Democracy Quotes
SJS @GreenPolicy360:
Today, July 19, 2024, marks the initiation of another page, a democracy page of quotes that we've been collecting over the years.
The time is ripe now and we'll be posting 'democracy in the spotlight' ... archival lines for modern times, a collection of thoughts and keepers, moments and clips, memes and graphics, pics and inspirations.
We would hope our readers, visitors, educators and defenders of democracy of all colors and stripes, find our democratic shares to be inspiring.
Democracy requires work. A working democracy is worth the work.
From Heather Cox Richardson
Historian / Contemporary Writer
Author of Democracy Awakening
- https://greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Democracy_Challenged,_Democracy_Awakening.png
- https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/717588/democracy-awakening-by-heather-cox-richardson/
Via "Letters from an American", July 18, 2024
In 1959, veteran Robert Biggs wrote to Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had led the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, asking the president to make “direct statements” that would give people the confidence to “back him completely.” Americans needed “more of the attitude of a commanding officer who knows the goal and the mission and states, without evasion, the way it is to be done.”
Eisenhower answered that “in a democracy debate is the breath of life. This is to me what Lincoln meant by government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.’”
“[D]ictatorial systems make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems — freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning…tremendous complex and difficult questions,” Eisenhower wrote. “But while this responsibility is a taxing one to a free people it is their great strength as well—from millions of individual free minds come new ideas, new adjustments to emerging problems, and tremendous vigor, vitality and progress... . While complete success will always elude us, still it is a quest which is vital to self-government and to our way of life as free men.”
[Ed: "(I)t is a quest which is vital to self-government and to our way of life as free men” ... and free women, free peoples around the world, future generations, families and our inter-generational legacy.
The above quote from General Eisenhower about democratic responsibilities of 'free people' carries a special relevance to me. My father was a German Republican from Kansas and lieutenant pilot of B-17s and B-29s fighting "against Fascism and Nazism" (as he explained to me in the 1960s]. The bravery of Eisenhower in defense of democracy was a message of the United States, my father said of Eisenhower a man also was from the heart of the country. They saw their mission to protect and preserve democracy. My father's son sees the mission continuing...]
"A Republic, if you can keep it." -- Benjamin Franklin
We are recalling a quote of Benjamin Franklin responding to a question in 1787 about the newly announced birth of the US as he left Independence Hall after the Constitutional Convention: We have "a Republic, if you can keep it."