Democracy Quotes

21 quotes

It was the American war against the poor of the earth, the most easily killed, the collateral damage. As was asked at the beginning, was it really about fighting communism or was it a misunderstood or disguised motivation? It was George Kennen, America's leading early cold war strategist, who went to the heart of the matter in a memorandum written in 1948: 'with 50% percent of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality, and daydreamings. We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards and democratization. We are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.'

— Look, we... we don't need politicians, we've all got iPhones and computers, right? So any decision that has to be made, any policy, we just put it online. Let the people vote thumbs up, thumbs down, the majority wins. That's a democracy. That's a... that's an actual democracy.

— So's YouTube, and I don't know if you've seen it, but the most popular video is a dog farting the theme tune to Happy Days.

„This is pure ends-justify-the-means logic. And the means are pushing falsehood. The notion here seems to be that Trump is helping America avoid perdition, and thus must be given leeway to lie; if we didn’t allow him to lie, the left would continue to do so, and then they’d win and drive us straight into Hell. But that suggests that truth no longer has the capacity to drive voters or Americans. If that’s true, republicanism is finished as a principle – if we can only lie to voters to get them to vote for us, that undermines the decency of republicanism altogether.

You know what I'm startin' to think? I'm startin' to think that the only kind of people they want in this country are guys like me. You know, guys who will work
for scraps, do six jobs. Basically, bend over and take it. Wanna know something, darling? 10, 15 years tops, this country is finished as a democracy. I'm telling you, as a caring society, where people do things for each other, we're done, we're finished.

You fight for the sake of it, or ninety nine percent
Just trying to make a shake of it
And yo you must be mistaking if you
Can't see your stake in it is greater than the vast majority
And you can stand there growling at authority
Cause we still got a democracy, and what that means
Is you can say what you feel
And they can't put you under lock and key
So many disappeared, so many lived in fear
But you know that here man, your brains the opponent
So many blown opportunities in the land of plenty
So many cats that let there souls run on empty it gets tempting
To let it all slide, make fate the fall guy
And join the could have been's.