Barbara Wejnert Quotes

Deep in my heart, I still believe that the democratization of Russia and the democratization of Ukraine will proceed.

Mexico has experimented with political change since the late 1980s.

We keep looking at democratization as an event—like the fall of the Berlin Wall—but it’s actually a process.

What seemed uppermost in the minds of many political and civil .society' actors was the handing over of political power to the -patriots". some of them thieves and pillagers of the yesteryear turned "liberators" under the political nirvana of multi-partyism.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Latin America moved decisively away from military rule and toward civilian democracy.

But at the same time, I think we recognize we can't impose democracy from without, particularly American-style democracy. We need to work with those elements in the region that are moving towards a reformed process and there are a number of them.

Democracy in the Middle East has to be front-loaded. You have to have elections first and then try and build democratic institutions. You are not going to have the dictators and clerics of the Middle East allow you to build up democratic institutions slowly.

Our country is being bled daily in an effort to create a democracy in a place where it never existed.

Not all countries are ready for it [democracy].

We had a revolution 2 years ago, and we see a people moving from a completely authoritarian system into a democracy. They don’t know how democracy works. They don’t know the ingredients of a democracy.

Establishing a stable democracy is a two stage process. First you get rid of the old regime, then you build a durable democratic replacement. Because the first stage is dramatic, many people think the game is over when the dictator is gone. But the second stage is more difficult. There are many examples of broad coalitions coming together to oust dictators but relatively few of them stayed together and agreed on what a new regime should look like.

As the 20th century ended, there were around 120 democracies in the world - and I can assure you more are on the way.

I was never convinced that war was the best system to bring democracy to the country.

There exists an unmistakable demand in the Middle East and in the wider Muslim world for democratization.

The list of non-democratic regimes that have seen significant reforms since 2001 is long and significant.

What we want the folks in Ethiopia to know is that we are behind them in the democratic process. We know it is not perfect, as we are still working on ours; but we wish them success in this great and noble endeavor.

And so I have studied, I have to tell you, revolutions and uprisings for a long time. They are all slightly different, but what they all look for is some kind of a mechanism to go from an authoritarian system to an open, democratic system.

With Taiwan, it took about 40 years to go from an authoritarian to a democratic society.

Politics and government are certainly among the most important of practical human interests.

I know more now than I did in the past about the process of democratization. I know more about the pitfalls.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the major international question was the relation between Islam and democracy.

The free world should not wait for dictatorial regimes to consent to reform.

For politics to change … culture must change too --- and that takes much more than dispatching troops, holding elections, and writing constitutions.

Our real battlefield today is Asia and our real battle is the one between democracy and communism.... We have to prove to the world and particularly to downtrodden areas of the world which are the natural prey to the principles of communist economics that democracy really brings about happier and better conditions for the people as a whole.

The peaceful path out of totalitarianism has never been tested.