Deliberative Democracy Quotes

Democracy is not brute numbers; it is a genuine union of true individuals...the essence of democracy is creating. The technique of democracy is group organization.

Democracy is not meant to be efficient, it is meant to be fair.

Democracy the domination of unreflective and timorous men, moved in vast herds by mob conditions.

Even the Founding Fathers of the U.S., nowadays considered the model of a democracy, were strictly opposed to it. Without a single exception, they thought of democracy as nothing but mob-rule.

Congress is the world's oldest deliberative body in the world's oldest democracy. The result of that democracy, and the Constitution on which it rests, are America's laws.

Democracy is an impossible thing until the power is shared by all, but let not democracy degenerate into mobocracy.

Democracy feeds on argument, on the discussion as to the right way forward. This is the reason why respecting the opinion of others belongs to democracy.

In order to get past disagreements, you just can't have one person with power decide. In other words, so just because I'm a boss, it would be terrible if I then said, "Okay, we're gonna go do this." That's why, after that thoughtful disagreement, there has to be a process of an idea meritocracy. That means okay, now you have to vote, not that the decision resides with power. And then you vote and move beyond it.

Democracy begins in human conversation. A democratic conversation does not require elaborate rules of procedure or utopian notions of perfect consensus. What it does require is a spirit of mutual respect-people conversing critically with one another in an atmosphere of honesty and shared regard.

The masses are the material of democracy, but its form-that is to say, the laws which express the general reason, justice, and utility-can only be rightly shaped by wisdom, which is by no means a universal property.

Democracy requires a certain relish for confusion

We sometimes talk about democracy as if it’s just about voting, and the stuff that happens in legislatures. But, at its core, liberal democracy is a series of concrete human encounters: persuasion, argument, negotiation, compromise. It’s one viewpoint encountering a bunch of other viewpoints in hopes of finding some positive way forward. For liberal democracy to function, we must be able to understand one another to some degree, to see one another’s viewpoints, to project respect across difference and disagreement.

I like the idea of a Citizen's Assembly that has been used in Ireland, providing a forum in which to discuss the nuances of an issue before deciding if and how it should be put to the people.

Democracy is a difficult art of government, demanding of its citizens high ratios of courage and literacy, and at the moment we lack both the necessary habits of mind and a sphere of common reference.

Democracy necessarily means a conflict of will and ideas, involving sometimes a war of the knife between different ideas.

In the small group then is where we shall find the inner meaning of democracy, its very heart and core.

[Louis Brandeis] insisted on the necessity of public reason, which he thought could only be achieved if all of us just take the time to inform ourselves about the best arguments on all sides of questions so that we can make up our own minds.

The procedure we are pursuing is that of true democracy. Semi-democracy accepts the dictatorship of a majority in establishing its arbitrary, ergo, unnatural, laws. True democracy discovers by patient experiment and unanimous acknowledgement what the laws of nature or universe may be for the physical support and metaphysical satisfaction of the human intellect's function in universe.

The example of changing a constitution by assembling the wise men of the state, instead of assembling armies, will be worth as much to the world as the former examples we had give them. The constitution, too, which was the result of our deliberation, is unquestionably the wisest ever yet presented to men.

The idea of public reason has to do with how questions should be decided, but it doesn't tell you what are the good reasons or correct decisions.

Democracy must be conceived as a process, not a goal.

In the American constitutional system of three different branches, conflict - and I mean that peaceful, vigorous debate - it's a feature of our system, not a bug. We need less all-or - winner-take-all politics.

I do not want to abandon representative democracy. I want to see it balanced by popular sovereignty, especially the variety known as deliberative democracy.

I am a big supporter of experiments to complement representative gov't with randomly selected representative bodies of citizens, sure. I think most Americans would be surprised to learn just how much better we are at gov't than our gov't.

The idea of public reason isn't about the right answers to all these questions, but about the kinds of reasons that they ought to be answered by.