Words matter. These are the best Liberal Democracy Quotes from famous people such as Martha McSally, Martin Amis, Victor Ponta, Anne Applebaum, Stanley Hauerwas, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Ultimately, it’s not our responsibility to turn Afghanistan into a 21st-century, vibrant, economic, liberal democracy with a little L. Our responsibility is to keep Americans safe, to make sure we don’t have a failed state in a region. It’s not our responsibility to reconstruct Afghanistan.
If every inhabitant of a liberal democracy believes in liberal democracy, then it doesn’t matter what creed or colour they are.
Only together do Europe and the U.S. stand a chance of keeping liberal democracy as the central doctrine for organizing world affairs.
Russian scorn for liberal democracy has a long history, and a certain kind of Russian disdain for the West is nothing new. As far back as 1920, Lenin declared that parliaments were ‘historically obsolete’ and predicted that it was just a matter of time before they disappeared.
To try to turn Iraq into a liberal democracy is absolutely crazy. Islam has no understanding of the separation between church and state because they don’t understand Islam to be a church.
I think Russians today have a distorted picture of capitalism, liberal democracy and market economy.
It should be no surprise that religion in the non-western world has failed to disappear under the juggernaut of industrial capitalism, or that liberal democracy finds its most dedicated saboteurs among the new middle classes.
I definitely think America should seek to lead and shape the world and make it safe for liberal democracy. I just don’t think military intervention is going to get us there.
To those who cynically say today that liberal democracy would be ‘obsolete,’ I reply: liberal democracy, human rights, freedom of the press and the rule of law were the right way, are the right way, and will be the right way.
Christians – at least Christians in a liberal democracy – have accepted, after Thomas Hobbes, that they must obey the secular rule of law; that there must be a separation of church and state.
China is not going to become a liberal democracy; if it did, it would collapse. I do not believe you can impose on other countries standards which are alien and totally disconnected with their past.
Noam Chomsky has a book, which I read for the first time when I was in Spain, called ‘Fear of Democracy’. There is your answer. Fear of democracy. In Honduras, they had a sham democracy. It was run by elites, what was called a liberal democracy, but in reality was a false democracy.
What we have to do is to definitively remove the last vestiges of power from those who treat terms such as ‘liberal democracy,’ ‘free markets’ and ‘Europe’ with suspicion.
Why should the idea of Western liberal democracy automatically imply unregulated free-market capitalism?
Liberal democracy – as you know, in the old days, we were saying we want socialism with a human face. Today’s left effectively offers global capitalism with a human face, more tolerance, more rights and so on. So the question is, is this enough or not? Here I remain a Marxist: I think not.
Free speech is the foundation of an open and liberal democracy from college campuses to the White House.
‘Solutionism’ for me is, above all, an unthinking pursuit of perfection – by means of technology – without coming to grips with the fact that imperfection is an essential feature of liberal democracy.
Liberal Democracy is all about extending choice. Give people the option to decide their retirement age, and you immediately extend their freedom in a very significant way.
I did not dwell on the issue of Europe during either the 2001 or the 2005 campaigns – despite it being a pivotal personal concern and despite seeing it as something of a litmus test for liberal democracy.
Of all the principles which constitute Liberal Democracy, internationalism is the clearest, the most distinctive, and the one with the longest history.
The only way that we can win over potential jihadists to liberal democracy is by winning the battle of ideas.
The crisis of Western values has many aspects, many faces. There is a decline in faith in liberal democracy, a loss of confidence in universal human rights, a collapse in support for all kinds of transnational projects.
In a functioning liberal democracy, we cannot normalize political violence.
The notion that you can duff up a country for three months, pacify it for a bit longer and then miraculously transform it into a liberal democracy is just ludicrous. You might achieve some kind of democracy: it’s the liberal bit I take issue with.
The rise of populism has steadily coalesced movements of millions of people around its divisive us-against-them rhetoric, motivating so many more people to become active political campaigners and party members to champion the case for liberal democracy.
