Informed Democracy Quotes & Sayings

Being adequately informed is a democratic duty, just as the vote is a democratic right. A misinformed electorate, voting without knowledge, is not a true democracy. — Jay Griffiths

Knowledge of the natural world and how it works should be counted as fundamental to informed governance. You can't have a functioning democracy, if the electorate is under-informed or, worse, mis-informed. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

An educated, enlightened & informed population is one of the surest ways of promoting the health of a democracy — Nelson Mandela

In a democratic society, there is always a struggle between the machinery of national security and press freedom, and the public's right to know is usually the loser. When our national security czars become, in effect, our media gatekeepers, we lose one of the essential cornerstones of a true democracy - an informed citizenry. Distracted by the manufactured flow of information produced by a news media that has fallen under the spell of its own official sources, and beguiled by militaristic and patriotic Hollywood myth-making, the American public is largely benighted when it comes to understanding the wars and covert violence carried out in our name. Spooked will explain exactly how this process occurs and what happens to journalists who dare to break the rules. The — Nicholas Schou

ultimately, the long-term goal is to have a critically informed public vote out of office representatives that are sacrificing children to the corporate bottom line with prepackaged teacher-proof curricula, standardized tests, and accountability schemes. — Pepi Leistyna

An informed citizenry is at the heart of a dynamic democracy. — Thomas Jefferson

Since an informed citizenry is the basis for a healthy democracy, independent, non-corporate media are more crucial today than ever before — Dahr Jamail

Widespread public access to knowledge, like public education, is one of the pillars of our democracy, a guarantee that we can maintain a well-informed citizenry. — Scott Turow

The subjugation of news by entertainment seriously harms our democracy: It leads to dysfunctional journalism that fails to inform the people. And when the people are not informed, they cannot hold government accountable when it is incompetent, corrupt, or both. — Al Gore

History proves that dictatorships do not grow out of strong and successful governments, but out of weak and helpless ones. If by democratic methods people get a government strong enough to protect them from fear and starvation, their democracy succeeds; but if they do not, they grow impatient. Therefore, the only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over its government. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

Democracy doesn't work unless people are well informed, and I don't know that we are. People just don't have the time. Most people's daily lives are just about surviving. Most people don't have time to really study [crucial] issues. — Brad Pitt

For politicians to be honest, the public needs to allow them to be honest, and the media, which mediates between the politicians and the public, needs to allow those politicians to be honest. If local democracy is to flourish, it is about the active and informed engagement of every citizen. — Rory Stewart

The bottom line is that our government is not intelligent about how it pursues the public interest, because its decisions are not informed decisions (and its interest is generally not the public's). — Robert David Steele

The Internet has done a wonderful thing for us. But democracy doesn't work unless people are well informed, and I don't know that we are. People just don't have the time. — Brad Pitt

Politicians would only move beyond gestures once there was a critical mass of informed citizens. — Paul Collier

I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts, and beer. — Abraham Lincoln

A democratic society must seek to give every young person, whether native-born or newcomer, the knowledge and skills to succeed as an adult. In a political system that relies on the participation of informed citizens, everyone should, at a minimum, learn to speak, read and write a common language. Those who would sustain our democratic life must understand its history. Tailoring children's education to the color of their skin, their national origins, or their presumed ethnicity is in some fundamental sense contrary to our nation's founding ideals of democracy, equality and opportunity. — Diane Ravitch

You cannot have a democracy without an informed people. — Helen Thomas

We must remember that democracy works when given time to develop, mature and deliver. People must have access to information for informed debate. Government institutions must treat citizens fairly, and with dignity, while responding to their needs. — Atifete Jahjaga

Democracy depends on citizens being informed, and since our media, especially television (which is the most important source of news for most Americans) reports mostly what the people in power do, and repeats what the people in power say, the public is badly informed, and it means we cannot really say we have a functioning democracy. — Howard Zinn

Democracy, finally, rests on a higher power than Parliament. It rests on an informed and cultivated and alert public opinion. The Members of Parliament are only representatives of the citizens. They cannot represent apathy and indifference. They can play the part allotted to them only if they represent intelligence and public spiritness. — Eric Williams

We in the press have a special role since there is no other institution in our society that can hold the President accountable. I do believe that our democracy can endure and prevail only if the American people are informed. — Helen Thomas

Under the leadership of Henry Kissinger, first as Richard Nixon's national security adviser and later as secretary of state, the United States sent an unequivocal signal to the most extreme rightist forces that democracy could be sacrificed in the cause of ideological warfare. Criminal operational tactics, including assassination, were not only acceptable but supported with weapons and money. A CIA internal memo laid it out in unsparing terms: On September 16, 1970 [CIA] Director [Richard] Helms informed a group of senior agency officers that on September 15, President Nixon had decided that an Allende regime was not acceptable to the United States. The President asked the Agency to prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him and authorized up to $10 million for this purpose. . . . A special task force was established to carry out this mandate, and preliminary plans were discussed with Dr. Kissinger on 18 September 1970. — John Dinges

Highly intelligent and well-informed people disagree on every political issue. Therefore, intelligence and knowledge are useless for making decisions, because if any of that stuff helped, then all the smart people would have the same opinions. So use your "gut instinct" to make voting choices. That is exactly like being clueless, but with the added advantage that you'll feel as if your random vote preserved democracy. — Scott Adams

Democracy in the contemporary world demands, among other things, an educated and informed people. — Elizabeth Bishop

Democracy is a proposal (rarely realized) about decision making; it has little to do with election campaigns. Its promise is that political decisions be made after, and in the light of, consultation with the governed. This is dependent upon the governed being adequately informed about the issues in question, and upon the decision-makers having the capacity and will to listen and take account of what they have heard. Democracy should not be confused with the 'freedom' of binary choices, the publication of opinion polls or the crowding of people into statistics. These are its pretences. Today the fundamental decisions, which effect the unnecessary pain increasingly suffered across the planet, have been and are taken unilaterally without any open consultation or participation. Both — John Berger

The best defense of democracy is an informed electorate. — Thomas Jefferson

Because we don't have a Fairness Doctrine, and because we have further media consolidation, and because we have a craptastic corporate media, WE DON'T HAVE NEWS! We don't have an informed populous and we don't have a democracy ... Everyone in the world knows that America, (in its current state, because of right-wingers) that the right wing arm of this country (that speaks for this country unfortunately) has no credibility when it comes to human rights or independent media. — Janeane Garofalo

Reading builds the educated and informed electorate so vital to our democracy. — Brad Henry

Bernard Shaw remains the only model we have of what the citizen of a democracy should be: an informed participant in all things we deem important to the society and the individual. — Jacques Barzun

If we don't have an informed electorate we don't have a democracy. So I don't care how people get the information, as long as they get it. I'm just doing it my particular way and I feel lucky I can do it the way I want to do it. — Jim Lehrer

The aspirations of democracy are based on the notion of an informed citizenry, capable of making wise decisions. The choices we are asked to make become increasingly complex. They require the longer-term thinking and greater tolerance for ambiguity that science fosters. The new economy is predicated on a continuous pipeline of scientific and technological innovation. It can not exist without workers and consumers who are mathematically and scientifically literate. — Ann Druyan

Informed by our sad experience of history, we require nothing short of a foundation for lasting democracy. — Ibrahim Babangida

Ensuring that we have a well-informed public citizenry is important for a well-functioning democracy, and that in turn requires an active and diverse media. — Joseph E. Stiglitz

A properly functioning democracy depends on an informed electorate. — Thomas Jefferson

As opposition leader, [Stephen Harper] wrote in the Montreal Gazette in the year before he came to power: 'Information is the lifeblood of a democracy. Without adequate access to key information about government policies and programs, citizens and parliamentarians cannot make informed decisions and incompetent or corrupt governments can be hidden under a cloak of secrecy.'
When he became prime minister, his attitude appeared to undergo a shift of considerable proportions. It often took the Conservatives twice as long as previous governments to handle access requests. Sometimes it took six months to a year. — Lawrence Martin

Democracy doesn't work unless the public is informed. — Brad Pitt

But the moment the politicians start saying they are in denial of what the scientists are telling them, of what the consensus of scientific experiments demonstrates, that is the beginning of the end of an informed democracy. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Saving the world requires saving democracy. That requires well-informed citizens. Conservation, environment, poverty, community, education, family, health, economy- these combine to make one quest: liberty and justice for all. Whether one's special emphasis is global warming or child welfare, the cause is the same cause. And justice comes from the same place being human comes from: compassion. — Carl Safina

Democracy cannot function or survive without a sufficient medium by which citizens remain informed and engaged in public policy debates. — Nancy Snow

Surely there is not a capitalist or well-informed person in this world today who believes that [World War I] is being fought to make the world safe for democracy. It is being fought to make the world safe for capital. — Rose Pastor Stokes

We live in a time that demands a discourse of both critique and possibility, one that recognizes that without an informed citizenry, collective struggle, and viable social movements, democracy will slip out of our reach and we will arrive at a new stage of history marked by the birth of an authoritarianism that not only disdains all vestiges of democracy but is more than willing to relegate it to a distant memory. — Henry A. Giroux

Our democracy depends on an informed citizenry to survive, Your Honor. Besides the advancement of truth, science and morality in general, the freedom of the press is a backbone of democracy. It exists to keep the government transparent, and the human instruments of government honest. — Kenneth Eade

We are a democracy, and there is only one way to get a democracy on its feet in the matter of its individual, its social, its municipal, its State, its National conduct, and that is by keeping the public informed about what is going on.There isnot a crime, there isnot a dodge, there is not a trick, there is not a swindle, there is not a vice which does not live by secrecy.Get these things out in the open, describe them, attack them, ridicule them in the press, and sooner or later public opinion will sweep them away. — Joseph Pulitzer

Not enough of our society is trained how to understand and interpret quantitative information. This activity is a centerpiece of science literacy to which we should all strive-the future health, wealth, and security of our democracy depend on it. Until that is achieved, we are at risk of making under-informed decisions that affect ourselves, our communities, our country, and even the world. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Mr. Speaker, democracy works best when the American electorate is engaged and informed. — Melissa Bean

I grew up in San Francisco. And so I'm informed in a certain kind of way about, you know, believing in democracy and believing in America. And I'm a very ardent patriot. — George Lucas