Jose Angel Gurria Quotes

Political discussions fly over the heads of those who have no votes, and are not endeavoring to acquire them.

What makes me worry today is the alarming decline in the trust in democratic institutions - political parties, Parliaments, political leaders. Less and less people are going to the polls in most advanced democracies.

The danger of democracy has always been the danger of an electorate seized by passivity.

Don’t vote. it only encourages the bastards.

It's so deeply disturbing to me that half of the eligible voters don't vote in this country. We talk about how divided the country is. The truth is, we don't even know. We just know what the half that voted thought.

Americans like to say we're fighting for democracy, and yet young Americans have come to the view that democracy doesn't deliver.

Not voting is not a protest. It is a surrender.

I have never voted in my life... I have always known and understood that the idiots are in a majority so it's certain they will win.

Democracy in our time is more likely to die of indifference than of intolerance.

Our citizens do not know whom to believe, and many of them have concluded that all the processes of government have become so compromised that honest government has been rendered impossible.

The public will vote if they have something important to vote for or against.

If you protect a person's right to vote, then he'll protect himself better than you can.

A growing number of people in this country do not believe that it makes a real difference who is elected President of the United States.

Americans expect too much of politics.

We must demonstrate our power by exercising our right to vote.

Of the many things we have done to democracy in the past, the worst has been the indignity of taking it for granted.

Our polity has fallen down a dark hole into a place that is far from the vision and values of those who founded this democracy.

Many people in the UN vote and then go home where nobody votes.

In many respects we now live in a society that is only formally democratic, as the great mass of citizens have minimal say on the major public issues of the day, and such issues are scarcely debated at all in any meaningful sense in the electoral arena

Getting people to vote is the only way to break this tragic coalition in Congress.

In a democracy, if the people don’t vote, the policies are made by others….The major decisions of our society are going to be made by our elected officials, like it or not.

The apathy of the modern voter is the confusion of the modern reformer.

Having everybody voting to avoid a £25 fine is no way to solve public apathy.

Voting has proliferated in the United States, and it has reached a point where there is now almost one vote available per citizen over the age of eighteen.

From the standpoint of democratic legitimacy, it's a problem if half the electorate, or close to it, declines to vote, not least because they may not feel much of a stake in the whole process.