A Quote by Pankaj Mishra
Democracy, loudly upheld as a cure for much of the ailing world, has proved no guarantor of political wisdom, even if it remains the least bad form of government.
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Democracy is a very bad form of government ... but all the others are so much worse.
The word "democracy" is a Western word obviously. It doesn't exist in Arabic. Democratiya is a loan word. We in the Western world make the great mistake of assuming that ours is the only form of good government; that democracy means what it means in the Anglo-American world and a few other places in the West, but not many others. Muslims have their own tradition on limited government. Now in Islam, there is a very strong political tradition. Because the different circumstances, Islam is political from the very beginning.
Democracy is not a form of government. It is a political philosophy that can be embodied in various systems of government.
Democracy is the worst form of government. It is the most inefficient, the most clumsy, the most unpractical.... It reduces wisdom to impotence and secures the triumph of folly, ignorance, clap-trap, and demagogy.... Yet democracy is the only form of social order that is admissible, because it is the only one consistent with justice.
It’s sad. Marxism didn’t work. Communism didn’t work. Capitalism doesn’t work. Nothing works. Even democracy doesn’t work. Democracy-the greatest form of government and we have two choices for who’s our leader. In fascism you only have one choice. That’s great. We have one more choice than the worst form of government.
If democracy is control by the people, as it is supposed to be, it is the right form of government. I believe in a complete democracy - individual, political, social, economic. If we really had that, which we don't now, it would be in harmony with divine purpose.
Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those others that have been
Our Founding Fathers crafted a constitutional Republic for the first time in the history of the world because they were shaping a form of government that would not have the failures of a democracy in it, but had the representation of democracy in it.
Democracy is not so much a form of government as a set of principles.
Democracy, taken in its narrower, purely political, sense, suffers from the fact that those in economic and political power possess the means for molding public opinion to serve their own class interests. The democratic form of government in itself does not automatically solve problems; it offers, however, a useful framework for their solution. Everything depends ultimately on the political and moral qualities of the citizenry.
They think that the cure to big government is to have bigger government... the only effective cure is to reduce the scope of government - get government out of the business.
The implications of the transfer of full sovereignty from separate nations to a World Organization. . .Political unification in some sort of World Government will be required. . .Even though. . . any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable.
If the government is vulnerable to public opinion, then famines are a dreadfully bad thing to have. You can?t win many elections after a famine, and you don?t like being criticized by newspapers, opposition parties in parliament, and so on. Democracy gives the government an immediate political incentive to act.
I have not given up my faith in democracy - it remains the worst form of government except for all the others - but I have given up my youthful expectation that it would inevitably triumph.
Freedom is a need of the soul, and nothing else. It is in striving toward God that the soul strives continually after a condition of freedom. God alone is the inciter and guarantor of freedom. He is the only guarantor. External freedom is only an aspect of interior freedom. Political freedom, as the Western world has known it, is only a political reading of the Bible. Religion and freedom are indivisible. Without freedom the soul dies. Without the soul there is no justification for freedom. Necessity is the only ultimate justification known to the mind.
This is the 21st-century paradox: Even as political democracy has become the intellectual default mode for much of the world, the private sector usually trumps the public one when it comes to accommodating consumer choice.
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