#democracy

A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership. ↗

— Chinua Achebe

#educated #functioning #grounded #healthy #leadership

Democracy is not something you put away for ten years, and then in the 11th year you wake up and start practicing again. We have to begin to learn to rule ourselves again. ↗

— Chinua Achebe

#away #begin #democracy #learn #ourselves

We've got to understand that the whole nature of the way American democracy guards its freedom has been changed. ↗

— John Ashcroft

#been #changed #democracy #freedom #got

It’s not unpatriotic to denounce an injustice committed on our behalf, perhaps it’s the most patriotic thing we can do. ↗

— E.A. Bucchianeri

#citizenship #courage #democracy #free-speech #freedom

secrecy is the freedom tyrants dream of ↗

— Bill Moyers

#dreams

India had a very long independence movement. It started in 1886, [with] the first generation of Western-educated Indians. They were all liberals. They followed the Liberal Party in Britain, and they were very proud of their knowledge of parliamentary systems, parliamentary manners. They were big debaters. They [had], as it were, a long apprenticeship in training for being in power. Even when Gandhi made it a mass movement, the idea of elective representatives, elected working committees, elected leadership, all that stayed because basically Indians wanted to impress the British that they were going to be as good as the British were at running a parliamentary democracy. And that helped quite a lot. ↗

— Meghnad Desai

#india #education

Here's what we're not taught [about the Declaration and Constitution]: Those words at the time they were written were blazingly, electrifyingly subversive. If you understand them truly now, they still are. You are not taught - and it is a disgrace that you aren't - that these men and women were radicals for liberty; that they had a vision of equality that was a slap in the face of what the rest of their world understood to be the unchanging, God-given order of nations; and that they were willing to die to make that desperate vision into a reality for people like us, whom they would never live to see. ↗

— Naomi Wolf

#democracy #equality #independence #liberty #subversive

Democracy is in the blood of Musalmans, who look upon complete equality of manhood [mankind]…[and] believe in fraternity, equality and liberty. ↗

— Muhammad Ali Jinnah

#equality #freedom #islam #jinnah #muslims

Secrecy begets tyranny. ↗

— Robert A. Heinlein

#freedom #freedom

You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police ... yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts: words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home -- all the more powerful because forbidden -- terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. ↗

— Winston Churchill

#dictatorship #fear #freedom #government #independent-thought