In our system of democracy, our government works on a system of checks and balances. Instead of stripping power from the courts, I believe we should follow the process prescribed in our Constitution - consideration of a Constitutional amendment.
I'm against unanswerable concentrations of power, whether that be government or private industry or religious figures - anybody who is not accountable to the larger social climate or society for the power they wield, that concerns me. I'm very pro-de...
It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to an...
You know, this idea of going around the world imposing democracy by growing a middle-class, a trading merchant class that is independent of your faith, is a good notion, but we're all partially different - it's no good imposing systems on people that...
One of the features of a democracy is the disentanglement of the sacred from the secular because in religiously pluralistic countries, no one can legitimately claim special status by faith membership.
I have made a film about jazz that tries to look through jazz to see what it tells us about who we are as a people. I think that jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a kind of look into our redemptive future possibilities.
Under the leadership of this President, the state of the union is not strong. We are being pulled apart rather than pulling together. Our democracy is suffering from the choices being made, and yet we are offered the same tired excuses and unrealisti...
The Chinese leadership hoped that the world would soon forget the Tiananmen Square massacre. Our job in Congress is to ensure that we never forget those who lost their lives in Tiananmen Square that day or the pro-democracy cause for which they fough...
Over the course of my life, I have made many transitions - most of them taking me further away from my Somali roots and steadily toward the enlightened mentality of Western democracy.
In society, we have these unspoken rules of conduct, these 'shoulds.' Even though we pride ourselves on being a democracy, there are all these ways we say you 'should' behave. But what if you're living your life by the 'shoulds' and you're not really...
The United Nations should come in and take over Liberia, not temporarily, but for life. To make Liberians believe in democracy, to make us believe in human rights, they need to go in and just seize control of the country. That is the only way Liberia...
Universities are some of the few places left where a struggle for the commons, for public life, if not democracy itself, can be made visible through the medium of collective voices and social movements energized by the need for a politics and way of ...
Our country was thereby saved from the consequences of its distracting individualistic conception of democracy, and its merely legal conception of nationality. It was because the followers of Jackson and Douglas did fight for it, that the Union was p...
Our constancy, same might call it our madness, was necessary to wear down the oppressive forces of the old democracy which, in Spain, was a hundred years behind the times.
Bosses are no more inevitable in state and local governments than dictators are in national governments. They will arise and prosper, nevertheless, if true believers of democracy - citizens devoted to the democratic ideals - do not constantly oppose ...
The bedrock of our democracy is the rule of law and that means we have to have an independent judiciary, judges who can make decisions independent of the political winds that are blowing.
You are never wrong when you have voted because you've acted in accordance with your conscience and your beliefs, and you've exercised your democratic right, which is, you know, perfectly legitimate in our democracies.
As a veteran, I know firsthand the satisfaction there is in defending the democracy you so strongly believe in, but I can also attest to the trauma encountered from combat on the battlefield.
For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region, here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither.
In this film George presents issues that are important, essential and vital, whoever you are, about constitutional rights and the bedrock of a democracy. I am drawn to those kinds of stories because they inspire me - they are responsible to a populac...
International politics is never about democracy and human rights. It's about the interests of states. Remember that, no matter what you are told in history lessons.
