#racy

So much of liberalism in its classical sense is taken for granted in the west today and even disrespected. We take freedom for granted, and because of this we don't understand how incredibly vulnerable it is. ↗

— Niall Ferguson

#freedom #liberalism #liberty #freedom

The end of democracy and the defeat of the American Revolution will occur when government falls into the hands of lending institutions and moneyed incorporations. ↗

— Thomas Jefferson

#plutocracy #money

Josh: So, Toby, it’s election night. What do you say about a country that goes out of its way to protect even those citizens that try to destroy it? Toby: God bless America. ↗

— Aaron Sorkin

#democracy #freedom #west-wing #freedom

The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country. ↗

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#conspiracy-theories #democracy #dictatorship #freedom #human-rights

If ideas and beliefs are to be denied validity outside the geographical and cultural bounds of their origin, Buddhism would be confined to north India, Christianity to a narrow tract in the Middle East and Islam to Arabia. ↗

— Aung San Suu Kyi

#freedom

...we're also extremely sensitive to the difference between literacy and ideology. It is our belief that the first helps to thwart intolerance, challenge dogma, and reinforce our common humanity. The second does the opposite. ↗

— Greg Mortenson

#literacy #ideology

[N]icht durch Reden und Majoritätsbeschlüsse werden die großen Fragen der Zeit entschiedenen [...] sondern durch Eisen und Blut. ↗

— Otto von Bismarck

#dictatorship #history #war #dictatorship

If “piracy” means using value from someone else’s creative property without permission from that creator–as it is increasingly described today – then every industry affected by copyright today is the product and beneficiary of a certain kind of piracy. Film, records, radio, cable TV… Extremists in this debate love to say “You wouldn’t go into Barnes & Noble and take a book off of the shelf without paying; why should it be any different with online music?” The difference is, of course, that when you take a book from Barnes & Noble, it has one less book to sell. By contrast, when you take an MP3 from a computer network, there is not one less CD that can be sold. The physics of piracy of the intangible are different from the physics of piracy of the tangible. ↗

— Lawrence Lessig

#piracy #love

In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#bad-reviews #self-publishing #writing #men

I gather you yellow-skinned men, despite your triumphs in sewage, drinking water, and Olympic gold medals, still don't have democracy. Some politician on the radio was saying that that's why we Indian are going to beat you: we may not have sewage, drinking water, and Olympic gold medals, but we do have democracy. If I were making a country, I'd get the sewage pipes first, then the democracy, then I'd go about giving pamphlets and statues of Gandhi to other people, but what do I know? I am just a murderer! ↗

— Aravind Adiga

#humour #politics #men