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"Let me say again that the relationship is asymmetrical: there's no democracy without a market economy, but you can have a market economy without democracy."
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"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."
"Those who abhors democracy would rarely immigrate to an authoritarian state if they have to."
"Change represents the real spirit of democracy and the real America."
"Democrats and Republicans alike support our military personnel."
"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."
Explore more quotes by Peter L. Berger
"In a market economy, however, the individual has some possibility of escaping from the power of the state."
"Some people seem to gravitate from one fundamentalism to another, from some kind of secular fundamentalism into a religious fundamentalism or the other way around, which is not very helpful."
"When certain branches of the economy become obsolete, as in the case of the steel industry, not only do jobs disappear, which is obviously a terrible social hardship, but certain cultures also disappear."
"We also have a cultural phenomenon: the emergence of a global culture, or of cultural globalization."
"Some people think that as the Chinese economy becomes more and more capitalistic it will inevitably become more democratic."
"The basic fault lines today are not between people with different beliefs but between people who hold these beliefs with an element of uncertainty and people who hold these beliefs with a pretense of certitude."
"Even if one is interested only in one's own society, which is one's prerogative, one can understand that society much better by comparing it with others."
"So I think one can say on empirical grounds - not because of some philosophical principle - that you can't have democracy unless you have a market economy."
"But we don't have an example of a democratic society existing in a socialist economy - which is the only real alternative to capitalism in the modern world."
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