Democratic Roots Quotes

Puritanism, believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy.

Peoples did not in the first instance originate from rulers, but whatever peoples desired to be ruled by a single monarch or by chief men elected by them were anterior to their rulers. Hence it follows that peoples were not created for the sake of rulers, but on the contrary the rulers for the sake of the people.

Judaism is the best basis for democracy. The debate between the House of Hillel and the House of Shammai, the constant debate, has been a tradition of ours for thousands of years.

If European democracy owes much to the Protestant Reformation it owes nothing whatever to the direct teaching of the Protestant leaders. — So deeply rooted was the reverence for monarchy that even the wars of religion in France and the Netherlands produced no distinctive republican doctrine.

We shouldn't waste any more time in making sure that democracy is properly rooted in our political life and the supremacy of the law becomes an integral part of our state's structure.

You can forgive your leaders for not knowing the intricacies of Islamic history. You cannot forgive them for not knowing their own. And when you look at American democracy, where did it start? It started, if you need to pick a point, at Runnymede in 1215. We have now been at this process, we and our English-speaking allies, for 800 years.

We are usually told that democracy originated in ancient Athens - like science, or philosophy, it was a Greek invention. It's never entirely clear what this is supposed to mean. Are we supposed to believe that before the Athenians, it never really occurred to anyone, anywhere, to gather all the members of their community in order to make joint decisions in a way that gave everyone equal say?

Loyalty to the true, core values and roots of democracy is what makes a true patriot, not loyalty to a symbol of the country.

Our notion of democracy derives from the Pilgrim notion of church government---that the congregation is governed by the people rather than some external authority.

Active people to revitalize what is really the root of democracy: citizens communicating with each other. Democracy is not just about voting, it's about citizens talking with each other about the issues which concern them. We've lost a great deal of that in the age of the mass media.

A form of government that is not the result of a long sequence of shared experiences, efforts, and endeavors can never take root.

Democracy is not the end point of mankind. There may be developments in many different directions in the coming centuries. Democracy has only existed for about 200 years. It started out with the American Declaration of Independence. The Americans got their ideas from the Europeans, in the main from the French, the Dutch and the British.

I've said in the primary race repeatedly that a Labour Party that I lead would be a true red Labour Party, be very clear about its social democratic roots and its social democratic agenda.