The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don’t have to waste your time voting.

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.

Personally, I’d like to see more of our leaders take a technocratic approach to solving our biggest problems.

Things in our country run in spite of government, not by aid of it.

The people will save their government, if the government itself will allow them.

If everybody that voted in 2008 shows up in 2010, we will win this election. We will win this election.

Corruption is a cancer: a cancer that eats away at a citizen’s faith in democracy, diminishes the instinct for innovation and creativity; already-tight national budgets, crowding out important national investments. It wastes the talent of entire generations. It scares away investments and jobs.

Self-government can succeed only through an instructed electorate.

Pakistan will never be able to match the Indian militarily, and the effort to do so is taking an immense toll on the society.

We have to do more than just elect a new President if we truly want to change this country.

I’ve used the prestige and influence of having been a president of the United States as effectively as possible. And secondly, I’ve still been able to carry out my commitments to peace and human rights and environmental quality and freedom and democracy and so forth.

Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.

The CIA is made up of boys whose families sent them to Princeton but wouldn’t let them into the family brokerage business.

It’s actually very easy for democracy to disappear.

He does it with better grace, but I do it more natural.

If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don’t know how to read, you don’t know how to decide. That’s the great thing about our country – we’re a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.

I think members of the legislature, people who have to run for office, know the connection between money and influence on what laws get passed.

Can people who hunger so desperately for what other people have ever have enough?

Politics have no relation to morals.

What Washington needs is adult supervision.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.

There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less.

The key is to vote because we need a vote to put the people in power that we want to represent us.

Man never thinks himself happy, but when he enjoys those things which others want or desire.

That our government should have been maintained in its original form from its establishment until now is not much to be wondered at. It had many props to support it through that period, which now are decayed and crumbled away. Through that period, it was felt by all to be an undecided experiment; now, it is understood to be a successful one.

Politics are very much like war. We may even have to use poison gas at times.

Remember, it is not about voting for the perfect candidate – there is no such thing. Presidents are human.

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.

Nothing turns out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government.

If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?

Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.

As a tactic, violence is absurd. No one can compete with the Government in violence, and the resort to violence, which will surely fail, will simply frighten and alienate some who can be reached, and will further encourage the ideologists and administrators of forceful repression.

Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence.

Why would anyone steal a shopping cart? It’s like stealing a two-year-old.

No fundamental social change occurs merely because government acts. It’s because civil society, the conscience of a country, begins to rise up and demand – demand – demand change.

Well, no one gives aid to Zimbabwe through the Mugabe government.

If you make any money, the government shoves you in the creek once a year with it in your pockets, and all that don’t get wet you can keep.

I told y’all I didn’t vote, right? But if I would’ve voted, I would’ve voted for Trump.

There’s no difference between movies and television. None at all. Except in a lot of cases, television’s much better than movies.

The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to an uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government.

We can’t equate democracy with Christianity because the largest democracy on earth is India, which is primarily Hindu. The third largest democracy is Indonesia, which is Islamic. Democracy and freedom are not dependent on Christian beliefs.

I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.

I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.

A politician is a man who understands government. A statesman is a politician who’s been dead for 15 years.

While democracy in the long run is the most stable form of government, in the short run, it is among the most fragile.

I lived in a dictatorship in Brazil, and I was arrested three times. I felt in my flesh what it is to live under such a regime and experience deprivation of freedom.

I saw what happened when a dictator was allowed to take over a piece of a country and the country went down the tubes. And I saw the opposite during the war when America joined the fight.

The ballot is stronger than the bullet.

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

Not only our future economic soundness but the very soundness of our democratic institutions depends on the determination of our government to give employment to idle men.

Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.

It is a way to take people’s wealth from them without having to openly raise taxes. Inflation is the most universal tax of all.

A Conservative Government is an organized hypocrisy.

The rights of persons, and the rights of property, are the objects, for the protection of which Government was instituted.

Well the protester I think is a very powerful thing. It’s basically a mechanism of democracy that, along with capitalism, scientific innovation, those things have built the modern world. And it’s wonderful that the new tools have empowered that protestor so that state secrets, bad developments are not hidden anymore.

Our future cannot depend on the government alone. The ultimate solutions lie in the attitudes and the actions of the American people.

Video is growing very quickly on Facebook. A lot of people compare that to YouTube. I think that kind of makes sense. YouTube isn’t the only video service, but I think it’s the biggest, and it probably makes more sense to compare Facebook video to YouTube rather than Netflix because that’s a completely different kind of content.

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy – which many believe goes hand in hand with it – will be dead as well.

Good governance with good intentions is the hallmark of our government. Implementation with integrity is our core passion.