Democracy Dying Quotes & Sayings

It was from an old friend who thought he was dying. Anyway, he said, 'Life and death issues don't come along that often, thank God, so don't treat everything like it's life or death. Go easier.' — Thomas Arnold

O to speed where there is space enough and air enough at last! — Walt Whitman

Democracy is worth dying for, because it's the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man. — Ronald Reagan

Another part or piece,' said Diabolus, 'of mine excellent armour, is a dumb and prayerless spirit, a spirit that scorns to cry for mercy, let the danger be ever so great; therefore be you, my Mansoul, sure that you make use of this. — John Bunyan

Me and Paul (Dean) will probably win forty games (they won forty-nine). — Dizzy Dean

To those who fought World War II, it was plain enough that Allied bombs were killing huge numbers of German civilians, that Churchill was fighting to preserve imperialism as well as democracy, and that the bulk of the dying in Europe was being done by the Red Army at the service of Stalin. It is only in retrospect that we begin to simplify experience into myth - because we need stories to live by, because we want to honor our ancestors and our country instead of doubting them. In this way, a necessary but terrible war is simplified into a "good war," and we start to feel shy or guilty at any reminder of the moral compromises and outright betrayals that are inseparable from every combat. The best history writing reverses this process, restoring complexity to our sense of the past. — Adam Kirsch

Democracy is dying. We are ruled by faceless bureaucrats and lecherous puritans ... You think about it. 'All right for me but not for you' is their philosophy. — Anne Stevenson

There is something inherently wrong, something out of accord with the ideals of representative democracy, when one portion of our citizenship turns its activities to private gain amid defensive war while another is fighting, sacrificing, or dying for national preservation. — Warren G. Harding

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince. — H.L. Mencken

Democracy is just a false idol - a mere catchword and illusion of inferior classes, visionaries and dying civilizations. — H.P. Lovecraft

Tush!
Fear not, my lord, we will not stand to prate;
Talkers are no good doers: be assured
We come to use our hands and not our tongues. — William Shakespeare

You know, when a president is about to leave office, most of the time most people are dying for him to go on and get out of there. But there are a few little rituals that have to be observed. One of them is that the president must host the incoming president in the White House, smile as if they love each other and give the American people the idea that democracy is peaceful and honourable and there will be a good transfer of power — Nancy Gibbs; Michael Duffy

I've handed life and death back to the people who do the living and the dying. — Alfred Bester

Pnin slowly walked under solemn pines. The sky was dying. He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended the destinies of the quick. — Vladimir Nabokov

I don't come on to seduce the audience. I don't care if everyone laughs. I can't think about that anymore. If there's anything that a lot of experience on stage and a lot of stage time gives you is the confidence to know that it's ok if they're not laughing every second you're up there. Although that's what drives me and I still go too fast a lot of the time. — Greg Proops

It was the French Revolution that served as the catalyst of this renovation. Its impact was to make the concept of popular sovereignty the new moral justification for the political system of historical capitalism. — Immanuel Wallerstein

Adolf Hitler declared war in 1941. By 1942, Allen Dulles was moved to Switzerland for the purpose of rounding up and importing German scientific "specialists" to the United States. Two years before the war ended (or its fate was decided), the United States was making arrangements for Nazi scientists, arms experts, to come to our democracy (for which the boys were fighting and dying at that moment).12 From 1945 until 1952, the U.S. military brought over 642 alien "specialists" and their families from Nazi Germany. They were known collectively by the code-name "Paperclip." German missile and rocket experts, munition makers, war experts were carefully selected and placed in aerospace programs and armament manufacturing.13 — Mae Brussell

My message is to get human beings to love God, love their neighbor and for the life of me I just don't see the downside of human beings not being so mean to one another and actually care for one another and not steal from one another and not murder each other for their tennis shoes. That's the message I have. — Phil Robertson

I think we are dying in America, I think our democracy is over. — Rickie Lee Jones