Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922.
Democracy
For poets (bear the word)
Half-poets even, are still whole democrats.
E. B. Browning—Aurora Leigh. Bk. 4.
A perfect democracy is therefore the most shameless thing in the world.
Burke—Reflections on the Revolution in France.
And wrinkles, the d—d democrats, won’t flatter.
Byron—Don Juan. Canto X. St. XXIV.
You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.
G. K. Chesterton—Tremendous Trifles. Wind and the trees.
Le Césarisme, c’est la démocratie sans la liberté.
Cæsarism is democracy without liberty.
Taxile Delord—L’Histoire du Second Empire.
The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians.
Benj. Disraeli—Lothair. Ch. XVII.
Democracy is on trial in the world, on a more colossal scale than ever before.
Charles Fletcher Dole—The Spirit of Democracy.
Drawn to the dregs of a democracy.
Dryden—Absalom and Achitopel. Pt. I. L. 227.
Puritanism, believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy.
Lowell—Among My Books. New England Two Centuries Ago.
Democ’acy gives every man
A right to be his own oppressor.
Lowell—Biglow Papers. Series 2. No. 7.
Thus our democracy was from an early period the most aristocratic, and our aristocracy the most democratic.
Macaulay—History. Vol. I. P. 20.
To one that advised him to set up a democracy in Sparta, “Pray,” said Lycurgus, “do you first set up a democracy in your own house.”
Lycurgus in Plutarch’s Apophthegms of Kings and Great Commanders.
Thunder on! Stride on! Democracy. Strike with vengeful strokes.
Walt Whitman—Drum-Taps. Rise O Days From Your Fathomless Deep. No. 3.
But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts—for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own Governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.
Woodrow Wilson—Address to Congress. April 2, 1917.
I believe in Democracy because it releases the energies of every human being.
Woodrow Wilson—At the Workingman’s Dinner, New York, Sept. 4, 1912.
The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them.
Woodrow Wilson—Address to Congress. April 2, 1917. (State of War with Germany.)