Quotes & Sayings About Threats To Democracy

Democracy tends to ignore, even deny, threats to its existence because it loathes doing what is needed to counter them," explained Revel. "It awakens only when the danger becomes deadly, imminent, and evident. By then, either there is too little time left for it to save itself, or the price of survival has become crushingly high. — Jean Francois Revel

. And it especially cannot endure when powerful groups in that society seek at every turn to undermine and destroy its very being. The threats to democracy are not always from enemies abroad. They can come from those within who espouse the language of democracy and use the liberties afforded them by democratic institutions to undermine the substance of democracy. Weimar cautions us to be wary of those people as well. What comes next can be very bad, even worse than imaginable. — Eric D. Weitz

The threats against democracy today are in general completely normal. They walk around in costume and tie. — Carl B. Hamilton

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

When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that, in our democracy, government is us. — Barack Obama

The potential for the abuse of power through digital networks - upon which we the people now depend for nearly everything, including our politics - is one of the most insidious threats to democracy in the Internet age. — Rebecca MacKinnon

The forces of moderation and democracy must, and will, prevail against extremism and dictatorship. I will not be intimidated ... Despite threats of death, I will not acquiesce to tyranny, but rather lead the fight against it. — Benazir Bhutto

And Kade understood why. They were a tribal species. They'd evolved in a world where a few dozen men and women made up a tribe, and virtually all others were enemies, threats. They lacked the cognitive capabilities necessary to collaborate on this scale. They'd done their best with democracy, with capitalism, but those had reached their limit long ago. They'd been corrupted, twisted to the interests of a few individuals, when the greatest problems the world faced were problems of collective interest. He — Ramez Naam

I can't stand THE DEPRESSED. It's like a job, it's the only thing they work hard at. Oh good my depression is very well today. Oh good today I have another mysterious symptom and I will have another one tomorrow. The DEPRESSED are full of hate and bile and when they are not having panic attacks they are writing poems. What do they want their poems to DO? Their depression is the most VITAL thing about them. Their poems are threats. ALWAYS threats. There is no sensation that is keener or more active than their pain. They give nothing back except their depression. It's just another utility. Like electricity and water and gas and democracy. They could not survive without it. — Deborah Levy

The greatest threats to Democracy are comfort and apathy. — T. Rafael Cimino

For police themselves, the consequence of [911 policing] has been the emergence of a siege mentality...the alienation of officers from the communities they police interferes with the effective exercise of their basic authority, forcing police to rely inordinately on the use of force. As strangers, police feel compelled to draw upon 'preemptively coercive means such as intimidation and threats' if not the direct application of force...not only is such coercion antithetical to policing a democracy, it may create the very resistance it is intended to forestall, and lead to self-fulfilling prophecies and a downward spiral in which police become more aggressive and youths embittered and resistant. — George Kelling