Quotes & Sayings About Democracy By Gandhi

Democracy, disciplined and enlightened, is the finest thing in the world. — Mahatma Gandhi

India had a very long independence movement. It started in 1886, [with] the first generation of Western-educated Indians. They were all liberals. They followed the Liberal Party in Britain, and they were very proud of their knowledge of parliamentary systems, parliamentary manners. They were big debaters. They [had], as it were, a long apprenticeship in training for being in power. Even when Gandhi made it a mass movement, the idea of elective representatives, elected working committees, elected leadership, all that stayed because basically Indians wanted to impress the British that they were going to be as good as the British were at running a parliamentary democracy. And that helped quite a lot. — Meghnad Desai

A democratic organization has to dare to do the right at all costs. — Mahatma Gandhi

Democracy comes naturally to him who is habituated normally to yield willing obedience to all laws, human or divine. — Mahatma Gandhi

We have unleashed aspirations of youngsters. Democracy is not going to go backwards. India is too big a country to be run by one person. We are going to accelerate the process of democratization and I think that is the biggest opportunity for Congress party because that is the DNA of the Congress — Rahul Gandhi

Democracy will break under the strain of apron strings. It can exist only on trust. — Mahatma Gandhi

While opposing injustice nonviolently, he (Gandhi) insisted, is always morally superior to opposing it violently, opposing injustice violently is still morally superior to doing nothing to oppose it at all. — David Graeber

A democrat must be utterly selfless. He must think and dream not in terms of self or of party, but only of democracy. — Mahatma Gandhi

My links with [Mahatma] Gandhi now are very political links because I do not believe there is any other politics available to us in the late twentieth century, a period of a totalitarianism linked with the market. There is really no other way you can do politics and create freedom for people without the kinds of instruments he revived. Civil disobedience is a way to create permanent democracy, perennial democracy, a direct democracy. — Vandana Shiva

Intolerance, discourtesy and harshness ... are taboo in all good society and are surely contrary to the spirit of democracy. — Mahatma Gandhi

In 1951 Dec 20th, Nehru, while campaigning for the first democratic elections in India, took a short break to address a UNESCO symposium in Delhi. Although he believed democracy was the best form of governance, while speaking at the symposium he wondered loud...
the quality of men who are selected by these modern democratic methods of adult franchise gradually deteriorates because of lack of thinking and the noise of propaganda....He[the voter] reacts to sound and to the din, he reacts to repetition and he produces either a dictator or a dumb politician who is insensitive. Such a politician can stand all the din in the world and still remain standing on his two feet and, therefore, he gets selected in the end because the others have collapsed because of the din.
-Quoted from India After Gandhi, page 157. — Ramachandra Guha

The spirit of democracy is not a mechanical thing to be adjusted by abolition of forms. It requires change of heart. — Mahatma Gandhi

Democracy demands patient instruction on it before legislation. — Mahatma Gandhi

The voice of the people may be said to be God's voice, the voice of the Panchayat. — Mahatma Gandhi

My notion of democracy is that under it the weakest shall have the same opportunities as the strongest ... no country in the world today shows any but patronizing regard for the weak ... Western democracy, as it functions today, is diluted fascism ... true democracy cannot be worked by twenty men sitting at the center. It has to be worked from below, by the people of every village. — Mahatma Gandhi

The spirit of democracy cannot be superimposed from the outside. It must come from within. — Mahatma Gandhi

The only force at the disposal of democracy is that of public opinion. — Mahatma Gandhi

Democracy is not a state in which people act like sheep. — Mahatma Gandhi

I understand democracy as something that gives the weak the same chance as the strong. — Mahatma Gandhi

Democracy is not perfect. It is an imperfection that the majority choose to support. — Debasish Mridha

Will Great Britain have an unwilling India dragged into war or a willing ally co-operating with her in the prosecution of a defence of true democracy? — Mahatma Gandhi

Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood. — Mahatma Gandhi

A born democrat is a born disciplinarian. — Mahatma Gandhi

The spirit of democracy ... requires change of the heart ... requires the inculcation of the spirit of brotherhood. — Mahatma Gandhi

The science of war leads one to dictatorship, pure and simple. The science of non-violence alone can lead one to pure democracy. Power based on love is thousand times more effective and permanent than power derived from fear of punishment. It is a blasphemy to say non-violence can be practiced only by individuals and never by nations which are composed of individuals. The nearest approach to purest anarchy would be a democracy based on non-violence. A society organized and run on the basis of complete non-violence would be the purest anarchy. — Mahatma Gandhi

Every democratic system evolves its own conventions. It is not only the water but the banks which make the river. — Indira Gandhi

No perfect democracy is possible without perfect nonviolence at the back of it. — Mahatma Gandhi

The very essence of democracy is that every person represents all the varied interests which compose the nation. — Mahatma Gandhi

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 in the holy name of liberty or democracy? — Mahatma Gandhi

To safeguard democracy the people must have a keen sense of independence, self-respect and their oneness, and should insist upon choosing as their representatives only such persons as are good and true. — Mahatma Gandhi

Indira Gandhi had been this very powerful, dominating, ambiguous mother figure. Ambiguous because she was tyrannical, she had imposed ... she had suspended Indian democracy for a few years but she also was the woman who had defeated Pakistan in war at a time when most male politicians in India had secretly feared fighting that war, so that here in India even today Indira Gandhi is called by Indian nationalists the only man ever to have governed India. — Aravind Adiga

Democracy is a great institution and, therefore, it is liable to be greatly abused. — Mahatma Gandhi

Democracy is about non-arbitrary decisions. Democracy is about spreading decisions; it is not about destroying processes. — Rahul Gandhi

Although I was too tactful to ask about politics or religion, I learned that she was socially and economically progressive. She believed in birth control, gun control, and rent control; she believed in the liberation of homosexuals and civil rights for all; she believed in Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Thich Nhat Hanh; she believed in nonviolence, world peace, and yoga; she believed in the revolutionary potential of disco and the United Nations of nightclubs; she believed in national self-determination for the Third World as well as liberal democracy and regulated capitalism, which was, she said, to believe that the invisible hand of the market should wear the kid glove of socialism. Her — Viet Thanh Nguyen

In the days of democracy there is no such thing as active loyalty to a person. You are, therefore, loyal or disloyal to institutions. — Mahatma Gandhi

I gather you yellow-skinned men, despite your triumphs in sewage, drinking water, and Olympic gold medals, still don't have democracy. Some politician on the radio was saying that that's why we Indian are going to beat you: we may not have sewage, drinking water, and Olympic gold medals, but we do have democracy.
If I were making a country, I'd get the sewage pipes first, then the democracy, then I'd go about giving pamphlets and statues of Gandhi to other people, but what do I know? I am just a murderer! — Aravind Adiga

Democracy and dependence on the military and police are incompatible. — Mahatma Gandhi

Democracy is an impossible thing until the power is shared by all, but let not democracy degenerate into mobocracy. — Mahatma Gandhi

Islam was nothing if it did not spell complete democracy. — Mahatma Gandhi

True democracy is not inconsistent with a few persons representing the spirit, the hope and the aspirations of those whom they claim to represent. — Mahatma Gandhi

Gandhi is the other person. I believe Gandhi is the only person who knew about real democracy - not democracy as the right to go and buy what you want, but democracy as the responsibility to be accountable to everyone around you. Democracy begins with freedom from hunger, freedom from unemployment, freedom from fear, and freedom from hatred. To me, those are the real freedoms on the basis of which good human societies are based. — Vandana Shiva

People in a democracy should be satisfied with drawing the Government's attention to a mistake, if any. — Mahatma Gandhi

Democracy necessarily means a conflict of will and ideas, involving sometimes a war of the knife between different ideas. — Mahatma Gandhi

What kind of victory is it when someone is left defeated? 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 and democracy. What is a war criminal? Was not war itself a crime against God and humanity, and, therefore, were not all those who sanctioned, engineered and conducted wars, war criminals? The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong. Non-cooperation with evil is a sacred duty. — Mahatma Gandhi