Because democratic institutions do not renew themselves as effortlessly as flowering trees, they demand the ceaseless tinkering of people who possess both the courage and the honesty to admit their mistakes and accept responsibility for even the most inglorious acts.

The faith in reason insists that the poverty of democracy offers a greater hope for mankind than the prosperity that attaches itself to aristocracy or despotism.

A democracy is a state which recognizes the subjection of the minority to the majority, that is, an organization for the systematic use of violence by one class against the other, by one part of the population against another.

The taste of democracy becomes a bitter taste when the fullness of democracy is denied.

On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy has given the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had.

No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.

This is one of the paradoxes of the democratic movement-that it loves a crowd and fears the individuals who compose it-that the religion of humanity should have no faith in human beings.

The consent of the governed" is more than a safeguard against ignorant tyrants: it is an insurance against benevolent despots as well.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

What democracy needs most of all is a party that will separate the good that is in it theoretically from the evils that beset it practically, and then try to erect that good into a workable system.