt really great when Ronald Reagan helped us establish peace and the elimination of communism from Russia. We are now dealing with a national power, and, you know, it is a big power in the world. It's no longer being motivated by communist ideology that has it trying to overthrow democratic governments and replace them with atheistic communist dictatorships.

The work of democratic government is routinely concerned with matters defined as troubles. In "The Presidency and the Press" I make the point, familiar to anyone who has flown about the world much, that the best quick test of the political nature of a regime is to read the local papers on arrival. If they are filled with bad news, you have landed in a libertarian society of some sort. If, on the other hand, the press is filled with good news, it is a fair bet that the jails will be filled with good men.

I would like to say, historically, from the very beginning, our people have time and again expressed the need for people to live in harmony with the creator, the mother earth, fellow man, and respect our brother's vision. In the past and the present, we have been respon-sible for the greatest gains; cultivated foods and medicines; democratic government, and many other areas of concern.

To take an analogy: if we say that a democratic government is the best kind of government, we mean that it most completely fulfills the highest function of a government - the realisation of the will of the people.

A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.

Franklin may . . . be considered one of the founding fathers of American democracy, since no democratic government can last long without conciliation and compromise.

Authoritarianism is not pretending anymore to be a real alternative to democracy, but we can see many more authoritarian practices and styles basically being smuggled into democratic governments.

Well, we're [USA] not looking for an ally; what we're looking for is a stable, democratic government that is not beholden to anyone in the region and is able to be secure within its own borders and have its own policy.

The United States has given frequent and enthusiastic support to the overthrow of democracy in favor of "investor friendly" regimes. The World Bank, IMF, and private banks have consistently lavished huge sums on terror regimes, following their displacement of democratic governments, and a number of quantitative studies have shown a systematic positive relationship between U.S. and IMF / World Bank aid to countries and their violations of human rights.

The American influence is not so aggressive anymore. The American big business influence in Latin America is not as strong, so people can vote and they can have a different life than before. They can have more liberal, more interesting, and more democratic governments.

Athens' biggest worry was the sheer recklessness of its own democratic government. A simple majority of the citizenry, urged on and incensed by clever demagogues, might capriciously send out military forces in unnecessary and exhausting adventures.

Decades, if not centuries are normally required for people to acquire the necessary disciplines and habits. In Britain, the road [to democratic government] took seven centuries to traverse.

The continuation of authority has frequently proved the undoing of democratic governments. Repeated elections are essential to the system of popular governments, because there is nothing so dangerous as to suffer power to be vested for a long time in one citizen. The people become accustomed to obeying him, and he becomes accustomed to commanding, hence the origin of usurpation and tyranny.

What the public does is not to express its opinions but to align itself for or against a proposal. If that theory is accepted, we must abandon the notion that democratic government can be the direct expression of the will of the people. We must abandon the notion that the people govern. Instead, we must adopt the theory that, by their occasional mobilizations as a majority, people support or oppose the individuals who actually govern. We must say that the popular will does not direct continuously but that it intervenes occasionally.