One of the features of a democracy is the disentanglement of the sacred from the secular because in religiously pluralistic countries, no one can legitimately claim special status by faith membership.
What my parents taught me was that the hallmark of a thriving democracy was an effective and respectful police force.
We shall continue our fight for democracy and freedom because we do not accept that Hong Kong will be transformed into a police state.
We know that when people are civically engaged, when they understand what their rights are, when they understand that in a democracy you can challenge governments, you can challenge policymakers, and you can... actually shape and form future policy, I think it changes the perception that a lot of young people have about where power is.
Islam does not believe in democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, or freedom of assembly. It does not separate religion and politics. It is partly a religion, but it is much more than that. It has a political agenda that goes far outside the realm of religion.
For us democracy is a question of human dignity. And human dignity is political freedom.
Our political institutions work remarkably well. They are designed to clang against each other. The noise is democracy at work.
Pakistan's future viability, stability and security lie in empowering its people and building political institutions. My goal is to prove that the fundamental battle for the hearts and minds of a generation can be accomplished only under democracy.
Appeal for votes should not be made on basis of caste, creed, or communal. In a healthy democracy, this is not expected from any political leader.
I've always maintained there is no incompatibility between Islam and democracy. The Europeans in general confuse Islam and Islamism. Islamism is a political movement that instrumentalises the religion to get to power, which has nothing to do with religion. Islam here in Tunisia is a religion of openness, of tolerance.
Democracy is indispensable, not because it renders superfluous the conquest of political power by the proletariat, but, on the contrary, because it makes this seizure of power both necessary and possible.
America is a country ready to be taken, in fact, longing to be taken by political leaders ready to restore democracy and trust to the political process.
Political speech is indispensable to decision-making in a democracy, and this is no less true because the speech comes from a corporation rather than an individual.
We need to reform the political system, or we'll lose the democracy. I don't think it's that hard. It doesn't take rocket science. We've done it before successfully at the presidential level and tried it several places at the state level.
I don't know how you define 'neoconservatism,' but I think it's associated with trying to spread open political systems and democracy.
It is part of our political thinking that democracy is a battle of ideas.
In politics, Joseph Smith was something of a radical. He preached, instead of democracy, a version of theocratic rule within a framework given by his own prophetic leadership. At Nauvoo, Smith affected a Napoleonic uniform and made himself into a general and quasi king of the polity he had constituted.
For those who have envisioned the State of Israel to be a democracy, which although primarily a Jewish polity for Jews is one in which non-Jews can become citizens and enjoy equal civil rights with the Jewish majority, the question of natural law is the question of human rights.
An election in which people have to wait 10 hours to vote, or in which black voters wait in the rain for hours, while white voters zip through polling places, is unworthy of the world's leading democracy.
American democracy must be a failure because it places the supreme authority in the hands of the poorest and most ignorant part of the society.
