The spirit of democracy is not a mechanical thing to be adjusted by abolition of forms. It requires change of heart.
America must be the teacher of democracy, not the advertiser of the consumer society. It is unrealistic for the rest of the world to reach the American living standard.
Whether people care enough about local news to pay for it is, sadly, an entirely different question than whether our democracy requires a strong watchdog function at the local level to ensure safeguards against abuse, chicanery, and outright dishonesty.
I think clearly the United States, as well as other western nations, should stand by their commitments to human rights and democracy and should try to influence other countries to move in that direction.
Democracy and socialism are means to an end, not the end itself.
It's true that General Musharraf opposes my return, seeing me as a symbol of democracy in the country. He is comfortable with dictatorship. I hope better sense prevails.
I think our democracy has it exactly right: two terms, eight years. It's enough. Because it's important to have one foot in reality when you have access to this kind of power.
Government by blackmail is incompatible with democracy.
People have the right to protest - that's what democracy is all about. I have no problem with people exercising their democratic rights.
I loved teaching social studies. And I loved starting each year by teaching about John Locke and the social contract. That lesson helped me teach not just about our rules for the classroom, but how, in our democracy, we give up some individual rights to ensure we collectively have the right to live and prosper in a society.
The greatest blessing of our democracy is freedom. But in the last analysis, our only freedom is the freedom to discipline ourselves.
Democracy opens new vistas and opportunities. We should use the opportunities it offers to correct past mistakes not to blunder anew.
At the heart of both democracy and capitalism is a simple assumption that, across the board, people make free and relatively rational decisions: that we are, to borrow a medical term, Gillick Competent.
The United States can't impose democracies. We can't impose our will. The Russians found that out in Afghanistan.
However, democracy cannot be defined as the existence of parliaments and elections alone.
You can't be a full participant in our democracy if you don't know our history.
I noticed that democracy was broken and tried to work on fixing that in Japan. Then I realized that it was broken all over the place and decided to work on that too.
In a democracy, supposedly we hold power by what we do at the ballot box, so therefore the more we know about political power the better our choices should be and the better, in theory, our democracy should be.
On a Chinese film you just give orders, no one questions you. Here, you have to convince people, you have to tell them why you want to do it a certain way, and they argue with you. Democracy.
There's this proud American tradition of worrying about the power of communication companies. That going all the way back to the founding, we've tried to limit the power of monopolies that played a role in our democracy.
Democracy is the wholesome and pure air without which a socialist public organization cannot live a full-blooded life.
It is beneficial for Turkish democracy that not all religious conservatives are united under one banner.
Celebrity distorts democracy by giving the rich, beautiful, and famous more authority than they deserve.
It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.
The United States is not for democracy in Iraq, it's for setting up a puppet government.
So I think one can say on empirical grounds - not because of some philosophical principle - that you can't have democracy unless you have a market economy.
What I don't like so much is people who - how do you say this? - who make judgments over the genre of reality like it's television from the devil, and that's something that I don't like because I think everybody should watch what they like. It's a free world. It's a form of democracy. If you like it, watch. If you don't like it, don't watch.
We have had a long wait for democracy.
Democracy is an extraordinary adventure. It's difficult, full of daring and risk and danger. But it's the greatest gift we have.
Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.
Please continue to voice your beliefs, as your participation is the foundation of our country's democracy.
And they understand that to be an effective member of a democracy, you have to accept responsibility.
A free America... means just this: individual freedom for all, rich or poor, or else this system of government we call democracy is only an expedient to enslave man to the machine and make him like it.
But if we had to trade with a Europe dominated by the present German trade policies, we might have to change our methods to some totalitarian form. This is a prospect that any lover of democracy must view with consternation.
I used to work for an NGO called Transitions Online, and I was their Director of New Media. I was a very idealistic fellow who thought that he could use blogs, social networks and new media to help promote democracy, human rights and freedom of expression.
For not only every democracy, but certainly every republic, bears within itself the seeds of its own destruction.
