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Lord Acton
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“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
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Abigail Adams
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“The spirit that prevails among men of all degrees, all ages and sexes is the spirit of liberty.”
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John Adams
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“And liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know—but besides this they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible divine right to that most dreaded, and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers.”
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Jane Addams
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“If the meanest man in the republic is deprived of his rights, then every man in the republic is deprived of his rights.”
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Aristotle
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“The basis of a democratic state is liberty.”
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Jimmy Carter
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“In a few days, I will lay down my official responsibilities in this office — to take up once more the only title in our democracy superior to that of president, the title of citizen.”
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Winston Churchill
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“It has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
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Dwight Eisenhower
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“Our civil and social rights form a central part of the heritage we are striving to defend on all fronts and with all our strength. I believe with all my heart that our vigilant guarding of these rights is a sacred obligation binding upon every citizen. To be true to one's own freedom is — in essence — to honor and respect the freedom of all others.”
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Benjamin Franklin
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“Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without freedom of speech.”
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Alexander Hamilton
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“A firm union will be of the utmost moment to the peace and liberty of the states, as a barrier against domestic faction and insurrection.”
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Thomas Jefferson
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“Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.”
“… and has proved that government to be the strongest of which every man feels himself a part.”
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John F. Kennedy
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“We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”
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Robert F. Kennedy
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“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
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Martin Luther King, Jr.
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“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
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Abraham Lincoln
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“Ballots are the rightful, and peaceful, successors of bullets, and that when ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets; that there can be no successful appeal except to ballots themselves, at succeeding elections.”
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John Locke
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“I easily grant, that Civil Government is the proper Remedy for the Inconveniences of the State of Nature, which must certainly be Great, where Men may be Judges in their own Case, since ’tis easy to be imagined, that he who was so unjust as to do his Brother an Injury, will scarce be so just as to condemn himself for it.”
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James Madison
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“The effect of (a representative democracy is) to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of the nation …”
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Karl Marx
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“Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand. The tradition of all past generations weighs like an alp upon the brain of the living.”
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Thomas Paine
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“… the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.”
“Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is a species of vice.”
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Eleanor Roosevelt
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“Governments do not become corrupt unless their citizens have allowed low standards to exist. If you live in a democracy, you set the standards as the individual citizen. You elect your representatives, and the government belongs to you.”
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Franklin D. Roosevelt
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“The creed of our democracy is that liberty is acquired, liberty is kept by men and women who are strong, self-reliant, and possessed of such wisdom as God gives mankind — men and women who are just, men and women who are understanding, and generous to others — men and women who are capable of disciplining themselves. For they are the rulers, and they must rule themselves.”
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Theodore Roosevelt
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“The object of government is the welfare of the people.”
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Sydney Smith
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“It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do a little.”
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William Howard Taft
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“Constitutions are checks upon the hasty action of the majority. They are the self-imposed restraints of a whole people upon a majority of them to secure sober action and a respect for the rights of the minority, and of the individual in his relation to other individuals, and in his relation to the whole people in their character as a state or government.”
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Margaret Thatcher
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“All attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail. ... It must be business as usual.”
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Alexis de Tocqueville
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“The people is therefore the real directing power; and although the form of government is representative, it is evident that the opinions, the prejudices, the interests, and even the passions of the community are hindered by no durable obstacles from exercising a perpetual influence on society.”
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E.B. White
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“Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time.”
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Walt Whitman
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“Did you, too, O friend, suppose democracy was only for elections, for politics, and for a party name? I say democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruit in manners, in the highest forms of interaction between (people), and their beliefs – in religion, literature, colleges and schools – democracy in all public and private life, and in the army and navy.”
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