Fight For Democracy Quotes & Sayings

We all know that election reform takes time. That's because those who have benefited from the system are the ones who fight hardest to preserve it. So if we're going to succeed, we need an independent coalition of citizens who believe in reform, who believe that our election laws should treat every voter equally, who believe that low levels of competition and participation are not healthy for democracy. The Independence Party is helping to build that coalition and I am happy to join you in doing so. — Michael Bloomberg

I may be wrong in that, but not I think in putting the questions. In our modern democracy the government needs not a unanimous but a general support for war before it orders our forces to fight. — Douglas Hurd

I vote because it's what small-d democracy is about. Because there are places where people fight for generations and stand for hours to cast a ballot knowing what we ought to remember: that it makes a difference. Not always a big difference. Not always an immediate difference. But a difference. — Ellen Goodman

Political struggle is the most important thing any of us can do as a citizen in a democracy; and that means the old joining the young to fight for elemental kinds of justice. — Jonathan Kozol

When you fight, you don't fight for abstract values like the flag, or the nation, or democracy. You fight for your buddy. You fight to keep him alive, and he fights to keep you alive, and you go on that way, day after day, battle after battle. And when one of your buddies dies, something inside you dies as well. But you go on. You fight, so that his death isn't meaningless, his sacrifice isn't for nothing. — Richard Marcinko

Our democracy is not something to be taken for granted. You have to fight for it. You have to commit yourself to working for it - for the long haul. — Keith Ellison

Women fight for democracy and engage in the world. But they shouldn't try and be copying men and be masculine; they should anchor on the home and build on those fundamentals. — Vivienne Westwood

We are in a prison of our own minds holding our own chains around us. We create our oligarchs and fight for their right to oppress us. — Heather Marsh

Every solitary one of these aristocratic conspirators and would-be murderers claims to be an arch-patriot; every one of them insists that the war is being waged to make the world safe for democracy. What humbug! What rot! What false pretense! These autocrats, these tyrants, these red-handed robbers and murderers, the "patriots," while the men who have the courage to stand face to face with them, speak the truth, and fight for their exploited victims-they are the disloyalists and traitors. If this be true, I want to take my place side by side with the traitors in this fight. — Eugene V. Debs

We've learned that it will take more than one generation to bring about change. The fight for civil rights has developed into a broader concern for human rights, and that encompasses a great many people and countries. Those of us who live in a democracy have a responsibility to be the voice for those whose voices are stilled. — Mary Travers

Women's fight for equal rights is essentially a humanist and peaceful struggle for true democracy, and a higher form of civilization. — Leyla Zana

Our country was thereby saved from the consequences of its distracting individualistic conception of democracy, and its merely legal conception of nationality. It was because the followers of Jackson and Douglas did fight for it, that the Union was preserved. — Herbert Croly

The Arab Spring showed that people are not going to wait for an American president to make good on his big talk about democracy and human rights; they are going to fight for those rights themselves and overthrow pro-American dictators who stand in their way. — Pankaj Mishra

There will always be a place for us somewhere, somehow, as long as we see to it that working people fight for everything they have, everything they hope to get, for dignity, equality, democracy, to oppose war and to bring to the world a better life. — Harry Bridges

We will not be intimidated or pushed off the world stage by people who do not like what we stand for, and that is, freedom, democracy and the fight against disease, poverty and terrorism. — Madeleine Albright

Chant back to us our platitudes about democracy, greatness, and freedom. Vote in our rigged corporate elections. Send your young men and women to fight and die in useless, unwinnable wars that provide huge profits for corporations. — Chris Hedges

So long as we have enough people in this country willing to fight for their rights, we'll be called a democracy. — Roger Nash Baldwin

The fight for truth ... is not just our right as free citizens of free societies. It is our duty as citizens of the earth. — Vandana Shiva

While we use American power to fight hard for democracy against extremism on both left and right, our critics seem suspicious of any assertion of United States power or influence against any government or group that claims to be on the left. — Elliott Abrams

We fight for autonomy over so many areas of our lives - for decency and democracy and freedom, for suffrage, for the right to have some say over our lives, some control - and then in the central question of what we are to do with our days, with our working lives, we give all that freedom away in return for a pay cheque. And are content to be bored and obedient, resentful and uninvolved and tired. This is such a standard, universally accepted feature of the modern world - that we will dislike and be bored by our work - that we have forgotten to notice that it doesn't make any sense. — John Lanchester

I think there is a heritage which I'm proud of, which is a fight for democracy, a fight for social justice, a fight for freedom. My grandfather went to jail or exile six times in his life, fighting for his principles for democracy, or for his country. And my father twice. — George Papandreou

The alleged music preached of the wrongs democracy had perpetrated on the people and how to protest against the causes of their pain, which would be, according to the fascist propagandists, the police, the military, the rich and the current American government. His ballads were to call for youth and the downtrodden to unite and fight against poverty, injustice and social ills - by destroying the American way of life. Radio — Louis L'Amour

I have to give moral support to my supporters. If I'm not going to fight anymore, that might hurt the feelings of my supporters. They are fighting for democracy. They are fighting for the rule of law. — Thaksin Shinawatra

You need to understand something, you drink deeply from wells of freedom and liberty and opportunity that you did not dig. You eat lavishly from banquet tables prepared for you by your ancestors. You sit under the shade of trees that you did not plant or cultivate or care for. You have a choice in life, you can just sit back, getting fat, dumb, and happy, consuming all the blessings put before you, or it can metabolize inside of you, become fuel to get you into the fight, to make this democracy real, to make it true to its words that we can be a nation of liberty and justice for all. — Cory Booker

Public confidence in the integrity of the Government is indispensable to faith in democracy; and when we lose faith in the system, we have lost faith in everything we fight and spend for. — Adlai E. Stevenson

That generation really has to fight for a new political language, social movements, and alliances with students from other countries. They have to convince labor, parents, and the general public that the fight over higher education is a fight that benefits everyone in a sustainable democracy and not just faculty and students. — Henry Giroux

We shared a bond I don't think can ever be broken. We helped them reclaim their nation, and they helped us reclaim ours. They showed us the meaning of democracy ... freedom, not just in vague, abstract terms, but on a very real, individually human level. Freedom isn't just something you have for the sake of having, you have to want something else first and then want the freedom to fight for it. That was the lesson we learned from the Nortecubanos. They all had such grand dreams, and they'd lay down their lives for the freedom to make those dreams come true. — Max Brooks

Pay 2 Play vividly tells the story of the threat posed to our political process by big money interests and what we can do to fight back to defend our Republic. This is a must-see movie for anyone who cares about the cause of democracy and the promise of political equality for all. — John Bonifaz

I was thinking about honour. It's a thing that changes doesn't it? I mean, a hundred and fifty years ago we would have had to fight if challenged. Now we'd laugh. There must have been a time when it was rather an awkward question."
"Yes. Moral theologians were never able to stop dueling
it took democracy to do that."
"And in the next war, when we are completely democratic, I expect that it will be quite honourable for officers to leave their men behind. It'll be laid down in King's Regulations as their duty
to keep a cadre going to train new men to take the place of prisoners."
"Perhaps men wouldn't take too kindly to being trained by deserters."
"Don't you think that they'd respect them more for being fly? I reckon our trouble is that we're in the awkward stage
like a man challenged to a duel a hundred years ago. — Evelyn Waugh

How simple the American narrative. Suppose you have two hands. The American political system will cut off both hands. You'll then hear that those with one hand will be along the upper class and those with two will be part of the elite few. Then politicians will come along and tell you their plan for giving each American two hands. The people will buy into this and fight the disillusioned in favor of the politician. They are never for themselves and the politicians are only for themselves so no one is for the people. — Bruce Crown

It is the fight for a new economy, a new energy system, a new democracy, a new relationship to the planet and to each other, for land, water, and food sovereignty, for Indigenous rights, for human rights and dignity for all people. When climate justice wins we win the world that we want. We can't sit this one out, not because we have too much to lose but because we have too much to gain. . . . We are bound together in this battle, not just for a reduction in the parts per million of CO2, but to transform our economies and rebuild a world that we want today. — Naomi Klein

The government may change faces from time to time, but it's not like we fight wars for democracy - we fight wars for capitalism and for oil. — Woody Harrelson

If we, as individuals, want to keep control of our democracy - rather than have a government paid for by corporate interest checks - then we have to fight back now and make sure our system reflects the belief that people, not corporations, control our democracy. — Michael Bennet

I am not one who, to quote an American author, believes that democracy and enterprise have finally won the battle of ideas - that we have therefore arrived at the end of history, and there is nothing left to fight for. That would be unutterably complacent, indeed foolish. There will always be threats to freedom, not only from frontal assaults, but more insidiously by erosion from within. — Margaret Thatcher

Imagine that
a country that's supposed to be a democracy, supposed to be for freedom and all of that kind of stuff when they want to draft you and put you in the army and send you to Saigon to fight for them
and then you've got to turn around and all night long discuss how you're going to just get a right to register and vote without being murdered. Why, that's the most hypocritical government since the world began! — Malcolm X

I was previously involved in local and state politics, but not national, because grassroots democracy starts at the bottom. This was the breaking point for me, though - and it made the case that in order to fight locally, we have to fight nationally; we can't afford to neglect any area of life in this democracy. — Jill Stein

We learned in World War II that no single nation holds a monopoly on wisdom, morality or right to power, but that we must fight for the weak and promote democracy. — Joe Baca

A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won't cross the street to vote in a national election. — Bill Vaughan

Machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don't hate: only the unloved hate, the unloved and the unnatural. Soldiers, don't fight for slavery, fight for liberty! You the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness! You the people have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure! Then, in the name of democracy, let us use that power. Let us all unite! Let us fight for a new world, a decent world ... — Charlie Chaplin

The long fight to save wild beauty represents democracy at its best. It requires citizens to practice the hardest of virtues
self-restraint. Why cannot I take as many trout as I want from a stream? Why cannot I bring home from the woods a rare wildflower? Because if I do, everybody in this democracy should be able to do the same. My act will be multiplied endlessly. To provide protection for wildlife and wild beauty, everyone has to deny himself proportionately. Special privilege and conservation are ever at odds. — Edwin Way Teale

Larsson was an active and lifelong feminist, partly for personal reasons but also because he saw that ending gender slavery was as crucial to next-stage evolution as ending race slavery was to the last stage. It's a noble fight, not least because the various fundamentalisms threatening Western democracy are united in their urgent need to re-cage women's sexuality. — Elizabeth Farrelly