Democratization Quotes

Protestantism's evolution away from hierarchy and authority has enormous consequences for America and the world. On the one hand, the democratization of religion runs parallel to political democratization. The king of England, questioning the pope, inspires English subjects to question the king and his Anglican bishops. Such dissent is backed up by a Bible full of handy Scripture arguing for arguing with one's kIng. This is the root of self-government in the English-speaking world. ~ Sarah Vowell

We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better. ~ George F. Kennan

Democratization is not democracy; it is a slogan for the temporary liberalization handed down from an autocrat. Glasnost is not free speech; only free speech, constitutionally guaranteed, is free speech. ~ Gail Sheehy

I would like to extend to you our deep appreciation and thanks for the position the United States has taken in support of the democratization process that has taken place in Tunisia, in Egypt, and what is attempting to take place in Libya. ~ Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani

Twitter is about the democratization of access to a platform that allows anyone in the world - who has a mobile phone and access to SMS - to have a voice and be heard. ~ Shailesh Rao

I don't believe that military intervention is always the right approach. What we need is a comprehensive strategy, one that advances democratization, economic reforms and equal rights for women. ~ Zalmay Khalilzad

An alternative modernity worthy of the name would recover the mediating power of ethics and aesthetics. This would be accomplished not by a return to blind traditionalism but through the democratization of technically mediated institutions. Power ~ Andrew Feenberg

We are sitting on a cornucopia of knowing that we had no way to access as a democracy. We couldn't get the democratization of the human capacity before our time. ~ Jean Houston

What I'm driving at is let's not lose sight in our excitement of the democratization of the media that some things are bad, false and ugly - and no amount of electronic gloss will make them true, beautiful and accurate. ~ Harold Evans

In television the democratization of knowledge and its pedagogical commercial exuberance have become one. Consider from the end of the nineties such BBC history shows as Surviving the Iron Age or The Ship: Retracing Cook's Endeavor Voyage - each shown 2001.... All these shows recruit volunteers who are put into environments conspicuously uncomfortable.... An emphasis on participants' surprise at the difficulties of daily life and a previously unexamined and thus taken for granted assumption of physical comfort is the formula for melodrama in these kinds of shows.... All of them are one part soap opera, one part period recreation - and with folks from our time who invite audience identification as "us," viewers mentally enacting too, playing at, reenacting, shadowing, experimenting, speculating, trying to provide evidence for, various understandings of varying pasts.... "Science" and all it stands for - knowledges broadly understood or our everyday knowledge-managed technologies - are especially lively players in the action.... ~ Katie King

The inherent non-linearity of the digital allows for more input from others, including the subject and reader as collaborators. The top-down, bedtime-style story is of limited use. A non-linear narrative that allows for increased complexity and depth, and encourages both subject and reader to have greater involvement, will eventually emerge more fully from the digital environment. This, in a sense, is the more profound democratization of media. ~ Fred Ritchin

Labor # Unions are the leading force for # democratization and # progress . ~ Noam Chomsky

We believe in the vocation of communion and participation of our people, who day to day awaken to their political conscience and express their desire for change and profound democratization of society. A change based on justice, built with love, and which will bring us the most anxiously desired fruits of peace. ~ Adolfo Perez Esquivel

I started as an engineer. I migrated to philosophy and international politics. And I did my studies about African - Africa democracy and democratization in Africa, taking Kenya as a model. And then, while I was doing so in 1996 in South Africa, Al Jazeera was established. So they requested me to be an analyst on African affairs. ~ Wadah Khanfar

The naive idea that, through education, one can transmit culture to all of society is destroying 'higher culture', because the only way of achieving this universal democratization of culture is by impoverishing culture, making it ever more superficial. ~ Mario Vargas-Llosa

I think in the old music, everything was so competitive. It was all about - very selfish in a lot of ways. ~ Adrian Grenier

Most Romans believed that their system of government was the finest political invention of the human mind. Change was inconceivable. Indeed, the constitution's various parts were so mutually interdependent that reform within the rules was next to impossible. As a result, radicals found that they had little choice other than to set themselves beyond and against the law. This inflexibility had disastrous consequences as it became increasingly clear that the Roman state was incapable of responding adequately to the challenges it faced. Political debate became polarized into bitter conflicts, with radical outsiders trying to press change on conservative insiders who, in the teeth of all the evidence, believed that all was for the best under the best of all possible constitutions (16). ~ Anthony Everitt

Journalism has changed tremendously because of the democratization of information. Anybody can put something up on the Internet. It's harder and harder to find what the truth is. ~ Robert Redford

It's the kind of democratization of the Internet that has led to the breaking down of barriers into the creative arts. ~ Kevin Spacey

We have unleashed aspirations of youngsters. Democracy is not going to go backwards. India is too big a country to be run by one person. We are going to accelerate the process of democratization and I think that is the biggest opportunity for Congress party because that is the DNA of the Congress ~ Rahul Gandhi

Media work needs ideals. Maybe thirty years from now, after I retire, I'll see the media mature and make the transition from political party, interest group, and corporate to truly public. But over the next ten years, the encroachment of commercialism and worldliness will loom much larger than the democratization we imagine. -Jin Yongquan in China Ink ~ Judy Polumbaum

A confidence problem exists on the part of the people of the region who desire democratic rule in principle, but remain suspicious of both the fashion with which democratization is presented and the purposes of the democratic world. ~ Recep Tayyip Erdogan

The democratization of media means that anyone with a phone can become a celebrity. Our short-sighted focus on self-esteem in children means that everyone gets a trophy, universities and education are "brands" instead of places of learning, standardized tests
are used to assess wisdom, and grade inflation is rampant. The tribe has been replaced with followers and likes. Our economy, our bodies, our health, our children, and frankly our psyches are in big trouble. ~ Ramani Durvasula

I fear the democratization of plastic surgery, when it's so cheap that everyone - the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker - goes under the knife and winds up looking like these tightly pulled, slightly surprised-looking society and celebrity aliens from Planet Botox. . . . When I was young, I could have bottled up my self-loathing and filled a mile of train cars with it. Now that I'm old, I can't think of anyone I'd rather be than me. . . . That's what we need now: surgeons who can slice away the self-consciousness, the fear, the loneliness, and inject a little hope instead. A little love. Or a doctor who implants only high spirits, penchants for practical jokes, or the ability to cha-cha even to a dirge beat. ~ Lorna Landvik

Deep in my heart, I still believe that the democratization of Russia and the democratization of Ukraine will proceed. ~ Milos Zeman

(...) the so-called democratization of reviews means the lowering of standards, and that subject knowledge, history and critical context are at risk of being lost in favour of people who only know how to write in attention-seeking soundbites. ~ Bernardine Evaristo

Internal democracy in schools is as important in order to ensure the true democratization of education. ~ Sharad Vivek Sagar

The promise of the Internet has always been that it was gonna be this unprecedentedly potent instrument of liberation and democratization. It would let you explore things and meet people who you wouldn't otherwise get to know, in completely free and unconstrained ways. ~ Glenn Greenwald

The political perspective of this book, ironically, is the progeny of the progressive potential of capitalism as an historical system. The joint possibility of universal material well-being and the democratization of society is a product of the capitalist era. But the history of capitalism is a chronicle of the tension between possibilities and limits: democracy and universal affluence in perpetual and ubiquitous conflict with class domination - itself a product of the social organization of capitalist production. ~ Samuel Bowles

The path to the ethnic democratization of American society is through its culture, that is to say through its cultural apparatus, which comprises the eyes, the ears, and the "mind" of capitalism and is twentieth-century voice to the world. Thus to democratize the cultural apparatus is tantamount to revolutionizing American society itself into the living realization of its professed ideas. Seeing the problem in another way, to revolutionize the cultural apparatus is to deal fundamentally with the unsolved American question of nationality--Which group speaks for America and for the glorification of which ethnic image? Either all group images speak for themselves and for the nation, or American nationality will never be determined. ~ Harold Cruse

[P]olitical freedom can easily provide the legal frame for economic slavery, with the underprivileged 'freely' selling themselves into servitude. We are thus brought to demand more than just political democracy: we need democratization of social and economic life. In short, we have to admit that what we first took as the failure fully to realize the noble principle of democratic freedom is a failure inherent to this principle itself. Learning how the distortion of a notion, its incomplete realization, is grounded in the distortion immanent to this notion is a big step in political education. ~ Slavoj Zizek

Social media is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. It is the shift from a broadcast mechanism, one-to-many, to a many-to-many model, rooted in conversations between authors, people and peers. ~ Brian Solis

For so long, companies were run using a command-and-control, 'top down' hierarchical method that involved dictating down the command chain and maintaining order. What I've witnessed in our time is evolving democratization, a shift to a demand economy accelerated by technological advancements like social media. ~ Kevin Allen

Liberalization and democratization are in essence counter-revolution. ~ Andrei Grechko

But looking under the covers of Indian democracy one sees a more complex and troubling reality. In recent decades, India has become something quite different from the picture in the hearts of its admirers. Not that it is less democratic: in important ways it has become more democratic. But it has become less tolerant, less secular, less law-abiding, less liberal. And these two trends - democratization and illiberalism - are directly related. ~ Fareed Zakaria

The democratization of manufacturing means that anyone and eventually everyone can access the means of production, making the question of who should own and control the means of production irrelevant, and capitalism along with it. ~ Jeremy Rifkin

There exists an unmistakable demand in the Middle East and in the wider Muslim world for democratization. ~ Recep Tayyip Erdogan

I think a lot more people are able to take on a design challenge than ever before. And this was true 20 years ago when the desktop publishing revolution came about that allowed people with Macintosh's at home to produce professional-looking newsletters or publications for the first time. So, there's a long march toward more democratization for design. ~ Khoi Vinh

I'm trying to tell you that there's a new wave on the continent. A new wave of openness and democratization in which, since 2000, more than two-thirds of African countries have had multi-party democratic elections. Not all of them have been perfect, or will be, but the trend is very clear. ~ Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

The Internet has created an incredible democratization of the architecture industry. ~ Cameron Sinclair

The civil rights movement didn't deal with the issue of political disenfranchisement in the Northern cities. It didn't deal with the issues that were happening in Northern cities like Detroit, where there was a deep process of deindustrialization going on. So you have this response of angry young people, with a war going on in Vietnam, a poverty program that was insufficient, and police brutality. All these things gave rise to the Black Power Movement. It was not a separation from the civil rights movement, but a continuum of this whole process of democratization. ~ Danny Glover

Over the years, I've come to recognize that democratization in Ethiopia is not just a matter of choice. It's a matter of national survival. I am deeply convinced that we either democratize and have a good chance of surviving, or if we fail to do so, we disintegrate. ~ Meles Zenawi

The Americans view the democratization of the Middle East as the route to peace. ~ Gilles Kepel

It is essential that policy instruments be developed that would firmly establish democratization on the basis of social consensus and enable transformation on stable grounds. ~ Recep Tayyip Erdogan

Everything has been degraded by what the sensory overload and the supposed freedom-of-choice technology has brought to us, and, in short, by the democratization of the arts. ~ Bret Easton Ellis

Be apprised, though, that the Maine Lobster Festival's democratization of lobster comes with all the massed inconvenience and aesthetic compromise of real democracy. See, for example, the aforementioned Main Eating Tent, for which there is a constant Disneyland-grade queue, and which turns out to be a square quarter mile of awning-shaded cafeteria lines and rows of long institutional tables at which friend and stranger alike sit cheek by jowl, cracking and chewing and dribbling. It's hot, and the sagged roof traps the steam and the smells, which latter are strong and only partly food-related. It is also loud, and a good percentage of the total noise is masticatory. ~ David Foster Wallace

Democracy is an objective. Democratization is a process. Democratization serves the cause of peace because it offers the possibility of justice and of progressive change without force. ~ Boutros Boutros-Ghali

Therefore, the question is not whether such democratization is possible, but instead how to meet the yearning of the masses in the Middle East for democracy; in other words, how to achieve democratization in the Middle East. ~ Recep Tayyip Erdogan

For everyone, everywhere, literacy is, along with education in general, a basic human right. ~ Kofi Annan

A fitting external security environment could also play an important role in promoting social consensus and institutionalization towards democratization. ~ Recep Tayyip Erdogan

[The democratization of luxury] means more people are going to get better fashion. And the more people who can have fashion, the better. ~ Anna Wintour

So many technologies start out with a burst of idealism, democratization, and opportunity, and over time, they close down and become less friendly to entrepreneurship, to innovation, to new ideas. Over time, the companies that become dominant take more out of the ecosystem than they put back in. ~ Tim O'Reilly

One of the first effects of this hyper-democratization of data was to unmoor information from the context required to understand it. On the Internet, facts float about freely and are recombined more according to the preferences of intuition than the rules of cognition: ~ Seth Mnookin

The "democratization of education" is everyone's fight, everyone's right. ~ Sharad Vivek Sagar

My theory is that security - also against terror - can only be accomplished through global democratization. ~ Natan Sharansky

The democratization of news is fine and splendid, but it's not reporting. It's based on a fragment of information picked up from television or the web, and people are sounding off about something that's not necessarily true. ~ Harold Evans

In the Arab mindset, democratization may not be an exclusively negative term. But it's associated closely with American policies and the occupation of Iraq. ~ Gilles Kepel

Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope. It is a tool for daily life in modern society. It is a bulwark against poverty, and a building block of development, an essential complement to investments in roads, dams, clinics and factories. Literacy is a platform for democratization, and a vehicle for the promotion of cultural and national identity. Especially for girls and women, it is an agent of family health and nutrition. For everyone, everywhere, literacy is, along with education in general, a basic human right ... Literacy is, finally, the road to human progress and the means through which every man, woman and child can realize his or her full potential. ~ Kofi Annan

But now it seems clear that literary criticism was inherently doomed. Explicitly or otherwise it had based itself on a structure of echelons and hierarchies; it was about the talent elite. And the structure atomized as soon as the forces of democratization gave their next concerted push.

Those forces – incomparably the most potent in our culture – have gone on pushing. And they are now running up against a natural barrier. Some citadels, true, have proved stormable. You can become rich without having any talent (via the scratchcard and the rollover jackpot). You can become famous without having any talent (by abasing yourself on some TV nerdathon; a clear improvement on the older method of simply killing a celebrity and inheriting the aura). But you cannot become talented without having any talent. Therefore, talent must go.

Literary criticism, now almost entirely confined to the universities, thus moves against talent by moving against the canon. Academic preferment will not come from a respectful study of Wordsworth's poetics; it will come from a challenging study of his politics – his attitude toward the poor, say, or his unconscious 'valorization' of Napoleon; and it will come still faster if you ignore Wordsworth and elevate some (justly) neglected contemporary, by which process the canon may be quietly and steadily sapped. A brief consultation of the Internet will show that meanwhile, everyone has become a literary critic – or at least, a book-re ~ Martin Amis

In the minds of many Western politicians, military interventions and air strikes appear to have become legitimate policy tools since the NATO attacks on Yugoslavia during the 1990s. That's how they intend to bring everyone into line who don't share the Western view of democratization of society and the liberalization of the economy. But there is no future for that kind of globalization. ~ Vladimir Yakunin