Universal Suffrage Quotes

Meiklejohn's position is that free speech in a democracy is not an absolute flowing from the boundless source of some presumed 'natural right.' It is a practical necessity of 'self-government by universal suffrage,' for if the citizens are not permitted to argue out the issues of government, how can they be what they must be in a democracy - the rulers as well as the ruled? ~ Max Lerner

Ending feudalism, ending slavery, enacting labor laws, winning universal suffrage, ending Jim Crow laws, overcoming much of the mindset and practice of patriarchy as it was entrenched in the '50s and '60s, bringing gay rights and liberation into the light of social policy and practice. Putting ecology on the political map. The left has a long lineage. ~ Michael Albert

Once I should have been, if not satisfied, partially, at least, contented with suffrage for the intelligent and those who have been soldiers; now I am convinced that universal suffrage is demanded by sound policy and impartial justice. ~ Salmon P. Chase

Universal suffrage in the end does not recognize any of the individual's rights except the "right" to be alternately oppressor or oppressed. ~ Nicolas Gomez Davila

What is freedom? What is slavery? Does man's freedom consist in revolting against all laws? We say No, in so far as laws are natural, economic, and social laws, not authoritatively imposed but inherent in things, in relations, in situations, the natural development of which is expressed by those laws. We say Yes if they are political and juridical laws, imposed by men upon men: whether violently by the right of force; whether by deceit and hypocrisy - in the name of religion or any doctrine whatever; or finally, by dint of the fiction, the democratic falsehood called universal suffrage. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

The alleged menace of universal suffrage having been avoided by the absolute suppression of the negro vote, the spirit of mob murder should have been satisfied and the butchery of negroes should have ceased. ~ Ida B. Wells

In fact, the gravest obstacle to the restoration of civilization in North America is universal suffrage. Letting everybody vote makes no sense. Obviously they are no good at it. The whole idea smacks of the fumble-witted idealism of a high-school Marxist society. ~ Fred Reed

Democracy turns upon and devours itself. Universal suffrage, in theory the palladium of our liberties, becomes the assurance of our slavery. And that slavery will grow more and more abject and ignoble as the differential birth rate, the deliberate encouragement of mendicancy and the failure of popular education produce a larger and larger mass of prehensile half-wits, and so make the demagogues more and more secure. ~ H.L. Mencken

passions without truth, truths without passion; heroes without heroic deeds, history without events; development, whose sole driving force seems to be the calendar, wearying with constant repetition of the same tensions and relaxations; antagonisms that periodically seem to work themselves up to a climax only to lose their sharpness and fall away without being able to resolve themselves; pretentiously paraded exertions and philistine terror at the danger of the world's coming to an end, and at the same time the pettiest intrigues and court comedies played by the world redeemers, who in their laisser aller remind us less of the Day of Judgment than of the times of the Fronde – the official collective genius of France brought to naught by the artful stupidity of a single individual; the collective will of the nation, as often as it speaks through universal suffrage, seeking its appropriate expression through the inveterate enemies of the interests of the masses, until at length it finds it in the self-will of a filibuster. If any section of history has been painted gray on gray, it is this. ~ Karl Marx

Among many other reforms, Australians pioneered the secret ballot and universal suffrage. ~ Richard Flanagan

A State which has universal suffrage and a wide extension of the jury franchise, must qualify the people by education to rightly exercise the great powers with which they are invested. ~ Edmund Barton

There are two antagonistic elements of society in America," Seward had proclaimed, "freedom and slavery. Freedom is in harmony with our system of government and with the spirit of the age, and is therefore passive and quiescent. Slavery is in conflict with that system, with justice, with humanity, and is therefore organized, defensive, active, and perpetually aggressive." Free labor, he said, demands universal suffrage and the widespread "diffusion of knowledge." The slave-based system, by contrast "cherishes ignorance because it is the only security for oppression. ~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

Socialists find me too far left; Trotskyites not far enough; ecologists say I am too happy eating foie gras, defending nuclear energy and GM plants; feminists find I am not enough of a woman; anarchists a petit-bourgeois who has sold out because I believe in universal suffrage. ~ Michel Onfray

The poor, stupid, free American citizen! Free to starve, free to tramp the highways of this great country, he enjoys universal suffrage, and by that right, he has forged chains around his limbs. The reward that he receives is stringent labor laws prohibiting the right of boycott, of picketing, of everything, except the right to be robbed of the fruits of his labor. ~ Emma Goldman

If I am asked, What do you propose to substitute for universal suffrage? Practically, What have you to recommend? I answer at once, Nothing. The whole current of thought and feeling, the whole stream of human affairs, is setting with irresistible force in that direction. The old ways of living, many of which were just as bad in their time as any of our devices can be in ours, are breaking down all over Europe, and are floating this way and that like haycocks in a flood. Nor do I see why any wise man should expend much thought or trouble on trying to save their wrecks. The waters are out and no human force can turn them back, but I do not see why as we go with the stream we need sing Hallelujah to the river god. ~ James Fitzjames Stephen

This demonstrated to me that those who regard universal suffrage as a guarantee for good choices are under a complete illusion. Universal suffrage has other advantages, but not that one. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Above all things the mass-mind is most bitterly resentful of superiority. It will not tolerate the thought of an elite; and under a political system of universal suffrage, the mass-mind is enabled to make its antipathies prevail. ~ Albert J. Nock

Universal suffrage is sound in principle. The radical element is right. ~ Rutherford B. Hayes

Against the new leviathan, whether in the guise of universal suffrage, democracy, or of an equally fraudulent triumphant proletariat, he (Kierkegaard) pitted the individual human soul made in the image of a God who was concerned about the fate of every living creature. In contrast with the notion of salvation through power, he held out the hope of salvation through suffering. The Cross against the ballot box or clenched fist; the solitary pilgrim against the slogan-shouting mob; the crucified Christ against the demagogue-dictators promising a kingdom of heaven on earth, whether achieved through endlessly expanding wealth and material well-being, or through the ever greater concentration of power and its ever more ruthless exercise. ~ Malcolm Muggeridge

Carry out the republican principle of universal suffrage, or strike it from your banners and substitute 'Freedom and Power to one half of society, and Submission and Slavery to the other.' ~ Ernestine Rose

If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a foot-rule can measure a pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage. As it is, the political problem remains unsolved. ~ George Bernard Shaw

All governments use force and all assert that they are founded on reason. In fact, whether universal suffrage prevails or not, it is always an oligarchy that governs, finding ways to give to'the will of the people'the expression which the few desire. ~ Vilfredo Pareto

In order to reach universal suffrage we need to build trust. ~ Donald Tsang

Perhaps the most obvious political inequality is the violation of the precept one person one vote. Yet until recent times most writers rejected equal universal suffrage. Indeed, persons were not regarded as the proper subjects of representation at all. Often it was interests that were to be represented, with Whig and Tory differing as to whether the interest of the rising middle class should be given a place alongside the landed and ecclesiastical interests. For others it is regions that are to be represented, or forms of culture, as when one speaks of the representation of the agricultural and urban elements of society. At the first sight, these kinds of representation appear unjust. How far they depart from the precept one person one vote is a measure of their abstract injustice, and indicates the strength of the countervailing reasons that must be forthcoming.119 ~ John Rawls

We Chinese are instinctively democratic, and Dr. Sun's objective of universal suffrage evokes from all Chinese a ready and unhesitating response. ~ Chiang Kai-shek

At the present time, political power is everywhere constituted on insufficient foundations. On the one hand it emanates from the so-called divine right of kings, which is none other than military force; on the other from universal suffrage, which is merely the instinct of the masses, or mere average intelligence. A nation is not a number of uniform values or ciphers; it is a living being composed of organs. So long as national representation is not the image of this organization, right from its working to its teaching classes, there will be no organic or intelligent national representation. So long as the delegates of all scientific bodies, and the whole of the Christian churches do not sit together in one upper council, our societies will be governed by instinct, by passion, and by might, and there will be no social temple.

...We are beginning to understand that Jesus, at the very height of his consciousness, the transfigured Christ, is opening his loving arms to his brothers, the other Messiahs who preceded him, beams of the Living Word as he was, that he is opening them wide to Science in its entirety, Art in its divinity, and Life in its completeness. But his promise cannot be fulfilled without the help of all the living forces of humanity. Two main things are necessary nowadays for the continuation of the mighty work: on the one hand, the progressive unfolding of experimental science and intuitive philosophy to facts of psychic order, intellectual principles, ~ Édouard Schuré

When a battle for suffrage is conducted, it should only be conducted according to socialist principles, and therefore with the demand of universal suffrage for women and men. ~ Clara Zetkin

Everyone says Francois Mitterrand had huge charisma. But before he was president they used to call him badly dressed, old, archaic and say he knew nothing about the economy ... until the day he was elected. It's called universal suffrage. When you're elected, you become the person that embodies France. ~ Francois Hollande

the upper classes instinctively abandoned idleness and invented meritocracy lest universal suffrage deprive them of everything they owned. ~ Thomas Piketty

The arc of history is longer than human vision. It bends. We abolished slavery, we granted universal suffrage. We have done hard things before. And every time it took a terrible fight between people who could not imagine changing the rules, and those who said, 'We already did. We have made the world new.' The hardest part will be to convince yourself of the possibilities, and hang on. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

I'd likte to welcome you to the land of free, where healthy, wealthy, happy people contribute to the civilization under the protection of the rules of capitalism, laws of science and rights of universal suffrage. ~ B. Barmanbek

VOTERS STRIKE!
...above all, remember that he who solicits your vote is by that very fact revealed as a scoundrel, since in exchange for your advantage and fortune he promises a cornucopia of marvels he'll never deliver because he hasn't the power to deliver them. the man you elect represents neither your misery nor your aspirations- nor anything else of yours- but rather his own interests, which are all opposed to yours...do not imagine that the sorry spectacle at which you assist today is peculiar to one epoch or one regime, and that it will pass away. all epochs and all regimes are worth the same- that is, they are worthless. so go home, my good chap, and go on strike against universal suffrage. I tell you, you've nothing to lose... and at least it should keep you amused for a while. I tell you, good chap! go home! go on strike! ~ Octave Mirbeau

Not being bothered to exercise your right to vote is a privilege that many women still don't have. Dismissing politicians as all the same is a luxury. Our votes may not seem very important to us, but our lives without them would be immeasurably worse. For we needed universal suffrage to be firmly and unarguably in place before we could demand equal rights. And while it may be tempting for people to mutter that feminism is old-fashioned, boring and a fight already won, we have have to look at the statistics to see that what is true for women is a very long way short of being true for us all. ~ Natalie Haynes

What plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion. ~ Herman Melville

Grace can only be personal if it's also universal. [Mine]... and everyone else's is either bound or loosed together. ~ Glennon Doyle Melton

One (practitioner of science) is the educated man who still has a controlled sense of wonder before the universal mystery, whether it hides in a snail's eye or within the light that impinges on that delicate organ. ~ Loren Eiseley

Little pools of water tend to become stagnant and useless, but that if they are joined together to
form a big lake, the atmosphere is cooled and there is universal benefit. ~ Sardar Patel

I'm being totally honest, but I really do get chills every time I see something that I designed, painted on the biggest stage in Universal, standing proud there among all the other stages. I think, "That is so amazing that I did this." ~ James Pearse Connelly

Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Islam is the only religion that gives dignity to the poor. ~ Ramsey Clark

the black church helped African Americans survive the harshest forms of oppression and developed a revolutionary appeal for universal communal spirituality. The black church didn't just theorize about democracy, it practiced democracy. From its roots there flowered the civil rights movement - creative, inclusive, and nonviolent. ~ U.S. Department Of State

Because we are universal explainers, we are not simply obeying our genes. For ~ David Deutsch

As she observed him, she briefly frowned, it was one of the quandaries a woman sometimes faces, not just a woman, but all of us: she entrances one man without effort, a man who is undesired, who follows her around like a dog, however much he is whipped or abused, while all her efforts to attract and then ensnare another man, the truly desired man, come to naught. Charm is not universal, desire is too often unreciprocated, it gathers and pools in the wrong places, slowly becoming toxic. ~ Katie Kitamura

I think Farmer taps into a universal anxiety and also into a fundamental place in some troubled consciences, into what he calls "ambivalence," the often unacknowledged uneasiness that some of the fortunate feel about their place in the world, the thing he once told me he designed his life to avoid. ~ Tracy Kidder

We just think that we're being born, when we're born; (headfirst crying out of the smile of the womb, if we'd only known that it was all the same before getting involved in Samsara---saving motion and nervousness, not forsaking peace---I remember being forced out---to the discriminatory prickles and thorns of the world)--- We're still the same old substance, High Hearable Essence Light---(whatever it really is, & Empty)--- Unbornness is the above---

We just think that we're dying, when we die!---headfirst falling in the airplane, falling once again, from stage-emptiness to stage-emptiness---unborn and undying and undead---Birth and death not a dualism, no difference---same Dharmakaya Universal Essence---

No death, no birth, no error, no "prose", but uncreated single substance essence flow of transitory unreal words riding an unreal ride across the memory of the unreal word,

I can't say that the world is
Not that it is not -
Because it is just from Mind ~ Jack Kerouac

I think the themes of belonging and parentage and love are obviously universal. ~ Christopher Eccleston

Within the confines of the great, universal prison, I had made for myself a smaller prison, a prison made to order. I had carved out for myself a little niche in which I could live. It was tiny, I had no doubt about that point. But at least it was made to measure, to my measure. A little niche in a prison that kept me from seeing the prison. A prison without work? Was I bored? Was I resigned? Tired, no doubt. ~ Eugene Ionesco

Basic geometric shapes communicate universal qualities common to all cultures. Practical design integrates them appropriately. ~ Maggie Macnab

The only means of establishing and perpetuating our republican forms of government is the universal education of our youth in the principles of Christianity by means of the Bible. ~ Benjamin Rush

I figure heaven will be a scratch-and-sniff sort of place, and one of my first requests will be the Driftwood in its prime, while it was filled with our life. And later I will ask for the smell of my dad's truck, which was a combination of basic truck (nearly universal), plus his cologne (Old Spice), unfiltered Lucky Strikes, and when I was very lucky, leaded gasoline. If I could have gotten my nose close enough I would have inhaled leaded gasoline until I was retarded. The tendency seemed to run in my family; as a boy my uncle Crandall had an ongoing relationship with a gas can he kept in the barn. Later he married and divorced the same woman four times, sometimes marrying other women in between, including one whose name was, honestly, Squirrelly. ~ Haven Kimmel

The desire to transcend one's own ego boundaries, to share completely, even for a moment, the consciousness of another person must be a universal longing. It motivates many of our activities from taking drugs to making love, and lies behind the search for new ways of getting close to one another that is so intense in our society today. ~ Andrew Weil

I admit that the generation which produced Stalin, Auschwitz and Hiroshima will take some beating, but the radical and universal consciousness of the death of God is still ahead of us. Perhaps we shall have to colonise the stars before it is finally borne in upon us that God is not out there. ~ R. J. Hollingdale

The religious way is the deep way, the way that sees what physical eyes alone fail to see, the intangibles of the heart of every phenomenon. The religious way is the way that touches universal relationships; that goes high, wide and deep, that expands the feelings of kinship. ~ Sophia Lyon Fahs

Were I to sum up the Basle Congress in a word- which I shall guard against pronouncing publicly- it would be this: 'At Basle, I founded the Jewish State. If I said this out loud today, I would be answered by universal laughter. If not in 5 years, certainly in 50, everyone will know it.' ~ Theodor Herzl

The love of God is so universal that His perfect plan bestows many gifts on all of His children, even those who disobey His laws. Mortality is one such gift, bestowed on all who qualified in the War in Heaven (see Revelation 12:7–8). Another unconditional gift is the universal resurrection: 'For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive' (1 Corinthians 15:22). Many other mortal gifts are not tied to our personal obedience to law. As Jesus taught, our Heavenly Father 'maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust' (Matthew 5:45). ~ Dallin H. Oaks

Once you turn something into something, its universal usage is over. ~ Carl Andre

Standing on the bare ground,
my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,
all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The story of the African-American people is the story of the settlement and growth of America itself, a universal tale that all people should experience, ~ Henry Louis Gates

All we see and admire today will burn in the universal fire that ushers in a new, just, happy world. ~ Seneca The Younger

I'm only interested in science fiction that's used as a literary device, a shortcut into something more exploratory or universal about our experience. That's why I think it was invented and why mythology was invented; it's a tool, not an end to itself. ~ Shane Carruth

Lansdale was a victim in Vietnam of his success in the Phillipines. Men who succeed at an enterprise of great moment often tie a snare for themselves by assuming that they have discovered some universal truth. ~ Neil Sheehan

When the ride was being designed, it was assumed that Kuka's robotic programming could easily produce the various movements called for in each scene. What nobody considered, however, is that the program was designed for maximum industrial efficiency. If, to correspond to the action in a given scene, the Kuka arm had to simulate 22 different motions, the software - not knowing a theme park ride from a diesel assembly line - would think, "OK, let's knock these 22 movements down to 13 and save half a minute." Because this would throw the timing of everything out of whack, Universal ended up having to create a program that would behave as it was told and not be so anal about efficiency. Luckily for us, Universal worked out the kinks, and Forbidden Journey is now remarkably reliable for such an advanced attraction. ~ Seth Kubersky

Child, if such folks awe you, then picture them on the lavatory, straining, constipated. They will at once seem small, pathetic, manageable." And she whispered to me a great, universal truth: "THE BOWELS ARE GREAT LEVELLERS. ~ Angela Carter

The task of universal pragmatics is to identify and reconstruct universal conditions of possible mutual understanding. ~ Jurgen Habermas

I worked for suffrage for years, and got it. I've worked for peace for 55 years and haven't come close. ~ Jeannette Rankin

It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering. ~ Judith Lewis Herman