Pillars Of Democracy Quotes

Right to peace is more urgent for the countries where the pillars of democracy are rusted by corrosion and purchased by the dark powers of few corporates.

Right to peace stands on the pillars of freedom of expression, respect for human rights, cultural diversity and scientific cooperation. Right to peace transform culture of war to a culture of peace. It is also saving humanity from the dangers of dark democracy, which exploits innocent citizens by implementing wrong law, purchased press and digital surveillance.

A program that stops and frisks predominantly those who are the least likely to have illegal contraband is not law enforcement.80 A war on drugs that uses race and ethnicity as the litmus test for crime is not justice.81 Millions of black citizens recognize this and, therefore, question the very legitimacy of this key pillar in American democracy.82 Meanwhile, state budgets have cracked under the strain of bloated, unsustainable prison systems.83 Mayors worry that their cities will ignite when yet another black person, who is more likely than not unarmed, is killed by police.84 The costs of the continued misuse of the criminal justice system are more than the United States can bear—morally, politically, and financially. It is time to rethink America.

When I saw Mr. Trump lean over and say to Mr. Putin, it’s a great honor to meet you, and this is Mr. Putin who assaulted one of the foundational pillars of our democracy, our electoral system, that invaded Ukraine, annexed Crimea, that has suppressed and repressed political opponents in Russia and has caused the deaths of many of them, to say up front, person who supposedly knows the art of the deal, I thought it was a very, very bad negotiating tactic, and I felt as though it was not the honorable thing to say,” Brennan told national security professionals gathered a couple weeks later at the Aspen Security Forum.

I see many so-called conservative commentators, including some faith leaders, focusing on favorable policy initiatives or court appointments to justify their acceptance of this damage, while de-emphasizing the impact of this president on basic norms and ethics. That strikes me as both hypocritical and wrong. The hypocrisy is evident if you simply switch the names and imagine that a President Hillary Clinton had conducted herself in a similar fashion in office. I've said this earlier but it's worth repeating: close your eyes and imagine these same voices if President Hillary Clinton had told the FBI director, 'I hope you will let it go,' about the investigation of a senior aide, or told casual, easily disprovable lies nearly every day and then demanded we believe them. The hypocrisy is so thick as to be almost darkly funny. I say this as someone who has worked in law enforcement for most of my life, and served presidents of both parties. What is happening now is not normal. It is not fake news. It is not okay. Whatever your politics, it is wrong to dismiss the damage to the norms and traditions that have guided the presidency and our public life for decades or, in many cases, since the republic was founded. It is also wrong to stand idly by, or worse, to stay silent when you know better, while a president so brazenly seeks to undermine public confidence in law enforcement institutions that were established to keep our leaders in check...without these checks on our leaders, without those institutions vigorously standing against abuses of power, our country cannot sustain itself as a functioning democracy. I know there are men and women of good conscience in the United States Congress on both sides of the aisle who understand this. But not enough of them are speaking out. They must ask themselves to what, or to whom, they hold a higher loyalty: to partisan interests or to the pillars of democracy? Their silence is complicity - it is a choice - and somewhere deep down they must know that. Policies come and go. Supreme Court justices come and go. But the core of our nation is our commitment to a set of shared values that began with George Washington - to restraint and integrity and balance and transparency and truth. If that slides away from us, only a fool would be consoled by a tax cut or different immigration policy.

In Pakistani political history, the former pawns of the establishment and the current jugglers of the ignorants are the most unsuitable figures. Factually, neither Family Kingdom nor a fool and lunatic leaders can be beneficial for the state and the people and even for the pillars of democracy in an exact democratic context.

The headline of a comprehensive exposé in The Guardian expressed the global shock among the scientific community at the rank corruption by scientific publishing’s most formidable pillars: “The Lancet has made one of the biggest retractions in modern history. How could this happen?”94 The Guardian writers openly accused The Lancet of promoting fraud: “The sheer number and magnitude of the things that went wrong or missing are too enormous to attribute to mere incompetence.” The Guardian commented, “What’s incredible is that the editors of these esteemed journals still have a job—that is how utterly incredible the supposed data underlying the studies was.” The capacity of their Pharma overlords to strong-arm the world’s top two medical journals, the NEJM and The Lancet, into condoning deadly research95,96 and to simultaneously publish blatantly fraudulent articles in the middle of a pandemic, attests to the cartel’s breathtaking power and ruthlessness. It is no longer controversial to acknowledge that drug makers rigorously control medical publishing and that The Lancet, NEJM, and JAMA are utterly corrupted instruments of Pharma. The Lancet editor, Richard Horton, confirms, “Journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.”97 Dr. Marcia Angell, who served as an NEJM editor for 20 years, says journals are “primarily a marketing machine.”98 Pharma, she says, has co-opted “every institution that might stand in its way.”99,100 Cracking Down on HCQ to Keep Case Fatalities High Referring to the Lancet Surgisphere study during a May 27 CNN interview, Dr. Fauci stated on CNN about hydroxychloroquine,

The six pillars of international peace are: respect, fairness, freedom, democracy, value creation, and cultural engagement. 

Seeking to unite a divided India, Nehru articulated an ideology that rested on four main pillars. First, there was democracy, the freedom to choose one’s friends and speak one’s mind (and in the language of one’s choice) – above all, the freedom to choose one’s leaders through regular elections based on universal adult franchise. Second, there was secularism, the neutrality of the state in matters of religion and its commitment to maintaining social peace. Third, there was socialism, the attempt to augment productivity while ensuring a more egalitarian distribution of income (and of social opportunity). Fourth, there was non-alignment, the placement of India beyond and above the rivalries of the Great Powers. Among the less compelling, but not necessarily less significant, elements of this worldview were the conscious cultivation of a multiparty system (notably through debate in Parliament), and a respect for the autonomy of the judiciary and the executive.

Their case was summed up by British Defense Minister Malcolm Rifkind, who, in November 1994, argued the need for “an Atlantic Community,” resting on four pillars: defense and security embodied in NATO; “shared belief in the rule of law and parliamentary democracy”; “liberal capitalism and free trade”; and “the shared European cultural heritage emanating from Greece and Rome through the Renaissance to the shared values, beliefs and civilization of our own century.

The headline of a comprehensive exposé in The Guardian expressed the global shock among the scientific community at the rank corruption by scientific publishing’s most formidable pillars: “The Lancet has made one of the biggest retractions in modern history. How could this happen?”94 The Guardian writers openly accused The Lancet of promoting fraud:

Thus Speaks The Human (A Sonnet) I am my government, I write my own laws. I need no congress to define rightness, An alive conscience needs no one to endorse. We barely grew out of the bible, And already replaced it with constitution. Before we feared an imaginary god, Now we give law our total submission. Law and policy may have their place, But they are no pillars of society. The only pillar is human conviction, All else are shallow mockery. One who needs law is yet to be civilized. Be accountable and all will be humanized.

The passage from the ancestral line of slavery via feudalism and capitalism to socialism can only lie through revolution: it cannot lie through reform. For in reform, fundamental principles are held constant, and the details of their expression are modified. In the words of Marx, it leaves the pillars of the building intact. Indeed sometimes, reform itself may be initiated by the necessities of preserving identical fundamental principles. Reform is a tactic of self-preservation.

Attempt to weaken the media, the pillar of transparent democracy in whatever description is disloyalty to the State and Nation that can open the route of conspiracies.

While there is no doubt that Johnson is both deceitful and amoral, the prime minister’s war on the truth is part of a wider attack on the pillars of British democracy: Parliament, the rule of law and the civil service.

[...] he realised that belief in the notions of reasons and free will, which are the natural foundations of democracy, probably resulted from a confusion between the concepts of freedom and unpredictability. The turbulence of a river flowing around the supporting pillar of a bridge is structurally unpredictable, but no one would think to describe it as being free.

George Washington so liked Edward Savage’s painting of “The President and His Family, the full size of life,” that he ordered “four stipple engravings” in “handsome, but not costly, gilt frames, with glasses,” and hung one of his purchases over the fireplace mantel in the small dining room at Mount Vernon. As the Washington family—George and Martha, and two of Martha’s orphaned grandchildren, George Washington (“Washy”) and Eleanor (“Nelly”) Custis—took their daily repast, Edward Savage’s tableau of “The President and His Family” looked down upon them. It is likely that Washington favored the portrait above many others because of its intimacy and its affirmation of the future. The family gathers about a table at Mount Vernon, George seated at the left, opposite his wife, Martha. Washy, the younger of the two grandchildren, stands in the left foreground, while Nelly stands at the right in the middle ground. Washington rests his right hand upon the boy’s shoulder; Washy, in turn, holds a compass in his right hand, which he rests upon a globe, in a stance suggesting that succeeding generations of the family were destined to spread the ideals of liberty and democracy around the world. In the background, framed by large pillars and a swagged curtain, Savage presents a glimpse, as he said in a note, of “a view of thirty miles down the Potomac River.” On the table at the portrait’s center rests Andrew Ellicott’s map of the new federal seat of government. The family appears to be unrolling the document; Washington holds it flat with his left arm and sword, while Nelly and Martha steady it on the right. With her folded fan, Martha gestures to “the grand avenue,” as Savage called it, that connects the Capitol with the White House. In the right middle ground stands one of the chief contradictions of the new democracy, a nameless black male servant, part of the retinue of more than three hundred slaves the Washingtons depended upon for their comfort, security, and prosperity. Dressed in the colors of Mount Vernon livery, a gray coat over a salmon red waistcoat, he possesses an almost princely quality. His black, combed-back hair frames his dark face with its prominent nose. His unknowable eye impassively takes in the scene. He keeps his left hand enigmatically concealed in his waistcoat; his collar flamboyantly mirrors Washington’s across from him. The slave must remain a shadow, unobtrusive, unassuming, unremarkable, almost a part of the frame for the Potomac. Only the slave’s destiny seems apart from those gathered about the table examining the plans, yet from the beginning the fates of both slavery and the new city were inextricably intertwined. The nameless man’s story, along with the stories of tens of thousands of others, was very much a part of the plot unfolding on the Potomac in the 1790s. The consequences of involuntary servitude would affect and effect Washington’s development to the present day.

Arendt cited President John Adams with approval: “a constitution is a standard, a pillar, and a bond when it is understood, approved and beloved. But without this intelligence and attachment, it might as well be a kite or balloon, flying in the air.”197

Journalists must uphold democracy; they are its fourth and last pillar

A continuing thread of Europe’s transformation over the seven decades since 1950 has been the central importance of Germany. Change here, in the country that did more than any other to destroy the continent during the first half of the twentieth century, has been especially profound. Despite its destruction as a nation state at the end of the Second World War, Germany has remained at the heart of Europe’s development – central to post-war economic recovery, central to the Cold War, central to the ending of the Cold War, central to widening European integration, central to the creation of the Euro, central to the crisis of the Eurozone, central to the migration crisis, and central to the still-embryonic steps to reform the European Union after its recent serious travails. In the meantime Germany has become a vital pillar of stable liberal democracy, it presides over Europe’s strongest economy, has overcome forty years of division to attain national unity, and has reluctantly acquired the mantle of European leadership. Germany’s own transformation has played a key role in Europe’s post-war story – and is far from the least successful part.

Our era, which began and has developed under the banner of the Enlightenment, first invented liberal democracy, then took it as its political ideal. But we have become enslaved by speed, and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, impairs our concentration and forces us to consume information in ever-smaller packets. To be worthy of the name, we Homo sapiens should rid ourselves of speed before it reduces us to a species in danger of extinction. A firm defense of quiet, rational deliberation is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life. Our defense of reason must rest on three pillars. First, we must better understand the conditions that make it possible. Second, we must deliberate about how to improve those conditions. And finally, we must engage in collective action aimed at bringing about those improvements. Only in this way can we banish the degrading effects of Fast Life. In its frenzied competition for attention, Fast Politics has changed our way of making decisions, making us prey to demagogues. This threatens our democracy and our way of life. Slow Politics is now the only truly progressive answer. Politics should be about cultivating intelligence rather than demeaning it, building on experience rather than going with our gut feelings. What better way to set about this than an international exchange of experiences, knowledge, projects? Slow Politics promises a better future. Slow Politics cannot succeed as an individual endeavor. It is an idea that needs many committed supporters who can help turn this into an international movement.

It does not matter that some of the institutions they deride are foundational pillars of the American or French republic; courts and constitutions are dismissed as undemocratic for not reflecting the political zeitgeist and the current whims of the masses.

One might think that the explosion of new media outlets produced by the digital revolution would multiply checks on government power and that increased competition among different news outlets might encourage them to adopt higher standards. The reverse seems to be true, alas: instead of an ever-more vigiliant “fourth estate,” the growing role of cable news channels, the Internet, online publishing, the blogosphere, and social media seems to be making the media environment less accountable than ever before. Citizens can choose which version of a nearly infinite number of “realities” to read, listen to, or watch. Anonymous individuals and foreign intelligence agencies disseminate “fake news” that is all too often taken seriously, and such “news” sites as Breitbart, the Drudge Report, and InfoWars compete for viewers not by working harder to ferret out the truth, but by trafficking in rumors, unsupported accusations, and conspiracy theories. Leading politicians—most notoriously, Donald Trump himself—have given these outlets greater credibility by repeating their claims while simultaneously disparaging established media organizations as biased and unreliable.77 The net effect is to discredit any source of information that challenges one’s own version of events. If enough people genuinely believe “The New York Times is fake news,” as former congressman Newt Gingrich said in 2016, then all sources of information become equally valid and a key pillar of democracy is effectively neutered.

What is it that Aristotle said: ‘Republics decline into democracies, and democracies degenerate into despotisms.’ We have approached that day.

The neutral and honest print and electronic media are free advisers, mirrors, information, and opinion of the nation for ruling and non-ruling political parties. Thus, such media deserve subsidies without distinctions to stay stable as the fourth pillar of democracy.

Indeed, as we will see in the book, healthy communities are essential for sustaining vibrant market democracies. This is perhaps why authoritarian movements like fascism and communism try to replace community consciousness with nationalist or proletarian consciousness.

Finally, the people in industrial democracies, engaged in their communities and thereby organized socially and politically, enforce the necessary separation between markets and the state through their democratic voice. They do so because they want sufficient political and economic competition that the economy does not descend into authoritarianism or cronyism.

In both Europe and the United States, that debate is currently polarized between a right that seeks to cut off immigration altogether and would like to send current immigrants back to their countries of origin and a left that asserts a virtually unlimited obligation on the part of liberal democracies to accept migrants. The real focus should instead be on strategies for better assimilating immigrants to a country’s creedal identity. Well-assimilated immigrants bring a healthy diversity to any society, and the benefits of immigration can be fully realized. Poorly assimilated immigrants are a drag on the state and in some cases constitute dangerous security threats. Europeans pay lip service to the need for better assimilation, but fail to follow through with an effective set of policies. The reform agenda here is highly varied since individual European countries approach the problem very differently. Many countries have in place policies that actively impede integration, such as the Dutch system of pillarization. Britain and a number of other European countries provide public funding for Muslim schools, just as they support Christian and Jewish schools.

I know there are men and women of good conscience in the United States Congress on both sides of the aisle who understand this. But not enough of them are speaking out. They must ask themselves to what, or to whom, they hold a higher loyalty: to partisan interests or to the pillars of democracy? Their silence is complicity—it is a choice—and somewhere deep down they must know that.

They must ask themselves to what, or to whom, they hold a higher loyalty: to partisan interests or to the pillars of democracy? Their silence is complicity—it is a choice—and somewhere deep down they must know that.

Democracy holds four pillars consist of Legislative, Executive, Judiciary and Press/Media. However, if that fails to assimilate the vision, skill, decency, and act, goes nowhere. Consequently, indeed, the state faces the collapse of all its systems.

The opposition leaders and those in power can keep reputable the four pillars of democracy in the context of their constitutional duties, transparent justice, truth, and honesty; they can also discredit those by their wrong character and fallacious decisions and deeds.

Press freedom is one significant pillar of true democracy pillars, but such democracy stays deaf, dumb, and blind, which restricts or represses the media.