This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Mikhail Gorbachev, fully Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev
We are witnessing most profound social change. Whether in the East or the South, the West or the North, hundreds of millions of people, new nations and states, new public movements and ideologies have moved to the forefront of history. Broad-based and frequently turbulent popular movements have given expression, in a multidimensional and contradictory way, to a longing for independence, democracy and social justice. The idea of democratizing the entire world order has become a powerful socio-political force. At the same time, the scientific and technological revolution has turned many economic, food, energy, environmental, information and population problems, which only recently we treated as national or regional ones, into global problems. Thanks to the advances in mass media and means of transportation, the world seems to have become more visible and tangible. International communication has become easier than ever before.
Democracy | Global | Longing | Means | Nations | Order | Public | Revolution | World |
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
In true democracy every man and women is taught to think for himself or herself.
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
If we want to cultivate a true spirit of democracy we cannot afford to be intolerant. Intolerance betrays want of faith in one’s cause.
Democracy | Faith | Intolerance | Spirit |
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood.
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
To safeguard democracy the people must have a keen sense of independence, self-respect, and their oneness.
Charles De Montesquieu, formally Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu
The love of democracy is that of equality.
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
The spirit of democracy cannot be established in the midst of terrorism, whether governmental or popular.
Nelson Mandela, fully Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela
The victory of democracy in South Africa is the common achievement of all humanity.
Achievement | Democracy |
Nelson Mandela, fully Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela
There was much in such a society that was primitive and insecure and it certainly could never measure up to the demands of the present epoch. But in such a society are contained the seeds of revolutionary democracy in which none will be held in slavery.
Niels Bohr, fully Neils Henrik David Bohr
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
Oswald Spengler, fully Oswald Manuel Arnold Gottfried Spengler
Through money, democracy becomes its own destroyer, after money has destroyed intellect.
Otto Kahn, fully Otto Hermann Kahn
The deadliest foe of democracy is not autocracy but liberty frenzied. Liberty is not foolproof. For its beneficent working it demands self-restraint, a sane and clear recognition of the practical and attainable, and of the fact that there are laws of nature which are beyond our power to change.
Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history, mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst off-sloughings of the planet are the ingredients of sovereignty. Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy the whores are us.
Democracy | Government | Lord | Mankind | Will | Government | Trouble |
Paul Feyerabend, fully Paul Karl Feyerabend
Every profession has an ideology and a drive for power that goes far beyond its achievements and it is the task of democracy to keep this ideology and this drive under control. Science is here no different from other institutions.
Pat Buchanan, fully Patrick Joseph "Pat" Buchanan
Our intellectual, cultural, and political elites are today engaged in one of the most audacious and ambitious experiments in history. They are trying to transform a Western Christian republic into an egalitarian democracy made up of all the tribes, races, creeds, and cultures of planet Earth. They have dethroned our God, purged our cradle faith from public life, and repudiated the Judeo-Christian moral code by which previous generations sought to live.
Well, one of the things we’ve done at my institute is we’ve created a website called wiserearth.org precisely to create, in a sense, an information commons for this unnamed movement that is also the fastest-growing movement in the world, and where you can put in your organization profiles, events and so forth, and a website, Democracy Now! or any other, can sit right on top of the data and pull it up, so that we’re trying to create more or less something that feeds these NGOs and the ability for them to recognize, contact, connect and collaborate or coalesce in different ways. That is missing right now.
Ability | Democracy | Events | Organization | Right |
Peter L. Berger, fully Peter Ludwig Berger
So I think one can say on empirical grounds – not because of some philosophical principle – that you can’t have democracy unless you have a market economy.
Peter L. Berger, fully Peter Ludwig Berger
Let me say again that the relationship is asymmetrical: there’s no democracy without a market economy, but you can have a market economy without democracy.
Phyllis Schlafly, fully Phyllis McAlpin Stewart Schlafly
As our government takes democracy to unlikely places all over the world, how about a decent respect for self-government at home!
Democracy | Government | Respect | Government | Respect |
Monarchy degenerates into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into savage violence and chaos.