Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

We don’t need democratization of privilege. What we need is the self-discipline of democracy.

In our democracy we must have a partnership of labor, of business and of government.

Democracy does not contain any force which will check the constant tendency to put more and more on the public payroll. The state is like a hive of bees in which the drones display, multiply and starve the workers so the idlers will consume the food and the workers will perish.

That businessmen should from time to time direct candid criticism toward our Government is only understandable but salutary in a free democracy.

The real strength of democracy is that anyone who is not specifically against it must ultimately be for it, while communism suffers from the great tactical liability that anyone who is not specifically for it is eventually forced to oppose it.

The goal of a great democracy should be fulfillment, not ease. It should be adequacy, not serenity.

I cannot too often repeat that Democracy is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawakened, notwithstanding the resonance and the many angry tempests out of which its syllables have come, from pen or tongue. It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten because that history has yet to

Autocracies may survive for intermittent periods with populations of “yes men” but democracies need a perennially renewed supply of “know men.”