The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians.
With the end of the cold war, all the 'isms' of the 20th century - Fascism, Nazism, Communism and the evil of apartheid-ism - have failed. Except one. Only democracy has shown itself true the help of all mankind.
Everyone living under the social contract we call democracy has a duty to act responsibly, to obey the laws, and to abandon certain types of self-interested behaviors that conflict with the general good.
Democracy has proved only that the best way to gain power over people is to assure the people that they are ruling themselves. Once they believe that, they make wonderfully submissive slaves.
Liberalism and Western-style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today these two concepts have failed. Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems.
In Cuba, our experiment is not the best democracy and should not be a reference to anybody elses, it is ours. It has worked for us and the clearest evidence that our democracy has worked is that there is a revolution that has continued after a half century of facing down the most powerful empire. This has not happened many times in history.
And I don't see that popular measures, self-abnegation and democracy have done anything for Man but push him further into the mud. Currently, popularity endorses degraded novels, self-abnegation has filled the Southeast Asian jungles with stone idols and corpses, and democracy has given us inflation and income tax.
With few exceptions, democracy has not brought good government to new developing countries. What Asians value may not necessarily be what Americans or Europeans value. Westerners value the freedoms and liberties of the individual. As an Asian of Chinese cultural backround, my values are for a government which is honest, effective and efficient.
For over a century, popular struggles in the democracies have used the nation-state to temper raw capitalism. The power of voters has offset the power of capital. But as national barriers have come down in the name of freer commerce, so has the capacity of governments to manage capitalism in a broad public interest. So the real issue is not "trade" but democratic governance.
Though editorialists at The New York Times and The Washington Post still don't get it, most Democrats in Congress finally do: Today's trade disputes are no longer mostly about tariffs, quotas, or free entry of goods. They are about the ground rules for capitalism. Are there to be only property rights? What about the other rights that liberal democracies have fought for since the 1880s?
Is America truly a democracy? Has America ever been a democracy with the institution of slavery?
Democracy and religion stand or fall together. Where democracy has been destroyed, religion has been doomed. Where religion has been trampled down, democracy has ceased to exist.... Tyrants have come and have had their day and then have passed while religion has survived them all.
One faith, one law and one standard of justice did not mean democracy. The heresy of democracy has since then worked havoc in church and state . . . Christianity and democracy are inevitably enemies.
Although Christianity has never been the guarantee of a democratic state anywhere in the world, no democracy has ever thrived successfully for any period of time outside of Christian influence.
To declare the Cold War over, and declare democracy has won out over totalitarianism, is a measure of arrogance and wrong-headedness.
Taiwan's democracy has grown very fast and we enjoy a certain degree of freedom, as other developed democracies like the United States.
The word democracy has no meaning. Duty has gone. Only rights remain.
The hegemony of finance and the banks has produced the indebted. Control over information and communication networks has created the mediatized. The security regime and the generalized state of exception have constructed a figure prey to fear and yearning for protection—the securitized. And the corruption of democracy has forged a strange, depoliticized figure, the represented. These subjective figures constitute the social terrain on which—and against which—movements of resistance and rebellion must act.
Although Israel was founded based on the historic Jewish homeland and the need to have a Jewish homeland, Israeli democracy has been premised on everybody in the country being treated equally and fairly. And I think that that is what's best about Israeli democracy.
Our democracy has been around far longer than European democracy.
A spurious democracy has influenced both our research methods (I am sometimes tempted to define "validity" as part of the context of an experiment demanding so little in the way of esoteric gift that any number can play at it, provided they have taken a certain number of courses) and our research subjects (it would be deemed snobbish to investigate only the best people).
A total work of art is only possible in the context of the whole of society. Everyone will be a necessary co-creator of a social architecture, and, so long as anyone cannot participate, the ideal form of democracy has not been reached. Whether people are artists, assemblers of machines or nurses, it is a matter of participating in the whole.
When free discussion is denied, hardening of the arteries of democracy has set in, free institutions are but a lifeless form, and the death of the republic is at hand.
Lincoln, they used to talk about him almost as bad as they talk about me. So democracy has never been for the faint of heart.
Democracy has turned out to be not majority rule but rule by well-organized and well-connected minority groups who steal from the majority.
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