A Quote by Gore Vidal

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.

Gore Vidal

Quote Topics

Politics Apparently Candidates Cost Democracy Elections Great Held Interchangeable Issues Numerous Place Without

Quote Author

Gore Vidal
American - Writer
October 3, 1925 - July 31, 2012

As a result of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, American democracy is being undermined by the ability of the Koch brothers and other billionaire families. These wealthy contributors can literally buy politicians and elections by spending hundreds of millions of dollars in support of the candidates of their choice. We need to overturn Citizens United and move toward public funding of elections so that all candidates can run for office without being beholden to the wealthy and powerful.

Bernie Sanders

America must begin the struggle for democracy at home. The advocacy of free elections in Europe by American officials is hypocrisy when free elections are not held in great sections of America.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The candidates before you know that the IFP has set up a system of deployed IFP national and provincial leaders who are not only monitoring the performance of candidates during these elections but will also do so after these elections.

Mangosuthu Buthelezi

I'm also very much aware that it is you who brought democracy to Chile, you set up a constitution suitable for democracy, you put it into effect, elections were held, and then, in accordance with the result, you stepped down.

Margaret Thatcher

So much of what passes for public life consists of little more than candidates without ideas, hiring consultants without conviction, to stage campaigns without content. The result, increasingly, is elections without voters.

Gerald R. Ford

We think that democracy can change a lot of things, but we're being fooled, because democracy is not the election. We've been taught that democracy is having elections. And it isn't. Elections are the most horrendous aspect of democracy. It's the most mundane, trivial, disappointing, dirty aspect.

Gael Garcia Bernal

I am and will remain the president of all Cameroonians without exception, and the great winner in these elections is democracy

Paul Biya

This democracy... The elections in Iraq were held despite the American opposition. It was the will of the Iraqi people and the religious authorities. [The elections] were the result of pressure by Ayatollah Sistani, by the Iraqi religious authorities, and by the fighting forces in Iraq on America. They left the US no choice but to allow the elections.

Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani

Some Democrats and their advocates in the press believe Obamacare, a year into implementation, is no longer much of a factor in the midterm elections. But no one has told Republican candidates, who are still pounding away at the Affordable Care Act on the stump. And no one has told voters, especially those in states with closely contested Senate races, who regularly place it among the top issues of the campaign.

Byron York

All the more reason we need to stand up for our democracy now. If we're going to solve the crises that are barreling down on us, we need democracy, and our democracy needs to start with an open and inclusive debate. That doesn't mean 20 candidates. There are four candidates who are on the ballot for just about every voter in America.

Jill Stein

[American Communist Party] legally exists in the U.S.A., it nominates its candidates in the elections, including Presidential elections.

Joseph Stalin

The Internet is such a paradoxical space - it's limitless and totally bounded, apparently free yet corporate-controlled, apparently invisible yet surveilled, a place of disembodiment where bodies are policed and enviolenced, a place that is apparently 'nowhere'.

Joyelle McSweeney

The American experiment with representative democracy has been a great success, but we need to realize that it needs to be a genuine representative democracy where ordinary people have a vote, have a voice in choosing the candidates who represent them.

Richard Painter

We can't continue assuming that politics is something which is decided elsewhere by distant leaders in a distant capital. Protest is insufficient too. If people who are willing to put time into demonstrations also prove willing to work on behalf of candidates in local elections - or to become candidates themselves - they will achieve far more. If all of this upheaval provokes more involvement, then we have a slim chance of ending up with more vibrant democracies eventually. The alternative, as you've hinted, is that democracy fails altogether.

Anne Applebaum

Although we can talk about an Indonesian democracy, or we can talk about democratic elections and democratic rituals - the trappings of democracy - we can't genuinely talk about democracy in Indonesia because there is not rule of law, and democracy without rule of law is a nonsense.