Best democracy & class Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking.”

Source: All Labor Has Dignity

“The ruling class is the rich. . . . And those people are so able to manipulate our democracy that they really control the democracy.”

People Able Political Class Democracy Rich Ruling Manipulate

Author:Walter Cronkite

“If democracy, in essence, means the abolition of class domination, then why should not a socialist minister charm the whole bourgeois world by orations on class collaboration?”

Ifs World Should Mean Whole Class Democracy Essence Ministers Charm Collaboration Socialist Domination Bourgeois Abolition

Book:Izbrannye Proizvedenii͡a V Trekh Tomakh

Source: Izbrannye Proizvedenii͡a V Trekh Tomakh

“The self-discipline of the Social Democracy is not merely the replacement of the authority of bourgeois rulers with the authority of a socialist central committee. The working class will acquire the sense of the new discipline, the freely assumed self-discipline of the Social Democracy, not as a result of the discipline imposed on it by the capitalist state, but by extirpating, to the last root, its old habits of obedience and servility.”

“I have no intention of slurring over the differences we have with socialism, nor concealing my belief that we are the National Party of Great Britain, representing not narrow class interest, nor the bigotry of the left wing intellectuals, but all those who support the British tradition of democracy, of personal freedom, of personal responsibility for one's own affairs and those of one's family, with the least possible interference from the State.”

“We owe to democracy, at least in part, the regime of discussion with which we live; we owe it to the principal modern liberties: those of thought, press and association. And the regime of free discussion is the only one which permits the ruling class to renew itself... which eliminates that class quasi-automatically when it no longer corresponds to the interests of the country.”

Country Interest Liberty Class Democracy Modern Speech Presses Discussion Permit Association Regimes Principal Ruling

Author:Gaetano Mosca

“In a true democracy everyone can be upper class and live in Connecticut.”

Class Democracy Upper Class Connecticut True Democracy

Book:The official preppy handbook

Source: The official preppy handbook

“You want sanity, democracy, community, an intact Earth? We can't get there, obeying Constitutional theory and law crafted by slave masters, imperialists, corporate masters, and Nature destroyers. We can't get there, kneeling before robed lawyers stockpiling class plunder precedent up their venerable sleeves. So isn't disobedience the challenge of our age? Principled, inventive, escalating disobedience to liberate our souls, to transfigure our work as humans on this Earth.”

“Democracy appears to be safer and less liable to revolution than oligarchy. For in oligarchies there is the double danger of the oligarchs falling out among themselves and also with the people; but in democracies there is only the danger of a quarrel with the oligarchs. No dissension worth mentioning arises among the people themselves. And we may further remark that a government which is composed of the middle class more nearly approximates to democracy than to oligarchy, and is the safest of the imperfect forms of government.”

Source: On man in the universe: Metaphysics, Parts of animals, Ethics, Politics, Poetics

“Every man should be responsible to others, nor should anyone be allowed to do just as he pleases; for where absolute freedom is allowed there is nothing to restrain the evil which is inherent in every man. But the principle of responsibility secures that which is the greatest good in states; the right persons rule and are prevented from doing wrong, and the people have their due. It is evident that this is the best kind of democracy, and why? because the people are drawn from a certain class.”

Source: Aristotle's Politics: Writings from the Complete Works: Politics, Economics, Constitution of Athens

“A government which is composed of the middle class more nearly approximates to democracy than to oligarchy, and is the safest of the imperfect forms of government.”

Government Form Class Democracy Middle Middle Class Imperfect Forms Of Government Oligarchy

Book:The Essential Aristotle

Source: The Essential Aristotle

“Tradition is only democracy extended through time; it may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who are merely walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father.”

“All deductions having been made, democracy has done less harm, and more good, than any other form of government. It gave to human existence a zest and camaraderie that outweighed its pitfalls and defects. It gave to thought and science and enterprise the freedom essential to their operation and growth. It broke down the walls of privilege and class, and in each generation it raised up ability from every rank and place.”

Source: The Lessons of History

“Unless the people can choose their leaders and rulers, and can revoke their choice at intervals long enough to test their measuresby results, the government will be a tyranny exercised in the interests of whatever classes or castes or mobs or cliques have this choice.”

People Long Enough Government Choices Interest Results Leader Class Democracy Tests Tyranny Voting Rulers Intervals Castes Clique

Author:George Bernard Shaw

“Democracy means the organization of society for the benefit and at the expense of everybody indiscriminately and not for the benefit of a privileged class.”

Mean Class Democracy Benefits Organization Expenses Privileged

Author:George Bernard Shaw

“A State, in idea, is the opposite of a Church. A State regards classes, and not individuals; and it estimates classes, not by internal merit, but external accidents, as property, birth, etc. But a church does the reverse of this, and disregards all external accidents, and looks at men as individual persons, allowing no gradations of ranks, but such as greater or less wisdom, learning, and holiness ought to confer. A Church is, therefore, in idea, the only pure democracy.”

Source: Golden Hours with Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“As the only class distinction available in a democracy, the college degree has created a caste society as rigid as ancient India's. Condemning elitism and simultaneously quaking in fear that our children won't become members of the elite, we send them to college, not to learn, but to "be" college graduates, rationalizing our snobbery with the cliché that high technology has eliminated the need for the manual labor that we secretly hold in contempt.”

Source: Lump It Or Leave It

“We all accuse Vladimir Putin of Cold War nostalgia, but Washington's elites - politicians and intellectuals - miss the old days as well. They wish for the world in which the United States was utterly dominant over its friends, its foes were to be shunned entirely, and the challenges were stark, moral, and vital. Today's world is messy and complicated. China is one of our biggest trading partners and our looming geopolitical rival. Russia is a surly spoiler, but it has a globalized middle class and has created ties in Europe.”

“Jail is just another micro-society. It just happens that here, the problems are far more out in the open, we don't live with the facades of lies that democracy or capitalism creates for us.”

Problem Reality Happens Lying Politics Community Money Class Democracy Policy Wall Taxes Capitalism Trade Property Human Rights Ideology Jail Free Speech Consumerism Facade Partisanship

Author:Cecily McMillan

“The structure of the Swiss ruling class is rock-hard, and unchanged since the time of Napoleon. They sit on their mountains and lecture the world on democracy. It's an unbelievable show of self-satisfaction and arrogance.”

World Self Hard Shows Class Democracy Rocks Mountain Structure Satisfaction Arrogance Unbelievable Ruling Lectures Swiss Self-satisfaction

Author:Jean Ziegler

“Inequality hardens society into a class system. Inequality divides us from one another... Inequality undermines democracy.”

Class Democracy Inequality Divides Class System

Author:George Packer

“A democracy survives when its citizens have access to trustworthy and impartial sources of information, when it can discern lies from truth. Take this away and a democracy dies. The fusion of news and entertainment, the rise of a class of celebrity journalists on television who define reporting by their access to the famous and the powerful, the retreat by many readers into the ideological ghettos of the Internet and the ruthless drive by corporations to destroy the traditional news business are leaving us deaf, dumb and blind.”

“The first and most important thing to understand about politics is this: forget Right, Left, Center, socialism, fascism, or democracy. Every government that exists - or ever existed, or ever will exist - is a kleptocracy, meaning "rule by thieves." Competing ideologies merely provide different excuses to separate the Productive Class from what they produce.”

Firsts Important Different Government Left Forget Class Democracy Produce Important Things Excuse Socialism Ideology Productive Fascism Thieves Competing

Author:L. Neil Smith

“We need a growing middle class, not one that has been disappearing for 40 years. We need a vibrant one person-one vote democracy, not one which is dominated by billionaire campaign contributors. It's time for a political revolution. It's time to make our government work for all of us, and not just the 1%.”

“Highly graduate taxation realizes most completely the supreme danger of democracy, creating a state of things in which one class imposes on another burdens which it is not asked to share, and impels the State into vast schemes of extravagance, under the belief that the whole costs will be thrown upon others.”

States Whole Belief Realizing Class Democracy Share Danger Cost Creating Burden Supreme Thrown Graduates Schemes Taxation Extravagance

Author:William Edward Hartpole Lecky

“For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.”

Lying Interest Behinds Class Democracy Events Training Western Currents Ideology Minorities Leisure Privileged Veils Facility Distortion Misrepresentation

Book:American Power and the New Mandarins

Source: American Power and the New Mandarins

“Our society is connecting workers with the products people consume and recognizing workers for their contributions. It is important to do that, and to have organized labor - a middle class - to preserve our democracy.”

People Important Class Democracy Middle Products Labor Workers Preserves Organized Contribution Middle Class Our Society Recognizing Connecting Organized Labor

Author:Dolores Huerta

“The neoliberal programs of the last generation have in fact been, and were intended to be, a pretty serious attack on democracy, but also they've led to stagnation or decline for large parts of the population - the working class, the lower middle class, these people have essentially been cast aside.”

People Facts Lasts Class Democracy Generations Middle Serious Program Casts Population Middle Class Decline Working Class Stagnation

Author:Noam Chomsky

“When the public loses faith in democracy's ability to solve the problems it has created for itself, the game's almost over. And I think we are this close to losing democracy to the mercenary class.”

Thinking Problem Games Loses Ability Class Democracy Losing Solve Mercenary Almost Over

Author:Bill Moyers

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Democracy Quotes