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"It means that, in fact, it's - whether fascist is the right word I don't know - more of a plutocracy than anything resembling a democracy; it has become a nation controlled by a very small, very wealthy elite."
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Exlpore more Democracy quotes
"Democracy can exist only in the countries where people are brave! Coward nations always live under the authoritarian regimes!"
"I'm much more attracted personally to governments going their full term. It's very hard to have a fixed term election I know with ah... a parliamentary democracy, but I've always had an instinct to say there should be a fixed term."
"Change represents the real spirit of democracy and the real America."
"Another tendency, which is extremely natural to democratic nations and extremely dangerous, is that which leads them to despise and undervalue the rights of private persons. The attachment which men feel to a right, and the respect which they display for it, is generally proportioned to its importance, or to the length of time during which they have enjoyed it. The rights of private persons amongst democratic nations are commonly of small importance, of recent growth, and extremely precarious; the consequence is that they are often sacrificed without regret, and almost always violated without remorse."
"Self-government is in inverse ratio to numbers. The larger the constituency, the less the value of any particular vote. When he is merely one of millions, the individual elector feels himself to be impotent, a negligible quantity. The candidates he has voted into office are far away, at the top of the pyramid of power. Theoretically they are the servants of the people; but in fact it is the servants who give orders and the people, far off at the base of the great pyramid, who must obey."
"Right-to-life groups won't fund us because we're Democrats."
"Democracy functions best when we have an active citizenry."
Explore more quotes by Peter Singer
"All the arguments to prove man's superiority cannot shatter this hard fact: in suffering the animals are our equals."
"At the descriptive level, certainly, you would expect different cultures to develop different sorts of ethics and obviously they have; that doesn't mean that you can't think of overarching ethical principles you would want people to follow in all kinds of places."
"As we realise that more and more things have global impact, I think we're going to get people increasingly wanting to get away from a purely national interest."
"The idea that we can actually have an impact on places more or less instantly, too, by responding in some way or not responding, I think, also makes it true."
"Bush is morally a universalist. For instance, he says the freedom is good, the same thing is good, all over the world. So in that sense he's a universalist."
"I'm a Utilitarian, so I don't see the rule against lying as absolute; it's always subject to some overriding utility which may prevent its exercise."
"We see things like reciprocity which are fairly central to our view of ethics. But if you're talking about a set of worked-out rules on what we are supposed to do then, yes, it is a human product."
"I'm not overly alarmist about it, but I do think there are some worrying signs, like the growing accumulation of wealth by a very small proportion of the population, plus elections in the US are much more dominated by money than anywhere else calling itself a democracy."
"Had Rumsfeld said at any time 'get me a report on what's going on', he could have had it. You're right, it depends on choices that we make, which parts of the world we want to be in immediate contact with."
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