democracy essay quotes

70 Quotes on Democracy that Capture the Spirit of Democracy

Quotes on Democracy, Democracy, the governance system that empowers citizens to participate in decision-making processes, has been a subject of contemplation and debate for centuries. From ancient philosophers to modern statesmen, individuals have shared profound insights, criticisms, and praises for this form of governance. Let’s explore some notable quotes on democracy and unravel their significance in today’s world.

• Related: 70 Best Election Day Quotes, Wishes, Messages & Captions

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Quotes on Democracy

“Democracy is the government of the people, by the people, for the people.” – Abraham Lincoln

“Democracy is not just a form of government; it’s a way of life.” – Jawaharlal Nehru

“The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.” – John F. Kennedy

“Democracy is the only system that persists in asking powers to justify themselves.” – John Kenneth Galbraith

“Democracy is not perfect, but it’s the best system we have.” – Winston Churchill

“Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.” – Harry Emerson Fosdick

“The ballot is stronger than the bullet.” – Abraham Lincoln

“Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking.” – Clement Attlee

“Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt

“Democracy is the art of thinking independently together.” – Alexander Meiklejohn

“Democracy is not just a political concept, but a culture that empowers individuals and communities.” – Unknown

“Democracy is a journey of continuous improvement, always striving for a more inclusive and just society.” – Aung San Suu Kyi

“Democracy is not simply a form of government; it is a way of organizing and uplifting the human spirit.” – Rollo May

“Democracy is the embodiment of the principle that men were born to be free.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt

“Democracy is the only system capable of reflecting the humanist premise of equilibrium or balance.” – John Ralston Saul

“Democracy is not just about casting votes, but also about ensuring that every voice is heard and respected.” – Kofi Annan

“Democracy is a commitment to the dignity and potential of each individual.” – Tony Blair

“In a democracy, the well-being, individuality, and happiness of every citizen is important for the overall prosperity of the nation.” – Adlai E. Stevenson II

“Democracy is more than a set of rules; it is a culture that promotes dialogue, tolerance, and the pursuit of common goals.” – Bill Clinton

“The strength of a democracy lies in the ability of its citizens to question, engage, and actively participate in shaping its future.” – Barack Obama

“Democracy thrives on the diversity of voices and perspectives, enriching the fabric of society.” – Unknown

“Democracy is not just about majority rule; it’s about protecting the rights and dignity of minorities.” – Jimmy Carter

“The essence of democracy is the assurance that every individual counts, every voice matters.” – Hillary Clinton

“Democracy is a continual process of renewal, where citizens actively participate in shaping their collective destiny.” – Vaclav Havel

“Democracy is a garden that requires constant cultivation, nurturing, and protection.” – Desmond Tutu

“In a democracy, the power of governance emanates from the people and returns to them, ensuring accountability and transparency.” – Mary Robinson

“Democracy is not just about elections; it’s about fostering a culture of civic engagement and responsibility.” – Justin Trudeau

“The true test of democracy is not the perfection of its institutions but the empowerment of its people.” – Helen Clark

“Democracy is a reflection of our shared humanity, where every individual’s rights and freedoms are safeguarded.” – Ban Ki-moon

“The beauty of democracy lies in its ability to accommodate dissent, dialogue, and peaceful resolution of conflicts.” – Nelson Mandela

“Democracy is the cornerstone of human dignity, allowing individuals to assert their rights and shape their destinies.” – Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

“Democracy is not just a system of governance; it’s a promise of equality, justice, and opportunity for all.” – Michelle Obama

“The strength of democracy lies in its ability to adapt, evolve, and respond to the changing needs and aspirations of its citizens.” – Angela Merkel

“Democracy is a reflection of our collective belief in the inherent worth and potential of every human being.” – Jacinda Ardern

“In a democracy, the power of the people is not just a slogan but a living reality that shapes the course of nations.” – Emmanuel Macron

“Democracy is a journey towards a more perfect union, where we strive to bridge divides and build a society based on mutual respect and understanding.” – Joe Biden

“The soul of democracy lies in the free exchange of ideas, where truth emerges from the crucible of debate and discourse.” – Kamala Harris

“Democracy is a beacon of hope in a world often plagued by division, oppression, and injustice.” – Justin Welby

“The essence of democracy is not just in the exercise of rights but in the fulfillment of responsibilities towards one another and the common good.” – Pope Francis

“Democracy is not a spectator sport; it requires active participation, vigilance, and a commitment to upholding democratic values.” – Michelle Bachelet

“Democracy is the art of balancing competing interests while upholding the dignity and rights of every individual.” – Ellen DeGeneres

“In a democracy, disagreement is not a sign of weakness but a testament to the strength of diverse perspectives.” – Justin Trudeau

“Democracy is not just about what happens in the halls of power but also in the streets, where the voices of the marginalized are often heard the loudest.” – Malala Yousafzai

“The essence of democracy lies in the empowerment of the powerless, giving voice to the voiceless, and ensuring that every person has a seat at the table.” – Desmond Tutu

“Democracy is a commitment to the principle that government exists to serve the people, not the other way around.” – Bernie Sanders

“In a democracy, the measure of a society’s progress is not just its GDP but the well-being and happiness of its citizens.” – Narendra Modi

“Democracy is a journey towards a more inclusive and equitable society, where no one is left behind.” – Justin Welby

“The true strength of democracy lies in its ability to foster a culture of empathy, compassion, and solidarity.” – Dalai Lama

“Democracy is not just a system of governance; it’s a moral imperative rooted in the inherent worth and dignity of every individual.” – Cory Booker

“In the tapestry of democracy, every thread counts, weaving together a fabric of justice, equality, and freedom.” – Barack Obama

Quotes on Democracy serve as poignant reminders of its enduring relevance and the collective responsibility to uphold and strengthen democratic institutions. As we navigate the complexities of the modern world, let us heed the wisdom of past and present voices in shaping a more inclusive, equitable, and resilient democratic future.

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The following are some quotations about democracy:

“E pluribus unum.” (Out of many, one.) 

—MOTTO OF THE UNITED STATES 

“Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.” 

—HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK

“Democracy is a process, not a static condition. It is becoming, rather than being. It can easily be lost, but never is fully won. Its essence is eternal struggle.” 

—FEDERAL JUDGE WILLIAM H. HASTIE 

“Chief among our gains must be reckoned this possibility of choice, the recognition of many possible ways of life, where other civilizations have recognized only one.” 

—MARGARET MEAD 

“Democracy means not ‘I am as good as you are,’ but ‘You are as good as I am.’” 

—REV. THEODORE PARKER 

“The government is us; we are the government, you and I.” 

—THEODORE ROOSEVELT

“In a democracy, the highest office is the office of citizen.”

—SUPREME COURT JUSTICE FELIX FRANKFURTER

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Facing History & Ourselves, “ What Is Democracy? ”, last updated July 6, 2023.

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Alexis de Tocqueville: 15 Quotes on Democracy and Liberty

The need for a political majority has become virtually the only limit on government..

July 29 marks the birth of Alexis de Tocqueville. Motivated by his “love of liberty and human dignity,” his Democracy in America has been called “one of the wisest works of modern thought,” that for understanding and preserving liberty, “the intelligent American reader can find no better guide.”

Despite democracy’s prominence in his title, de Tocqueville’s focus was liberty, because “the only passions I have are love of liberty and human dignity.” Revisiting him is particularly important now, when the need for a political majority has become virtually the only limit on government, because he saw how democracy can subvert liberty.

“The Revolution… was the result of a mature and reflecting preference for freedom, and not of a vague or ill-defined craving for independence.” “The Federal Constitution… disavowed beforehand the habitual use of compulsion in enforcing the decisions of the majority.” “It profits me but little, after all, that a vigilant authority… averts all dangers from my path… if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life.” “I am not so much alarmed at the excessive liberty which reigns… as at the inadequate securities which one finds there against tyranny.” “No sooner does a government attempt to go beyond its political sphere… than it exercises… insupportable tyranny.” “The despotism of faction is not less to be dreaded than the despotism of an individual.” “Americans believe their freedom to be the best instrument and surest safeguard… to secure for themselves a government which will allow them to acquire the things they covet and which will not debar them from the peaceful enjoyment of those possessions.” “[People] think they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom when they have surrendered it to the power of the nation at large. This does not satisfy me: the nature of him I am to obey signifies less to me than the fact of extorted obedience.” “The democratic tendency… leads men unceasingly to multiply the privileges of the state and to circumscribe the rights of private persons… often sacrificed without regret and almost always violated without remorse… men become less and less attached to private rights just when it is most necessary to retain and defend what little remains of them.” “True friends of liberty… ought constantly to be on the alert to prevent the power of government from lightly sacrificing the private rights of individuals to the general execution of its designs. At such times no citizen is so obscure that it is not very dangerous to allow him to be oppressed; no private rights are so unimportant that they can be surrendered with impunity to the caprices of a government… [because] men accustom themselves to sacrifice private interest without scruple and to trample on the rights of individuals in order more speedily to accomplish any public purpose.” “I hold it to be… a detestable maxim that, politically speaking, the people have a right to do anything.” “When…the people are invested with the supreme authority…they discover a multitude of wants… to satisfy these exigencies recourse must be had to the coffers of the state.” “Popularity may be united with hostility to the rights of the people, and the secret slave of tyranny may be the professed lover of freedom.” “Defending rights against the encroachments of the government saves the common liberties of the country.” “To lay down… limits to the action of the government; to confer certain rights on private persons, and to secure to them the undisputed enjoyment of those rights… [are] the main objects.”

It has been said of Alexis de Tocqueville that “no authority on America has equaled him in prophetic vision.” When we view how much political determination, in which “the ever increasing despotism of the majority…makes every eye turn to the state,” has displaced freedom, it is hard to disagree. 

The centrality of liberty to Democracy in America can be encapsulated by two of its key statements: “[Citizens’] chief business…is to remain their own masters,” recognizing that “to neglect to hold [liberty] fast is to allow it to escape.” Americans desperately need to heed his insights again.

Gary M. Galles is a Professor of Economics at Pepperdine University and a member of the Foundation for Economic Education faculty network .

In addition to his new book,   Pathways to Policy Failures   (2020), his books include   Lines of Liberty   (2016),   Faulty Premises, Faulty Policies   (2014), and   Apostle of Peace   (2013). 

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Essay on Democracy in 100, 300 and 500 Words

• Updated on  
• Jan 15, 2024

The oldest account of democracy can be traced back to 508–507 BCC Athens . Today there are over 50 different types of democracy across the world. But, what is the ideal form of democracy? Why is democracy considered the epitome of freedom and rights around the globe? Let’s explore what self-governance is and how you can write a creative and informative essay on democracy and its significance. 

Today, India is the largest democracy with a population of 1.41 billion and counting. Everyone in India above the age of 18 is given the right to vote and elect their representative. Isn’t it beautiful, when people are given the option to vote for their leader, one that understands their problems and promises to end their miseries? This is just one feature of democracy , for we have a lot of samples for you in the essay on democracy. Stay tuned!

This Blog Includes:

What is democracy , sample essay on democracy (100 words), sample essay on democracy (250 to 300 words), sample essay on democracy for upsc (500 words).

Democracy is a form of government in which the final authority to deliberate and decide the legislation for the country lies with the people, either directly or through representatives. Within a democracy, the method of decision-making, and the demarcation of citizens vary among countries. However, some fundamental principles of democracy include the rule of law, inclusivity, political deliberations, voting via elections , etc. 

Did you know: On 15th August 1947, India became the world’s largest democracy after adopting the Indian Constitution and granting fundamental rights to its citizens?

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Democracy where people make decisions for the country is the only known form of governance in the world that promises to inculcate principles of equality, liberty and justice. The deliberations and negotiations to form policies and make decisions for the country are the basis on which the government works, with supreme power to people to choose their representatives, delegate the country’s matters and express their dissent. The democratic system is usually of two types, the presidential system, and the parliamentary system. In India, the three pillars of democracy, namely legislature, executive and judiciary, working independently and still interconnected, along with a free press and media provide a structure for a truly functional democracy. Despite the longest-written constitution incorporating values of sovereignty, socialism, secularism etc. India, like other countries, still faces challenges like corruption, bigotry, and oppression of certain communities and thus, struggles to stay true to its democratic ideals.

Did you know: Some of the richest countries in the world are democracies?

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As Abraham Lincoln once said, “democracy is the government of the people, by the people and for the people.” There is undeniably no doubt that the core of democracies lies in making people the ultimate decision-makers. With time, the simple definition of democracy has evolved to include other principles like equality, political accountability, rights of the citizens and to an extent, values of liberty and justice. Across the globe, representative democracies are widely prevalent, however, there is a major variation in how democracies are practised. The major two types of representative democracy are presidential and parliamentary forms of democracy. Moreover, not all those who present themselves as a democratic republic follow its values.

Many countries have legally deprived some communities of living with dignity and protecting their liberty, or are practising authoritarian rule through majoritarianism or populist leaders. Despite this, one of the things that are central and basic to all is the practice of elections and voting. However, even in such a case, the principles of universal adult franchise and the practice of free and fair elections are theoretically essential but very limited in practice, for a democracy. Unlike several other nations, India is still, at least constitutionally and principally, a practitioner of an ideal democracy.

With our three organs of the government, namely legislative, executive and judiciary, the constitutional rights to citizens, a multiparty system, laws to curb discrimination and spread the virtues of equality, protection to minorities, and a space for people to discuss, debate and dissent, India has shown a commitment towards democratic values. In recent times, with challenges to freedom of speech, rights of minority groups and a conundrum between the protection of diversity and unification of the country, the debate about the preservation of democracy has become vital to public discussion.

Did you know: In countries like Brazil, Scotland, Switzerland, Argentina, and Austria the minimum voting age is 16 years?

Also Read: Difference Between Democracy and Dictatorship

Democracy originated from the Greek word dēmokratiā , with dēmos ‘people’ and Kratos ‘rule.’ For the first time, the term appeared in the 5th century BC to denote the political systems then existing in Greek city-states, notably Classical Athens, to mean “rule of the people.” It now refers to a form of governance where the people have the right to participate in the decision-making of the country. Majorly, it is either a direct democracy where citizens deliberate and make legislation while in a representative democracy, they choose government officials on their behalf, like in a parliamentary or presidential democracy.

The presidential system (like in the USA) has the President as the head of the country and the government, while the parliamentary system (like in the UK and India) has both a Prime Minister who derives its legitimacy from a parliament and even a nominal head like a monarch or a President.

The notions and principle frameworks of democracy have evolved with time. At the core, lies the idea of political discussions and negotiations. In contrast to its alternatives like monarchy, anarchy, oligarchy etc., it is the one with the most liberty to incorporate diversity. The ideas of equality, political representation to all, active public participation, the inclusion of dissent, and most importantly, the authority to the law by all make it an attractive option for citizens to prefer, and countries to follow.

The largest democracy in the world, India with the lengthiest constitution has tried and to an extent, successfully achieved incorporating the framework to be a functional democracy. It is a parliamentary democratic republic where the President is head of the state and the Prime minister is head of the government. It works on the functioning of three bodies, namely legislative, executive, and judiciary. By including the principles of a sovereign, socialist, secular and democratic republic, and undertaking the guidelines to establish equality, liberty and justice, in the preamble itself, India shows true dedication to achieving the ideal.

It has formed a structure that allows people to enjoy their rights, fight against discrimination or any other form of suppression, and protect their rights as well. The ban on all and any form of discrimination, an independent judiciary, governmental accountability to its citizens, freedom of media and press, and secular values are some common values shared by all types of democracies.

Across the world, countries have tried rooting their constitution with the principles of democracy. However, the reality is different. Even though elections are conducted everywhere, mostly, they lack freedom of choice and fairness. Even in the world’s greatest democracies, there are challenges like political instability, suppression of dissent, corruption , and power dynamics polluting the political sphere and making it unjust for the citizens. Despite the consensus on democracy as the best form of government, the journey to achieve true democracy is both painstaking and tiresome. 

Did you know: Countries like Singapore, Peru, and Brazil have compulsory voting?

Must Read: Democracy and Diversity Class 10 Notes

Democracy is a process through which the government of a country is elected by and for the people.

Yes, India is a democratic country and also holds the title of the world’s largest democracy.

Direct and Representative Democracy are the two major types of Democracy.

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Top 25 Quotations for Democracy Essay – Quotes for Essays

Quotations on democracy in pakistan for fa / fsc 2nd year – democracy quotes.

This post contains the top 25 quotations for Democracy Essay for Class 12. The Democracy essay is an important essay for FSC 2nd year. If you visit Essays with Quotations you will find a complete essay on Democracy . However, if you need only quotations, you can continue with this post.

Students can use the same quotations in Essay on Democracy in Pakistan , Essay on Democracy and Dictatorship, Essay on Democracy and voting and Essay on Democracy. You can visit Essay Quotations for more quotes about other essays.

Quotations about Democracy for FSC Part 2 – Second Year English Notes

• “Man’scapacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.” (Reinhold Niebuhr)
• “Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.” Martin Luther King Jr.
• “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.”  (Abraham Lincoln0)
• “When Jefferson and the Republicans rallied to the Union and to the existing Federalist organization, the fabric of traditional American democracy was almost completely woven.” ( Herbert Croly)
• “The single-most powerful word in our democracy is the word ‘ we ’. We, the people. We shall overcome. Yes, we can.” (Barack Obama)
• “Democracy literally means the power of people. Democracy is not about politics, it is about the people.”  (Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj)
• “A great democracy has got to be progressive or it will soon cease to be great or a democracy.” (Theodore Roosevelt)
• “Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.” ( Howard Zinn )
• “The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the law.” ( Aristotle )
• “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)
• “There’s too much democracy in the culture, not enough in the society.” (Fran Lebowitz)
• “Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.” ( Benazir Bhutto)
• “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” ( Winston S. Churchill)
• “At the time of the Civil War, there were six democracies in the face of the planet. Today, there’s 120 and they’ve been inspired by American exceptionalism.” ( Robert Kennedy, Jr.)
• “Democracy is the government of the people, for the people and by the people.” (Abraham Lincoln)
• “Be not overcome by evil but overcome evil by good.” (Romans)
• “In a democracy, the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme.” (Aristotle)
• “Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve”. (G.B.Shaw)
• “A democracy is the only place where mankind is guaranteed of enjoying all of his/her basic God-given rights and freedoms.”
• “Democracy is too important to leave up to the votes of the people.” (Henry A. Kissinger)
• “Democracy the fools have right to vote dictatorship the fools have right to rule.” (Bertrand Russell)
• “When dictatorship is a fact revolution becomes a right.” (Victor Hugo)
• “In a democracy, you believe it or not; in a dictatorship, you believe it or else.” (Evan Esar)
• “The fact that the world’s richest and happiest countries practice democracy is more than enough proof that democracy is an absolutely priceless blessing”.

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15 Democracy Quotes

2) The people who own the country ought to govern it. -John Kay

3) A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy. -Theodore Roosevelt

4) There cannot be daily democracy without daily citizenship. -Ralph Nader

5) Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing. -Archibald MacLeish

6) The lesson of history is clear: democracy always wins in the end. -Marjorie Kelly

7) It is my principle that the will of the majority should always prevail. -Thomas Jefferson

8 ) I understand democracy as something that gives the weak the same chance as the strong. -Mohandas Gandhi

9) The primal principle of democracy is the worth and dignity of the individual. -Edward Bellamy

10) In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, the will of the majority is supreme. -Aristotle

11) Democracy is not the law of the majority but protection of the minority. -Albert Camus

12) In a democracy, the individual enjoys not only the ultimate power but carries the ultimate responsibility. -Norman Cousins

13) Democracy is not just a question of having a vote. It consists of strengthening each citizen’s possibility and capacity to participate in the deliberations involved in life in society. -Fernando Cardoso

14) The road to democracy may be winding and is like a river taking many curves, but eventually the river will reach the ocean. – Chen Shui-bian

15) Democracy is not so much a form of government as a set of principles. -Woodrow Wilson

Since the 4th of July is over now, how did you spend your time?  What did you do to celebrate?

While we’re at it, do you have any democracy quotes of your own to share?  Which one’s above did you like the most?

As always, please share your answers to these questions in the comments section below.

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• Marcia Hays
• July 8, 2009

As always, I enjoy reading the quotes and inspirations you post. Although I don’t always comment on them, please know I DO read them! And, ocassionally, I save them and use them, too!

Thanks Marcia, I enjoy your comments, so keep ’em coming. I’m glad to know you’re always around close-by.

• July 9, 2009

This is the famous quotation of John F. Kennedy.

“Do not ask what the Government can do to you but ask what you can do to the Government.”

• February 18, 2011

Just found this while looking for democracy quotes and had to stick my nose in. While I love the paraphrasing an the new meaning, just in case anyone is interested in the actual quote it is: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

• Kenneth Bell
• May 25, 2011

Life is always a two-way street – giving and receiving – not just giving or not just receiving.

• July 24, 2009

I like 4 and 8! thx!

• Robert Edwards
• October 17, 2009

Democracy is fast becoming a fraudulent subject; for it to survive it must become unethical and there is the road of self destruction. A democracy can only survive in an educated environment; an environment in which its people have compassion and a large dose of liberality. Only then can democracy stand the vigor’s and onslaught of fundamentalism. Take care and keep the force. Robert

• sarthak bhagat
• April 25, 2011

plz cud u offer some quotes on democracy empowerment over corruption

The words are : “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”

• happygolucky
• February 7, 2013

Our nation is not a democracy, but a Constitutional Republic. Our founders went out of their way to PREVENT democracy in order to avoid the tyranny of the majority. Your quote in #1 is a correct quote, but Lincoln was not referring to democracy. The word democracy isn’t even in the Gettysburg Address. If you read any of his other speeches you will find that he was a HUGE supporter of the founders who believed that democracy will destroy a nation but a republic that limits both the government and the governed is the best form of government to protect the rights of the majority and the minority. Direct democracy destroyed Greece and representative democracy destroyed Rome. Tyranny of the majority always leads to anarchy and then oligarchy.

• RAMANA GOVE
• January 9, 2020

Many quotes have their great impressions on the mind bearing great relevance to the context.It is indeed a good collection.Since you asked any own quotes from our side ,I am herewith submitting a few I framed on my own long back. Success of democracy lies in reaching the needy and in handling the greedy

True democracy lets the weakest of the weak live with pride and dignity.

The thin line between democracy and demonocracy is that in the former,the needy are taken care of while in latter, the greedy and the unruly.

The intensity of the voice and noise of the dissent ,the rulers can endure without resorting to oppression, is the hallmark for true democracy. —RAMANA GOVE

• January 10, 2020

Great ones, Ramana! Thanks for sharing!

• January 26, 2020

I am submitting a few quotes of my own on democracy:

*Success of democracy lies in reaching the needy and in handling the greedy

*True democracy lets the weakest of the weak live with pride and dignity.

*The thin line between democracy and demonocracy is that in the former,the needy are taken care of while in latter, the greedy and the unruly.

*The intensity of the voice and noise of the dissent the rulers can endure without resorting to oppression, is the hallmark for true democracy.

• February 5, 2020

Good ones! Who are they by?

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Democracy Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on democracy.

Democracy is known as the finest form of government. Why so? Because in a democracy, the people of the country choose their government. They enjoy certain rights which are very essential for any human being to live freely and happily. There are various democratic countries in the world , but India is the largest one. Democracy has withstood the test of time, and while other forms have the government has failed, democracy stood strong. It has time and again proved its importance and impact.

Significance of a Democracy

Democracy is very important for human development . When people have free will to live freely, they will be happier. Moreover, we have seen how other forms of government have turned out to be. Citizens are not that happy and prosperous in a monarchy or anarchy.

Furthermore, democracy lets people have equal rights. This ensures that equality prevails all over the country. Subsequently, it also gives them duties. These duties make them better citizens and are also important for their overall development.

Most importantly, in a democracy, the people form the government. So, this selection of the government by the citizens gives everyone a chance to work for their country. It allows the law to prevail efficiently as the rules are made by people whom they have selected.

In addition, democracy allows people of various religions and cultures to exist peacefully. It makes them live in harmony with one another. People of democracy are more tolerant and accepting of each other’s differences. This is very important for any country to be happy and prosper.

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India: A Democratic Country

India is known to be the largest democracy all over the world. After the rule of the British ended in 1947 , India adopted democracy. In India, all the citizens who are above the age of 18 get the right to vote. It does not discriminate on the basis of caste, creed, gender, color, or more.

Although India is the largest democracy it still has a long way to go. The country faces a lot of problems which do not let it efficiently function as a democracy. The caste system is still prevalent which hampers with the socialist principle of democracy. Moreover, communalism is also on the rise. This interferes with the secular aspect of the country. All these differences need to be set aside to ensure the happiness and prosperity of the citizens.

In short, democracy in India is still better than that in most of the countries. Nonetheless, there is a lot of room for improvement which we must focus on. The government must implement stringent laws to ensure no discrimination takes place. In addition, awareness programs must be held to make citizens aware of their rights and duties.

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George Orwell Quotes About Democracy

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That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.

The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle, hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or laborer's cottage, is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.

Since pacifists have more freedom of action in countries where traces of democracy survive, pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it. Objectively the pacifist is pro-Nazi.

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 any one meaning.

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulne­ss while telling carefully constructe­d lies, to hold simultaneo­usly two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradict­ory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy.

Preventive war is a crime not easily committed by a country that retains any traces of democracy.

The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.

Except for the small revolutionary groups which exist in all countries, the whole world was determined upon preventing revolution in Spain. In particular the Communist Party, with Soviet Russia behind it, had thrown its whole weight against the revolution. It was the Communist thesis that revolution at this stage would be fatal and that what was to be aimed at in Spain was not workers' control, but bourgeois democracy. It hardly needs pointing out why 'liberal' capitalist opinion took the same line.

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Quotes on Democracy

• Democracy is the rule of the people, by the people and for the people – Abraham Lincoln
• Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time – Winston Churchill

• In a democracy, VOX POPULI (Voice of people) should be VOX DEI (Voice of God)
• Pillars of democracy : 3D i.e. Debate, Discuss and Dialogue
• Democracy can’t be restricted to elections and government. Democracy is strengthened by “Jan Bhagidari” i.e. People Participation
•  Example of Jan Bhagidari – On independence Day people took oath to donate time for public service of their choice and by its implementation huge human resource were invested in various projects
• Jan Bhagidari is the biggest asset of democracy
• Democracy is nothing more than an angry mob, where 51% of the people may take away the rights of the other 49% – Thomas Jefferson
• Good governance with good intentions is the hallmark of our government. Implementation with integrity is our core passion— Narendra Modi
• Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.—Margaret Mead
• In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme. – Aristotle
• Democracy works when people claim it as their own. – BILL MOYERS
• The ballot is stronger than the bullet. – ABRAHAM LINCOLN
• Democracy is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequal alike. – Plato
• Democracy, like liberty, justice and other social and political rights, is not “given”, it is earned through courage, resolution and sacrifice. – AUNG SAN SUU KYI
• Democracy is the road to socialism. – KARL MARX
• “A vote is like a rifle: its usefulness depends upon the character of the user.”  ― Theodore Roosevelt

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The Last Time Democracy Almost Died

The last time democracy nearly died all over the world and almost all at once, Americans argued about it, and then they tried to fix it. “The future of democracy is topic number one in the animated discussion going on all over America,” a contributor to the New York Times wrote in 1937. “In the Legislatures, over the radio, at the luncheon table, in the drawing rooms, at meetings of forums and in all kinds of groups of citizens everywhere, people are talking about the democratic way of life.” People bickered and people hollered, and they also made rules. “You are a liar!” one guy shouted from the audience during a political debate heard on the radio by ten million Americans, from Missoula to Tallahassee. “Now, now, we don’t allow that,” the moderator said, calmly, and asked him to leave.

In the nineteen-thirties, you could count on the Yankees winning the World Series, dust storms plaguing the prairies, evangelicals preaching on the radio, Franklin Delano Roosevelt residing in the White House, people lining up for blocks to get scraps of food, and democracies dying, from the Andes to the Urals and the Alps.

In 1917, Woodrow Wilson’s Administration had promised that winning the Great War would “make the world safe for democracy.” The peace carved nearly a dozen new states out of the former Russian, Ottoman, and Austrian empires. The number of democracies in the world rose; the spread of liberal-democratic governance began to appear inevitable. But this was no more than a reverie. Infant democracies grew, toddled, wobbled, and fell: Hungary, Albania, Poland, Lithuania, Yugoslavia. In older states, too, the desperate masses turned to authoritarianism. Benito Mussolini marched on Rome in 1922. It had taken a century and a half for European monarchs who ruled by divine right and brute force to be replaced by constitutional democracies and the rule of law. Now Fascism and Communism toppled these governments in a matter of months, even before the stock-market crash of 1929 and the misery that ensued.

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“Epitaphs for democracy are the fashion of the day,” the soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote, dismally, in 1930. The annus horribilis that followed differed from every other year in the history of the world, according to the British historian Arnold Toynbee: “In 1931, men and women all over the world were seriously contemplating and frankly discussing the possibility that the Western system of Society might break down and cease to work.” When Japan invaded Manchuria, the League of Nations condemned the annexation, to no avail. “The liberal state is destined to perish,” Mussolini predicted in 1932. “All the political experiments of our day are anti-liberal.” By 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power, the American political commentator Walter Lippmann was telling an audience of students at Berkeley that “the old relationships among the great masses of the people of the earth have disappeared.” What next? More epitaphs: Greece, Romania, Estonia, and Latvia. Authoritarians multiplied in Portugal, Uruguay, Spain. Japan invaded Shanghai. Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. “The present century is the century of authority,” he declared, “a century of the Right, a Fascist century.”

American democracy, too, staggered, weakened by corruption, monopoly, apathy, inequality, political violence, hucksterism, racial injustice, unemployment, even starvation. “We do not distrust the future of essential democracy,” F.D.R. said in his first Inaugural Address, telling Americans that the only thing they had to fear was fear itself. But there was more to be afraid of, including Americans’ own declining faith in self-government. “What Does Democracy Mean?” NBC radio asked listeners. “Do we Negroes believe in democracy?” W. E. B. Du Bois asked the readers of his newspaper column. Could it happen here? Sinclair Lewis asked in 1935. Americans suffered, and hungered, and wondered. The historian Charles Beard, in the inevitable essay on “The Future of Democracy in the United States,” predicted that American democracy would endure, if only because “there is in America, no Rome, no Berlin to march on.” Some Americans turned to Communism . Some turned to Fascism. And a lot of people, worried about whether American democracy could survive past the end of the decade, strove to save it.

“It’s not too late,” Jimmy Stewart pleaded with Congress, rasping, exhausted, in “ Mr. Smith Goes to Washington ,” in 1939. “Great principles don’t get lost once they come to light.” It wasn’t too late. It’s still not too late.

There’s a kind of likeness you see in family photographs, generation after generation. The same ears, the same funny nose. Sometimes now looks a lot like then. Still, it can be hard to tell whether the likeness is more than skin deep.

In the nineteen-nineties, with the end of the Cold War, democracies grew more plentiful, much as they had after the end of the First World War. As ever, the infant-mortality rate for democracies was high: baby democracies tend to die in their cradles. Starting in about 2005, the number of democracies around the world began to fall, as it had in the nineteen-thirties. Authoritarians rose to power: Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Donald J. Trump in the United States.

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“American democracy,” as a matter of history, is democracy with an asterisk, the symbol A-Rod’s name would need if he were ever inducted into the Hall of Fame. Not until the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act can the United States be said to have met the basic conditions for political equality requisite in a democracy. All the same, measured not against its past but against its contemporaries, American democracy in the twenty-first century is withering. The Democracy Index rates a hundred and sixty-seven countries, every year, on a scale that ranges from “full democracy” to “authoritarian regime.” In 2006, the U.S. was a “full democracy,” the seventeenth most democratic nation in the world. In 2016, the index for the first time rated the United States a “flawed democracy,” and since then American democracy has gotten only more flawed. True, the United States still doesn’t have a Rome or a Berlin to march on. That hasn’t saved the nation from misinformation, tribalization, domestic terrorism, human-rights abuses, political intolerance, social-media mob rule, white nationalism, a criminal President, the nobbling of Congress, a corrupt Presidential Administration, assaults on the press, crippling polarization, the undermining of elections, and an epistemological chaos that is the only air that totalitarianism can breathe.

Nothing so sharpens one’s appreciation for democracy as bearing witness to its demolition. Mussolini called Italy and Germany “the greatest and soundest democracies which exist in the world today,” and Hitler liked to say that, with Nazi Germany, he had achieved a “beautiful democracy,” prompting the American political columnist Dorothy Thompson to remark of the Fascist state, “If it is going to call itself democratic we had better find another word for what we have and what we want.” In the nineteen-thirties, Americans didn’t find another word. But they did work to decide what they wanted, and to imagine and to build it. Thompson, who had been a foreign correspondent in Germany and Austria and had interviewed the Führer, said, in a column that reached eight million readers, “Be sure you know what you prepare to defend.”

It’s a paradox of democracy that the best way to defend it is to attack it, to ask more of it, by way of criticism, protest, and dissent. American democracy in the nineteen-thirties had plenty of critics, left and right, from Mexican-Americans who objected to a brutal regime of forced deportations to businessmen who believed the New Deal to be unconstitutional. W. E. B. Du Bois predicted that, unless the United States met its obligations to the dignity and equality of all its citizens and ended its enthrallment to corporations, American democracy would fail: “If it is going to use this power to force the world into color prejudice and race antagonism; if it is going to use it to manufacture millionaires, increase the rule of wealth, and break down democratic government everywhere; if it is going increasingly to stand for reaction, fascism, white supremacy and imperialism; if it is going to promote war and not peace; then America will go the way of the Roman Empire.”

The historian Mary Ritter Beard warned that American democracy would make no headway against its “ruthless enemies—war, fascism, ignorance, poverty, scarcity, unemployment, sadistic criminality, racial persecution, man’s lust for power and woman’s miserable trailing in the shadow of his frightful ways”—unless Americans could imagine a future democracy in which women would no longer be barred from positions of leadership: “If we will not so envisage our future, no Bill of Rights, man’s or woman’s, is worth the paper on which it is printed.”

If the United States hasn’t gone the way of the Roman Empire and the Bill of Rights is still worth more than the paper on which it’s printed, that’s because so many people have been, ever since, fighting the fights Du Bois and Ritter Beard fought. There have been wins and losses. The fight goes on.

Could no system of rule but extremism hold back the chaos of economic decline? In the nineteen-thirties, people all over the world, liberals, hoped that the United States would be able to find a middle road, somewhere between the malignity of a state-run economy and the mercilessness of laissez-faire capitalism. Roosevelt campaigned in 1932 on the promise to rescue American democracy by way of a “new deal for the American people,” his version of that third way: relief, recovery, and reform. He won forty-two of forty-eight states, and trounced the incumbent, Herbert Hoover, in the Electoral College 472 to 59. Given the national emergency in which Roosevelt took office, Congress granted him an almost entirely free hand, even as critics raised concerns that the powers he assumed were barely short of dictatorial.

New Dealers were trying to save the economy; they ended up saving democracy. They built a new America; they told a new American story. On New Deal projects, people from different parts of the country labored side by side, constructing roads and bridges and dams, everything from the Lincoln Tunnel to the Hoover Dam, joining together in a common endeavor, shoulder to the wheel, hand to the forge. Many of those public-works projects, like better transportation and better electrification, also brought far-flung communities, down to the littlest town or the remotest farm, into a national culture, one enriched with new funds for the arts, theatre, music, and storytelling. With radio, more than with any other technology of communication, before or since, Americans gained a sense of their shared suffering, and shared ideals: they listened to one another’s voices.

This didn’t happen by accident. Writers and actors and directors and broadcasters made it happen. They dedicated themselves to using the medium to bring people together. Beginning in 1938, for instance, F.D.R.’s Works Progress Administration produced a twenty-six-week radio-drama series for CBS called “Americans All, Immigrants All,” written by Gilbert Seldes, the former editor of The Dial. “What brought people to this country from the four corners of the earth?” a pamphlet distributed to schoolteachers explaining the series asked. “What gifts did they bear? What were their problems? What problems remain unsolved?” The finale celebrated the American experiment: “The story of magnificent adventure! The record of an unparalleled event in the history of mankind!”

There is no twenty-first-century equivalent of Seldes’s “Americans All, Immigrants All,” because it is no longer acceptable for a serious artist to write in this vein, and for this audience, and for this purpose. (In some quarters, it was barely acceptable even then.) Love of the ordinary, affection for the common people, concern for the commonweal: these were features of the best writing and art of the nineteen-thirties. They are not so often features lately.

Americans reëlected F.D.R. in 1936 by one of the widest margins in the country’s history. American magazines continued the trend from the twenties, in which hardly a month went by without their taking stock: “Is Democracy Doomed?” “Can Democracy Survive?” (Those were the past century’s versions of more recent titles, such as “ How Democracy Ends ,” “ Why Liberalism Failed ,” “ How the Right Lost Its Mind ,” and “ How Democracies Die .” The same ears, that same funny nose.) In 1934, the Christian Science Monitor published a debate called “Whither Democracy?,” addressed “to everyone who has been thinking about the future of democracy—and who hasn’t.” It staked, as adversaries, two British scholars: Alfred Zimmern, a historian from Oxford, on the right, and Harold Laski, a political theorist from the London School of Economics, on the left. “Dr. Zimmern says in effect that where democracy has failed it has not been really tried,” the editors explained. “Professor Laski sees an irrepressible conflict between the idea of political equality in democracy and the fact of economic inequality in capitalism, and expects at least a temporary resort to Fascism or a capitalistic dictatorship.” On the one hand, American democracy is safe; on the other hand, American democracy is not safe.

Zimmern and Laski went on speaking tours of the United States, part of a long parade of visiting professors brought here to prognosticate on the future of democracy. Laski spoke to a crowd three thousand strong, in Washington’s Constitution Hall. “ Laski Tells How to Save Democracy ,” the Washington Post reported. Zimmern delivered a series of lectures titled “The Future of Democracy,” at the University of Buffalo, in which he warned that democracy had been undermined by a new aristocracy of self-professed experts. “I am no more ready to be governed by experts than I am to be governed by the ex-Kaiser,” he professed, expertly.

The year 1935 happened to mark the centennial of the publication of Alexis de Tocqueville’s “ Democracy in America ,” an occasion that elicited still more lectures from European intellectuals coming to the United States to remark on its system of government and the character of its people, close on Tocqueville’s heels. Heinrich Brüning, a scholar and a former Chancellor of Germany, lectured at Princeton on “The Crisis of Democracy”; the Swiss political theorist William Rappard gave the same title to a series of lectures he delivered at the University of Chicago. In “The Prospects for Democracy,” the Scottish historian and later BBC radio quiz-show panelist Denis W. Brogan offered little but gloom: “The defenders of democracy, the thinkers and writers who still believe in its merits, are in danger of suffering the fate of Aristotle, who kept his eyes fixedly on the city-state at a time when that form of government was being reduced to a shadow by the rise of Alexander’s world empire.” Brogan hedged his bets by predicting the worst. It’s an old trick.

The endless train of academics were also called upon to contribute to the nation’s growing number of periodicals. In 1937, The New Republic , arguing that “at no time since the rise of political democracy have its tenets been so seriously challenged as they are today,” ran a series on “The Future of Democracy,” featuring pieces by the likes of Bertrand Russell and John Dewey. “Do you think that political democracy is now on the wane?” the editors asked each writer. The series’ lead contributor, the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, took issue with the question, as philosophers, thankfully, do. “I call this kind of question ‘meteorological,’ ” he grumbled. “It is like asking, ‘Do you think that it is going to rain today? Had I better take my umbrella?’ ” The trouble, Croce explained, is that political problems are not external forces beyond our control; they are forces within our control. “We need solely to make up our own minds and to act.”

Don’t ask whether you need an umbrella. Go outside and stop the rain.

Here are some of the sorts of people who went out and stopped the rain in the nineteen-thirties: schoolteachers, city councillors, librarians, poets, union organizers, artists, precinct workers, soldiers, civil-rights activists, and investigative reporters. They knew what they were prepared to defend and they defended it, even though they also knew that they risked attack from both the left and the right. Charles Beard (Mary Ritter’s husband) spoke out against the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, the Rupert Murdoch of his day, when he smeared scholars and teachers as Communists. “The people who are doing the most damage to American democracy are men like Charles A. Beard,” said a historian at Trinity College in Hartford, speaking at a high school on the subject of “Democracy and the Future,” and warning against reading Beard’s books—at a time when Nazis in Germany and Austria were burning “un-German” books in public squares. That did not exactly happen here, but in the nineteen-thirties four of five American superintendents of schools recommended assigning only those U.S. history textbooks which “omit any facts likely to arouse in the minds of the students question or doubt concerning the justice of our social order and government.” Beard’s books, God bless them, raised doubts.

Beard didn’t back down. Nor did W.P.A. muralists and artists, who were subject to the same attack. Instead, Beard took pains to point out that Americans liked to think of themselves as good talkers and good arguers, people with a particular kind of smarts. Not necessarily book learning, but street smarts—reasonableness, open-mindedness, level-headedness. “The kind of universal intellectual prostration required by Bolshevism and Fascism is decidedly foreign to American ‘intelligence,’ ” Beard wrote. Possibly, he allowed, you could call this a stubborn independence of mind, or even mulishness. “Whatever the interpretation, our wisdom or ignorance stands in the way of our accepting the totalitarian assumption of Omniscience,” he insisted. “And to this extent it contributes to the continuance of the arguing, debating, never-settling-anything-finally methods of political democracy.” Maybe that was whistling in the dark, but sometimes a whistle is all you’ve got.

The more argument the better is what the North Carolina-born George V. Denny, Jr., was banking on, anyway, after a neighbor of his, in Scarsdale, declared that he so strongly disagreed with F.D.R. that he never listened to him. Denny, who helped run something called the League for Political Education, thought that was nuts. In 1935, he launched “America’s Town Meeting of the Air,” an hour-long debate program, broadcast nationally on NBC’s Blue Network. Each episode opened with a town crier ringing a bell and hollering, “Town meeting tonight! Town meeting tonight!” Then Denny moderated a debate, usually among three or four panelists, on a controversial subject (Does the U.S. have a truly free press? Should schools teach politics?), before opening the discussion up to questions from an audience of more than a thousand people. The debates were conducted at a lecture hall, usually in New York, and broadcast to listeners gathered in public libraries all over the country, so that they could hold their own debates once the show ended. “We are living today on the thin edge of history,” Max Lerner, the editor of The Nation , said in 1938, during a “Town Meeting of the Air” debate on the meaning of democracy. His panel included a Communist, an exile from the Spanish Civil War, a conservative American political economist, and a Russian columnist. “We didn’t expect to settle anything, and therefore we succeeded,” the Spanish exile said at the end of the hour, offering this definition: “A democracy is a place where a ‘Town Meeting of the Air’ can take place.”

No one expected anyone to come up with an undisputable definition of democracy, since the point was disputation. Asking people about the meaning and the future of democracy and listening to them argue it out was really only a way to get people to stretch their civic muscles. “Democracy can only be saved by democratic men and women,” Dorothy Thompson once said. “The war against democracy begins by the destruction of the democratic temper, the democratic method and the democratic heart. If the democratic temper be exacerbated into wanton unreasonableness, which is the essence of the evil, then a victory has been won for the evil we despise and prepare to defend ourselves against, even though it’s 3,000 miles away and has never moved.”

The most ambitious plan to get Americans to show up in the same room and argue with one another in the nineteen-thirties came out of Des Moines, Iowa, from a one-eyed former bricklayer named John W. Studebaker, who had become the superintendent of the city’s schools. Studebaker, who after the Second World War helped create the G.I. Bill, had the idea of opening those schools up at night, so that citizens could hold debates. In 1933, with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation and support from the American Association for Adult Education, he started a five-year experiment in civic education.

The meetings began at a quarter to eight, with a fifteen-minute news update, followed by a forty-five-minute lecture, and thirty minutes of debate. The idea was that “the people of the community of every political affiliation, creed, and economic view have an opportunity to participate freely.” When Senator Guy Gillette, a Democrat from Iowa, talked about “Why I Support the New Deal,” Senator Lester Dickinson, a Republican from Iowa, talked about “Why I Oppose the New Deal.” Speakers defended Fascism. They attacked capitalism. They attacked Fascism. They defended capitalism. Within the first nine months of the program, thirteen thousand of Des Moines’s seventy-six thousand adults had attended a forum. The program got so popular that in 1934 F.D.R. appointed Studebaker the U.S. Commissioner of Education and, with the eventual help of Eleanor Roosevelt, the program became a part of the New Deal, and received federal funding. The federal forum program started out in ten test sites—from Orange County, California, to Sedgwick County, Kansas, and Pulaski County, Arkansas. It came to include almost five hundred forums in forty-three states and involved two and a half million Americans. Even people who had steadfastly predicted the demise of democracy participated. “It seems to me the only method by which we are going to achieve democracy in the United States,” Du Bois wrote, in 1937.

The federal government paid for it, but everything else fell under local control, and ordinary people made it work, by showing up and participating. Usually, school districts found the speakers and decided on the topics after collecting ballots from the community. In some parts of the country, even in rural areas, meetings were held four and five times a week. They started in schools and spread to Y.M.C.A.s and Y.W.C.A.s, labor halls, libraries, settlement houses, and businesses, during lunch hours. Many of the meetings were broadcast by radio. People who went to those meetings debated all sorts of things:

Should the Power of the Supreme Court Be Altered? Do Company Unions Help Labor? Do Machines Oust Men? Must the West Get Out of the East? Can We Conquer Poverty? Should Capital Punishment Be Abolished? Is Propaganda a Menace? Do We Need a New Constitution? Should Women Work? Is America a Good Neighbor? Can It Happen Here?

These efforts don’t always work. Still, trying them is better than talking about the weather, and waiting for someone to hand you an umbrella.

When a terrible hurricane hit New England in 1938, Dr. Lorine Pruette, a Tennessee-born psychologist who had written an essay called “Why Women Fail,” and who had urged F.D.R. to name only women to his Cabinet, found herself marooned at a farm in New Hampshire with a young neighbor, sixteen-year-old Alice Hooper, a high-school sophomore. Waiting out the storm, they had nothing to do except listen to the news, which, needless to say, concerned the future of democracy. Alice asked Pruette a question: “What is it everyone on the radio is talking about—what is this democracy—what does it mean?” Somehow, in the end, NBC arranged a coast-to-coast broadcast, in which eight prominent thinkers—two ministers, three professors, a former ambassador, a poet, and a journalist—tried to explain to Alice the meaning of democracy. American democracy had found its “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” moment, except that it was messier, and more interesting, because those eight people didn’t agree on the answer. Democracy, Alice, is the darnedest thing.

That broadcast was made possible by the workers who brought electricity to rural New Hampshire; the legislators who signed the 1934 federal Communications Act, mandating public-interest broadcasting; the executives at NBC who decided that it was important to run this program; the two ministers, the three professors, the former ambassador, the poet, and the journalist who gave their time, for free, to a public forum, and agreed to disagree without acting like asses; and a whole lot of Americans who took the time to listen, carefully, even though they had plenty of other things to do. Getting out of our current jam will likely require something different, but not entirely different. And it will be worth doing.

A decade-long debate about the future of democracy came to a close at the end of the nineteen-thirties—but not because it had been settled. In 1939, the World’s Fair opened in Queens, with a main exhibit featuring the saga of democracy and a chipper motto: “The World of Tomorrow.” The fairgrounds included a Court of Peace, with pavilions for every nation. By the time the fair opened, Czechoslovakia had fallen to Germany, though, and its pavilion couldn’t open. Shortly afterward, Edvard Beneš, the exiled President of Czechoslovakia, delivered a series of lectures at the University of Chicago on, yes, the future of democracy, though he spoke less about the future than about the past, and especially about the terrible present, a time of violently unmoored traditions and laws and agreements, a time “of moral and intellectual crisis and chaos.” Soon, more funereal bunting was brought to the World’s Fair, to cover Poland, Belgium, Denmark, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. By the time the World of Tomorrow closed, in 1940, half the European hall lay under a shroud of black.

The federal government stopped funding the forum program in 1941. Americans would take up their debate about the future of democracy, in a different form, only after the defeat of the Axis. For now, there was a war to fight. And there were still essays to publish, if not about the future, then about the present. In 1943, E. B. White got a letter in the mail, from the Writers’ War Board, asking him to write a statement about “ The Meaning of Democracy .” He was a little weary of these pieces, but he knew how much they mattered. He wrote back, “Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.” It meant something once. And, the thing is, it still does. ♦

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• Democracy Essay for Students in English

Essay on Democracy

Introduction.

Democracy is mainly a Greek word which means people and their rules, here peoples have the to select their own government as per their choice. Greece was the first democratic country in the world. India is a democratic country where people select their government of their own choice, also people have the rights to do the work of their choice. There are two types of democracy: direct and representative and hybrid or semi-direct democracy. There are many decisions which are made under democracies. People enjoy few rights which are very essential for human beings to live happily. 

Our country has the largest democracy. In a democracy, each person has equal rights to fight for development. After the independence, India has adopted democracy, where the people vote those who are above 18 years of age, but these votes do not vary by any caste; people from every caste have equal rights to select their government. Democracy, also called as a rule of the majority, means whatever the majority of people decide, it has to be followed or implemented, the representative winning with the most number of votes will have the power. We can say the place where literacy people are more there shows the success of the democracy even lack of consciousness is also dangerous in a democracy. Democracy is associated with higher human accumulation and higher economic freedom. Democracy is closely tied with the economic source of growth like education and quality of life as well as health care. The constituent assembly in India was adopted by Dr B.R. Ambedkar on 26 th November 1949 and became sovereign democratic after its constitution came into effect on 26 January 1950.

What are the Challenges:

There are many challenges for democracy like- corruption here, many political leaders and officers who don’t do work with integrity everywhere they demand bribes, resulting in the lack of trust on the citizens which affects the country very badly. Anti-social elements- which are seen during elections where people are given bribes and they are forced to vote for a particular candidate. Caste and community- where a large number of people give importance to their caste and community, therefore, the political party also selects the candidate on the majority caste. We see wherever the particular caste people win the elections whether they do good for the society or not, and in some cases, good leaders lose because of less count of the vote.

India is considered to be the largest democracy around the globe, with a population of 1.3 billion. Even though being the biggest democratic nation, India still has a long way to becoming the best democratic system. The caste system still prevails in some parts, which hurts the socialist principle of democracy. Communalism is on the rise throughout the globe and also in India, which interferes with the secular principle of democracy. All these differences need to be set aside to ensure a thriving democracy.

Principles of Democracy:

There are mainly five principles like- republic, socialist, sovereign, democratic and secular, with all these quality political parties will contest for elections. There will be many bribes given to the needy person who require food, money, shelter and ask them to vote whom they want. But we can say that democracy in India is still better than the other countries.

Basically, any country needs democracy for development and better functioning of the government. In some countries, freedom of political expression, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, are considered to ensure that voters are well informed, enabling them to vote according to their own interests.

Let us Discuss These Five Principles in Further Detail

Sovereign: In short, being sovereign or sovereignty means the independent authority of a state. The country has the authority to make all the decisions whether it be on internal issues or external issues, without the interference of any third party.

Socialist: Being socialist means the country (and the Govt.), always works for the welfare of the people, who live in that country. There should be many bribes offered to the needy person, basic requirements of them should be fulfilled by any means. No one should starve in such a country.

Secular: There will be no such thing as a state religion, the country does not make any bias on the basis of religion. Every religion must be the same in front of the law, no discrimination on the basis of someone’s religion is tolerated. Everyone is allowed to practice and propagate any religion, they can change their religion at any time.

Republic: In a republic form of Government, the head of the state is elected, directly or indirectly by the people and is not a hereditary monarch. This elected head is also there for a fixed tenure. In India, the head of the state is the president, who is indirectly elected and has a fixed term of office (5 years).

Democratic: By a democratic form of government, means the country’s government is elected by the people via the process of voting. All the adult citizens in the country have the right to vote to elect the government they want, only if they meet a certain age limit of voting.

Merits of Democracy:

better government forms because it is more accountable and in the interest of the people.

improves the quality of decision making and enhances the dignity of the citizens.

provide a method to deal with differences and conflicts.

A democratic system of government is a form of government in which supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodic free elections. It permits citizens to participate in making laws and public policies by choosing their leaders, therefore citizens should be educated so that they can select the right candidate for the ruling government. Also, there are some concerns regarding democracy- leaders always keep changing in democracy with the interest of citizens and on the count of votes which leads to instability. It is all about political competition and power, no scope for morality.

Factors Affect Democracy:

capital and civil society

economic development

modernization

Norway and Iceland are the best democratic countries in the world. India is standing at fifty-one position.

India is a parliamentary democratic republic where the President is head of the state and Prime minister is head of the government. The guiding principles of democracy such as protected rights and freedoms, free and fair elections, accountability and transparency of government officials, citizens have a responsibility to uphold and support their principles. Democracy was first practised in the 6 th century BCE, in the city-state of Athens. One basic principle of democracy is that people are the source of all the political power, in a democracy people rule themselves and also respect given to diverse groups of citizens, so democracy is required to select the government of their own interest and make the nation developed by electing good leaders.

FAQs on Democracy Essay for Students in English

1. What are the Features of Democracy?

Features of Democracy are as follows

Equality: Democracy provides equal rights to everyone, regardless of their gender, caste, colour, religion or creed.

Individual Freedom: Everybody has the right to do anything they want until it does not affect another person’s liberty.

Majority Rules: In a democracy, things are decided by the majority rule, if the majority agrees to something, it will be done.

Free Election: Everyone has the right to vote or to become a candidate to fight the elections.

2. Define Democracy?

Democracy means where people have the right to choose the rulers and also people have freedom to express views, freedom to organise and freedom to protest. Protesting and showing Dissent is a major part of a healthy democracy. Democracy is the most successful and popular form of government throughout the globe.

Democracy holds a special place in India, also India is still the largest democracy in existence around the world.

3. What are the Benefits of Democracy?

Let us discuss some of the benefits received by the use of democracy to form a government. Benefits of democracy are: 

It is more accountable

Improves the quality of decision as the decision is taken after a long time of discussion and consultation.

It provides a better method to deal with differences and conflicts.

It safeguards the fundamental rights of people and brings a sense of equality and freedom.

It works for the welfare of both the people and the state.

4. Which country is the largest democracy in the World?

India is considered the largest democracy, all around the world. India decided to have a democratic Govt. from the very first day of its independence after the rule of the British. In India, everyone above the age of 18 years can go to vote to select the Government, without any kind of discrimination on the basis of caste, colour, religion, gender or more. But India, even being the largest democracy, still has a long way to become perfect.

5. Write about the five principles of Democracy?

There are five key principles that are followed in a democracy. These Five Principles of Democracy of India are -  secular, sovereign, republic, socialist, and democratic. These five principles have to be respected by every political party, participating in the general elections in India. The party which got the most votes forms the government which represents the democratic principle. No discrimination is done on the basis of religion which represents the secular nature of democracy. The govt. formed after the election has to work for the welfare of common people which shows socialism in play.

Are Americans more attracted to anger or hope? Don Watson reports from the US election trail

Vice Chancellor's Fellow and Professorial Fellow, Institute for Human Security and Social Change, La Trobe University

Disclosure statement

Dennis Altman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

La Trobe University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

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In 2016, Don Watson wrote a remarkable Quarterly Essay predicting the success of Trump, when political commentators were largely united in their belief that Hillary Clinton would win the election.

So it’s hardly surprising Watson was back in the United States this year to track Trump’s possible return to the White House. But politics can be a cruel game to follow, and he was clearly caught out by the rapid replacement of President Joe Biden by Kamala Harris – and a very different campaign.

It is too early to analyse the impact of the Trump/Harris debate, but there is little doubt that Harris handled herself impressively and established herself as a viable candidate. How many undecided voters will be put off by Trump’s bluster and boastfulness remains to be seen.

The first half of High Noon , Watson’s new Quarterly Essay on the US election, reads as if Trump’s re-election is inevitable. Watson had no illusions about Biden’s electability in 2024. Whether fairly or not, Biden was widely regarded as too old and unable to defend his record. That said, it is strange Watson has so little to say about Biden’s success four years ago, when he won back some of those voters who had opted for Trump.

Review: Quarterly Essay – High Noon: Trump, Harris and America on the Brink by Don Watson (Black Inc.)

Watson claims Bernie Sanders might have done better than Hillary Clinton in 2016 – but I’m not convinced. The Republicans would have consistently portrayed Sanders as a dangerous socialist, if not a communist – and for reasons Watson himself acknowledges, the dirt would probably have stuck. Against Sanders, Trump would have portrayed himself as the defender of American values in ways he could not four years later against Biden.

Appalled and enchanted by the US

Watson writes in the long tradition of outsiders who have traversed the US in search of understanding the complexities of the country.

At his best, as in his account of life in Detroit and nearby Kalamazoo, Michigan, he combines analysis with poetic prose, often drawing on passing conversations to illuminate perceptions of the world rarely shared by readers of the Quarterly Essays. A taxi driver in Queens echoes Trump’s diatribes against illegal immigrants: “I am very angry,” he tells Watson. “Americans are very angry.”

Rather like journalist Nick Bryant, author of The Forever War , Watson is simultaneously appalled and enchanted by the US.

Like Bryant, he is aware of growing inequality, persistent racism and the extent of its violence, even as he relishes the energy and inventiveness of so much of American life. Like me, Watson knows that entering the US recalls the moment in The Wizard of Oz where black and white suddenly transforms to colour.

He writes that Trump has turned politics into “the wildly adversarial and addictive world” of TV wrestling. We understand “wrestlers are real, but not real […] personifications of good and evil, courage and cowardice, patriotism and treachery”.

As Watson suggests, Trump has created “a fictional setting for his fictions” where “he can be as abusive and as untruthful as he likes” – and where “boasting, posturing and abusing” are expected.

One question dominates High Noon, as it did his earlier essay. Namely: what explains Trump’s ability to capture the Republican Party – and perhaps to become only the second president to be re-elected after losing the election following their first term?

Watson is good at explaining Trump’s ability to channel the discontent and anger of millions of Americans. But he fails to explain the almost total defeat of the Republican establishment, which has so jettisoned its own past that no senior member of any Republican administration before Trump could be found to speak at their convention.

Former vice president Dick Cheney (under George W. Bush) is among the establishment Republicans who’ve recently announced their support for Harris, hardly surprising as his daughter, Liz Cheney, lost her position in Congress due to her antipathy to Trump.

There is surprisingly little reflection on the culture wars, which have become central to Republican campaigns over the past decade. And no discussion of abortion or attacks on woke ideologies (gender, critical race theory), which have become staples of the MAGA language and help cement the white evangelical vote for Trump.

I wish Watson had spoken to more women, given the growing gender gap within American politics and the way Harris’ nomination has accelerated that. A recent poll shows Harris leading Trump by 13 points among women. Her success in a couple of key states, including Arizona and Nevada, may hinge on otherwise apolitical women turning out to vote on referenda to ban abortions.

Abortion is for Trump what Gaza is for Harris: an issue that arouses great passions that are impossible to reconcile among people they could normally take for granted. In Tuesday’s presidential debate, Trump equivocated on abortion , making unsubstantiated claims for postpartum terminations while claiming he’s “great for women and their reproductive rights”.

I suspect the last section of High Noon was written after Watson returned to Australia. His account of Harris’ nomination and the early stages of the 2024 campaign lack the firsthand immediacy of the earlier sections.

Capitalism trumps democracy

The overriding question Watson poses is: how can a country that believes itself to be a democracy, the leader of “the Free World”, possibly elect a demagogue like Trump?

In the end, it seems, capitalism trumps democracy. Watson quotes the right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel as saying he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible. Harris consistently stresses that Trump’s tax proposals would further increase economic inequality within the US.

“An election,” writes Watson, “is democracy’s effort to outrun the anger and envy arising from its failure to honour the promise of a fair shake for everyone.” My hunch is that Harris understands this. The apoplectic columns in the Murdoch press claiming she is light on policy ignore the fact Clinton lost in 2016 despite an armoury of policies designed to attract working-class voters.

Trump is almost unique in winning (and then losing) by speaking of anger and decline. Harris is in the tradition of both Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama in proclaiming hope. (In choosing the title for his essay, did Watson remember that Reagan cited High Noon as his favourite film ?)

I wish Watson had held off finishing this essay long enough to see whether the Harris campaign’s instinctive sense of how to defeat Trump through positivity over anger, stressing his egoism against her desire to unify the country, pays off.

Why do we care so much?

Is Trump a fascist? Watson skirts around this question. He is correct, though, in pointing to Trump’s admiration for Hungarian authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orban .

In today’s debate, Trump called Orban “one of the most respected men, they call him a strong man” and quoted him as saying “you need Trump back as president”. Trump further claimed China and North Korea are “afraid” of him.

Trump claims he can end the war in Ukraine, but gives no answer as to how he would do this. Neither Trump nor Harris have any obvious solution for the war in Gaza, although Trump claims she would be responsible for the destruction of Israel, again with no clear explanation for this.

The constant attempts by Trump’s supporters to interfere with what we would regard as the basic norms of free democratic elections – including, most dramatically, the attacks of January 6 – suggest a second Trump administration would sorely test those Australian politicians who like to speak of our shared values.

Watson reflects a much larger Australian obsession with the US, ranging from the AUKUS agreement to the extraordinarily high proportion of American speakers who turn up at our literary festivals.

But as Watson writes in his final paragraph: “You have your own life to lead. Why let yourself be lured into theirs?”

It’s a good question, but Watson has provided an answer for why we should pay attention to US politics. He writes: “Once the Democrats allow themselves to be defined by their opposition to Trump, the fight is as good as lost.”

Until Harris became the candidate, it seemed as if this was the only strategy the Democrats had to fall back upon. Her performance in the debate suggests Harris is both willing to attack Trump and to promise a rather different path forward, stressing the need for generational change.

Don Watson’s Quarterly Essay High Noon: Trump, Harris and America on the Brink (Black Inc.) is published Monday 16 September.

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The most notable — and quotable — exchanges from the Harris-Trump debate

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump showcased starkly different visions for the country Tuesday on as they met for the first time for perhaps their only debate before November’s presidential election.

People watch the presidential debate between Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024, at the Gipsy Las Vegas in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/John Locher)

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The first meeting between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump featured some sharp comments and memorable moments.

Here are some of the most notable — and quotable — exchanges from Tuesday night’s debate :

“You’re not running against Joe Biden. You’re running against me.”

— Harris, after Trump repeatedly criticized President Biden and his administration.

“She refused to be there because she was at a sorority party of hers.”

— Trump, referring to Harris missing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress. Harris was in Indianapolis speaking to the national gathering of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, a historically Black sorority of which she is not a member.

“It’s a really interesting thing to watch. You will see, during the course of his rallies, he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about windmills cause cancer. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”

— Harris, who said she was taking the “unusual step” of inviting people to attend a Trump rally.

“They’re eating the dogs.”

— Trump, repeating a false claim his campaign has promoted that Haitian immigrants are eating pets. Trump stood by the false claims despite ABC News’ David Muir noting that city officials found no evidence of the claim.

“Talk about extreme.”

— Harris, responding to Trump’s false claim about dogs.

“I read where she was not Black ... and then I read that she was Black, and that’s OK. Either one was OK with me. That’s up to her.”

— Trump, who has questioned Harris’ racial identity. He then repeatedly said that he “does not care” how she identifies. Harris, who is Black and Indian American , called it a “tragedy” that Trump “has consistently, over the course of his career, attempted to use race to divide the American people.”

“These dictators and autocrats are rooting for you to be president again, because they’re so clear, they can manipulate you with flattery and favors.”

— Harris, who critiqued Trump for his foreign policy stances and, as she argued, his appeal to authoritarians around the world. Harris added, “And that is why so many military leaders who you have worked with have told me, you are a disgrace.”

“If she is president, I believe that Israel will not exist within two years from now.”

— Trump, who claimed that Harris “hates Israel.” He added: “I’ve been pretty good at predictions. I hope I’m wrong about that one.”

“What we know is that this war must end, it must end immediately. And the way it will end is we need a cease-fire deal and we need the hostages out.”

— Harris, speaking about the Israel-Gaza war. She reiterated she supports Israel and believes the nation has a right to defend itself.

“I’m talking now. I’m talking, please. Does that sound familiar?”

— Trump, to Harris, as she began a rebuttal to some of his remarks. It was a reference to Harris’ comment to Mike Pence, then a candidate for vice president, during a 2020 presidential debate. The moment — when Harris blunted Pence’s interruptions with “I’m speaking” — became a catchphrase among her supporters.

“The government, and Donald Trump, certainly should not be telling a woman what to do with her body.”

— Harris, who pledged to support reproductive rights and contrasted her position with Trump.

“No, I don’t acknowledge that all, that was said sarcastically.”

— Trump, standing by his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him when asked directly whether some of his recent remarks indicated that he now acknowledged his 2020 election loss to Biden.